“Remember that you probably aren’t going to have a chance to do it again. You know, when you’re doing a shot or a scene or whatever it is (…) don’t ever lose your stamina or anything like that, because this is your one chance.”
They genuinely feel new to me, as if someone else drew them.
Scanned files say 2022, but I can’t imagine I did them then — they’re probably from 2019 or 2020, so even though I didn’t post them here before, I’m still filing this under archival reruns.
Drawing on glossy paper is always a nightmare and the only pens that work are Sharpies, but any chance to use screentone makes up for it.
— only with approximately 100% more drawing, if you look at things a bit closer (I shouldn’t be inviting anyone to look at any of it closer). Or rather: what the 2015 me thought he was doing. Ten years since the second book of this. In cartoonist time that’s both two, and fifty years ago — though it seems like everyone is on cartoonist time these days.
(*not a new thing, just adjusting an even older thing for a thing)
Hey, a new picture (that’s not secret until 2028).
This one was done back in November, and I was well enough to try inking it on paper. It worked out ok — even if I felt someone set my entire body on fire for the most of it — but it wasn’t someting I haven’t been able to again since, so the total number of paper pictures in the last five years remains at… two.
It was a nice day though, feeling like old times, and going “oh right, this is what I do, I remember now.” Not so much the paper part of it, but just drawing. And I have been drawing more lately, so the months ahead do seem a bit more optimistic, after a long time*.
* (in this particular room, no guarantees about anywhere else)
Three quarters of this year were an unusable crawl, and the remaining quarter was working under an NDA, but for the holidays it’s personal program only, so the next* new years card is in progress–
“Start now. Don’t wait until you feel differently about yourself, (…) don’t wait until you feel you’re up to the task. You’re up to the task, right now, to start.”
Advertising work generally isn’t too exciting to post, since it tends to be a person using a new phone, or a closeup of a shoe, and usually there’s about six minutes total to draw it all, but a while back I did a few pictures for a sports promo that had a different setting — not sure if it even got shot, but drawing the rain was fun (for six minutes).
(These could, as always, also be filed in the “why don’t you just draw comics this way (and at this speed)” folder.)
Maybe I can’t do comics just yet, but I can do pictures that take as long to read as one — this cover was for an old friend Goran Sudžuka’s (and Stephanie Phillips’) new book, so I wanted to go all out on it if I could.
A hiatus with work and blog (and literally everything else, but that part’s not new), because of the body very much not cooperating again, but there’s still covers I didn’t get to here. More unexpected subject matter too. In anticipation of the last cover, here’s the first four —
(you should be able to click on them and just use the arrow keys)
“The danger in technology is not the power the technology has, which can be misused by a person, but that the natural flow of the use of technology argues for banality and conformity and the mundane (…) So my only advice to music technology people is to be very careful when you automate the process of making something prettier, or regulating something.
It’s now kind of normal for people to tune their vocals in the studio to the extent that one vocalist is just as good as another; for a lot of utilitarian tasks, it could be anybody. And as tools become more powerful, you run the risk of reducing essentially everyone to interchangeable elements, because the quirks and the idiosyncracies and the oddities that make us able to discern the difference between one person and another, those disappear. (…)
The utility of [these tools] argues against the irregularities and the perversities that make music brilliant rather than delivering what is expected.”
I don’t draw animals that often but I had a stretch this year where for a few weeks everyone asked me to. This story at least suggested a very graphic treatment. (The cat one was my favorite as a picture, though this one is better as a cover.)
This inverted version, when I was mailing the file, was also fun, but the cover was already finished, so it goes in the “accidental good ideas” folder for some future use.
I continue to work on a couple of stories after the new years one, and I continue to not want to share them before they are done — but I also get tired of only posting covers, so here’s a rough panel from one of them that doesn’t spoil anything.
Today’s small part of this year’s program of allowing myself to put in at least as much time and effort into personal work — off the clock, on my own time — as I would put in on work for others.
Or, since I can finally allow such a thought: more.
