I had a dream last night that I lost my website, and then couldn’t remember what I might need one for. I think this is a sign that I ought to blog more often, although it’s possibly a sign that I shouldn’t blog at all anymore.
Continue reading RIP, Nancy Swartz
The digital version has been out for a while, but it never seems real for me until I get my three contributor’s copies of the American Bystander’s latest issue in the mail. This one has a 70s theme, and contains a comic based on my bicentennial dream diary.
Continue reading Bicentennial Dreams In American Bystander
I completed the final panel of the final page of my most recent 24 Hour Comic at ten in the morning of Sunday, October 2nd, only four hours behind schedule (according to rules laid down by 24 Hour Comic inventor Scott McCloud, this is an acceptable variant- some projects just take longer, and this one involved a prodigious amount of shading). My final count was 23 pages and a cover image- which I consider a page on its own, but your mileage may vary. As promised, the story is titled Nudity I Have Witnessed, and it is a memoir of my years drawing the figure at Hipbone Studio and elsewhere.
Continue reading Nudity I Have Witnessed
My first call for 24 Hour Comic sponsors a week ago attracted no response, so I have crafted this shorter one tailored for Hipbone Studio regulars:
This blog has been mostly silent for the past little while, but I decided to post a solicitation for my upcoming 24 hour comic, which I intend to draw on the first Saturday in October. You can read all about it below:
I haven’t been doing much commissioned work recently, but I’ve been plugging away nonetheless, posting comics, videos, and sketchbook pages to my Patreon on a regular basis. On any given week I might post a book report comic drawn on a library call slip, like this one about Sarah Polley’s memoir:
I was recently approached by Sheperd.com to compile a list of books to recommend. What is Shepherd? Here’s what their website says on the subject: “Shepherd is like wandering around your favorite bookstore but reimagined for the online world… along with little notes from authors pointing out their favorite books.”
The recommendations on the website are all over the map. Some recent ones are: “The best young adult shifter romance books” “The best science fiction books in aesthetic universes” “The best historical fiction books about the Tudors” and “The best Christian romance with spiritual and romantic passion”. Since the Shepherd people had chosen me because of the popularity of my perspective instructional books, I decided that my list would be “The best books to make you a better artist.”
Continue reading I Pick The Best Books To Make You A Better Artist
My family and friends love to play the game “Eat Poop You Cat”, especially at large gatherings. This game is the drawing equivalent of the game “Telephone.” The way it’s played is that one person writes a simple description of a scene, preferably something comical like “a badger eating pizza”, then passes it to the next person. That person attempts to draw a picture to match, then folds the paper so that the only their drawing can be seen, and the NEXT person writes a description of that drawing, and so on until there is no more room on the paper. What may start out as the caption “Karen reads a lot of books”can end up as “A man presenting a girl with a snowman for her birthday” once it has traveled down the line.
The most recent issue of the American Bystander arrived the other day, just in time for me to read with my noon coffee. This issue sports a cover by the great Peter Kuper:
I haven’t put up a blog post in a long time. I hope it hasn’t been TOO long a wait. I have quite a backlog of YouTube videos I either created or appear in to share. First up, a Zoom conference talk on my favorite subject, perspective, with a small and appreciate audience from the group Cartoonists Northwest: