Author: splicer

An instal­la­tion of Kevin Burkhal­ter’s Jour­nal Com­ic from the end of last year pro­vides an inter­est­ing twist on the idea that con­stant prac­tice is more impor­tant than any oth­er aspect of cre­ative work:

http://kevinsjournalcomic.com/comic12‑4 – 2008.html

There are a lot of ways to express this which encom­pass a vari­ety of iter­a­tions and corol­lar­ies. Mal­colm Glad­well’s 10,000 hours to mas­tery, Kevin Burkhal­ter’s rais­ing of the low­er bar, and my old art skool instruc­tor who said, «Every­one’s … Read the rest

I’m lis­ten­ing to The Art & Sto­ry pod­cast, Episode 004 «The Big Style». Mark Rudolph and Jerzy Drozd are reach­ing back into their ear­ly com­ic influ­ences. Com­ic artists are absolute­ly the first illus­tra­tors that inspired me to copy them and do what they do. It’s got­ten me think­ing about who my ear­ly influ­ences were — and when I say «ear­ly» I mean cer­tain­ly before art skool. I’m look­ing back rough­ly at ages twelve to sev­en­teen. This is who I … Read the rest

Last night I stayed in the stu­dio until after mid­night when I real­ized I was parked in a street­clean­ing zone and was risk­ing a $35 ticket.

I worked on a few drafts of the back­ground of this Rotring Art­Pen and Vis­con­ti ink bot­tle and did­n’t come upon a solu­tion, so I went in to the bot­tle to do the first lay­er of hatch­ing. That’s as far as I got before remem­ber­ing I was parked on the Mon­day side of … Read the rest

I was­n’t able to spend much time in the stu­dio today, but I’m forc­ing myself to keep adding to this, even if it’s a small por­tion at a time and the draw­ing real­ly isn’t yet tak­ing shape in my head. I can’t afford to sit around wait­ing for the muse to throw a brick at my head; the name of this game is just to keep mov­ing forward.

I have a lot to do over the next few months, so … Read the rest

I don’t know where this is head­ing. I’m run­ning right up against the lim­its of my ren­der­ing vocab­u­lary here and I feel like I’m fum­bling around in the dark. I’m find­ing myself wish­ing I was work­ing larg­er so that I’d have more room. At this scale I don’t have much room to use tex­ture with­out mud­dy­ing it up and mak­ing it too dark. That leads me to rely on out­line, and that way there be monsters.

I’m not sure how … Read the rest

Look­ing at this scan I’m hav­ing a lot of trou­ble see­ing the good in here, so I offer this in my defense: the image to the right is a sec­tion of the draw­ing in progress about two inch­es wide. So all the slop­pi­ness is exag­ger­at­ed by the amount larg­er the image is shown on screen than on the draw­ing table.

I do think I’ll have to touch this up after I fin­ish the rest of the draw­ing but for now I’m … Read the rest