Topic: Studio Notes

It’s been an inter­est­ing cou­ple of weeks. I’ve moved out of my stu­dio at the Third Street Art Explo­sion and I have been rear­rang­ing my cot­tage to ded­i­cate the down­stairs to my new stu­dio. In addi­tion to mov­ing every­thing from the stu­dio here, I’ve had to move pret­ty much every piece of fur­ni­ture I own either from down­stairs to upstairs or from upstairs to down. Let me tell you: mov­ing fur­ni­ture by myself ain’t easy.

It’s not easy but it’s gone … Read the rest

I dis­like say­ing hate­ful things about oth­er artists or their art­work. I real­ly do. I believe that any­one who puts their time and ener­gy into cre­at­ing some­thing rather than into idle con­sump­tion deserves respect. Even when I am unmoved by the art­work, it is to be laud­ed for the skill and effort expend­ed even in cre­at­ing dis­plays of tech­nique with lit­tle else to rec­om­mend them.

On the oth­er hand, I have some of the skills in ques­tion and a per­spec­tive that many do … Read the rest

Tonight I spent a few hours mak­ing test prints to fol­low up on my Novem­ber 1 post Pon­der­ing Paper. My last round of tests gave me a lot of infor­ma­tion to go on, but under the draw­ing table lights none of the prints were of sat­is­fac­to­ry qual­i­ty. I had to learn whether this was the fault of the paper, the print­er, or the qual­i­ty of the scan from which I was working.

After care­ful exam­i­na­tion of the test prints, … Read the rest

A few months ago I pur­chased sam­ple packs of print­mak­ing paper for giclée (French for «inkjet») print­ing, intend­ing to test the papers out with the print­er a client of mine has giv­en me per­mis­sion to use. I have been get­ting the prints of my pen & ink work done at Pho­toworks here in San Fran­cis­co, and they gen­er­al­ly do good work. Nev­er­the­less, I would like more con­trol over the process. A cou­ple of times mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions have led to frus­trat­ing delays … Read the rest

Here’s some­thing I don’t think gets men­tioned enough in the dis­cus­sion of spec­u­la­tive (spec) work. Artists like to say «you get what you pay for» and talk down about the qual­i­ty of the work you get if you get it for free, but it’s not true. It’s actu­al­ly real­ly easy to find peo­ple with tal­ent who are des­per­ate enough to work for free. The dif­fer­ence is not so much about the illus­tra­tor’s artis­tic tal­ent (though I agree that peo­ple that … Read the rest

I’ve got­ten behind sched­ule on the «Pens and Inks» series, so tonight after spend­ing a few hours putting down ink I went back to my sched­ule and refig­ured the due dates. I’m keep­ing the same final date, just reduc­ing the num­ber of days I have to fin­ish each of the draw­ings in the series to give them an even pace start­ing now. There’s no point in stick­ing to an unre­al­is­tic sched­ule. The new sched­ule may not be real­is­tic either, but … Read the rest

Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Inno­va­tion puts for­ward the notion that peo­ple love a good sto­ry and that many cel­e­brat­ed inno­va­tors have told sto­ries that over­sim­pli­fy or even ignore the truth that inno­va­tion requires a lot of work. Peo­ple love the sto­ry of a cre­ator observ­ing an odd con­flu­ence of events which caus­es an epiphany, which there­after leads to an inven­tion no one had thought of previously.

These sto­ries elim­i­nate the uncom­fort­able idea that a cre­ator or inven­tor is some­how … Read the rest

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