I’ve realized lately that I haven’t been drawing much outside of comics and freelance work.  To heck with that!  If you’re going to draw for a living you need to find ways to preserve the joy, experimentation, and spontaneity inherent to the act.

At the same time, if you’re a goal-focused person like me, it’s hard to just sit down with blank paper and goof off for an hour (unless you’re on hold with tech support).

So once a week I’m going to try to doodle a character from somebody else’s work, starting with comics and maybe later branching out into prose fiction.  Perhaps this can also serve as a sort of Recommended Reading list.

This week:  Bottle Woman, from Order of Tales by Evan Dahm (of Rice Boy fame). Watercolor, oil pencil, colerase pencil.

What a wonderful character design!  That stopper head is just brilliant, and the simplicity of her features belies a complicated and moody character.  (the same could be said for Evan’s art overall!)  I don’t think she’s actually green, or that her contents are blue, but it was the palette that seemed like fun.

I picked up Order of Tales at SPX on a personal mandate to Read New Things, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as strange and absorbing.  It’s rare to pick up a story that’s so immediately distinctive.  A lot of people doing fantasy comics can spend a million years designing political systems and special ceremonial corsetry and researching weather patterns in an attempt to create a world so dense and realistic that a reader can immerse themselves in it, but Evan manages to suck you in with just a few brush strokes.

{wp version}

For those of you who couldn't make it to the gallery opening, now you can see the art online!



It's still up at the Sequential Art Gallery along with Erika's stunning pieces, so if you're in town for Stumptown be sure to stop by - they look even sweeter in person.

A number of them are still for sale through the gallery - and I will try to have some prints for sale in time for Stumptown, and thenceforth online.

New page yaaaaaaay! I am being horribly cruel with my little teaser up there, I know. It's been an intense week, and I'm a little punchy.

I've spent most of this week frantically teaching myself how to watercolor, by which I mean alternating in five minute intervals between being utterly hypnotized by my apparent mastery of the pretty colors and saying "DAMMIT" a lot and wanting to lie down for awhile.

But, behold, I have twelve pieces for my joint show with Ms.Moen!





The opening is this Thursday from 6-10 at 328 NW Broadway #113 here in Portland.


The upshot to my first week post-layoff being so crazy devoted to this stuff is that I haven't had time to flip out yet over my sudden ejection from the increasingly small slice of America that is employed in a normal fashion.

It is a pleasant irony that I have so much going on in my life that suddenly dropping about 40 hours (counting transit) a week from my schedule has not yet resulted in any free time, merely the anticipatory loss of income. I managed to sleep a full nine hours last night, and woke up at 7:30 this morning feeling like a girl-shaped rainbow.

But now that the show is ready to open, my next project is getting ready for the Stumptown Comics Fest, where the Bite Me! book will be on sale for the very first time! I am also in charge of panels again this year, and you'll be able to catch me interrogating Spike for public amusement.

Along with that, I'm planning a revamp (no pun intended) of the Bite Me! website. It's already been updated and moved to bitemecomic.com, but between now and April 26th I'll be setting up a store for all online book and merchandise ordering.

The book won't be the only thing for sale - remember those commemorative spoons? They're totally being shipped to me in a giant box, and will part of the exciting deluxe package available for a reasonable surcharge to the already inexcusably low price of $15. There are only 100 of these babies!

How can you resist.

As of the sale date, I will also be hosting the comic on my own server, so it is no longer available solely through the deep dark back archives of Girlamatic. It will still be available for free reading online, because this is the New Economy where I hope that I'm charming enough to make up for the increasing scarcity of, you know, scarcity.

After that I'll be moving on to the Family Man website, porting over to update primarily through Comicpress/Wordpress for ease of viewing.

And, you know, the actual making of the comics will be in there, too. I've got at least three things just banging at the oven door. But that's kind of a given.

I'll see you soon with news and photos from the gallery opening this Thursday!

I have no idea. I colored it because I found living in a stack of work doodles on my desk, and I am avoiding actual productivity.

Also, apparently I don't know how to draw a bike without reference.

Happy Stickoween, everybody!

I doodle little people in this style all the time for the dayjob, although generally they're doing things like developing a fiscal strategy for FY2009 or building a database. Rather than hungering for the brains of the living.

Also, last night Bill and I watched Lost Boys.



Patrick's succinct review, upon my return to the Collective Abode: "Definitely the best movie ever filmed in Santa Cruz." I have to agree with that analysis.

I myself was comforted to learn that vampires almost invariably wear dangly man-earrings. Now I know what to look for!

Maybe it's just the lovely weather here in Portland, because there's no one particular thing I can identify as the cause. But the fact is:



I'm having a pretty nice day.

I sort of like this little dayjob illustration.



In my alternate life as an designer/illustrator (as opposed to a writer/artist) I get to have a lot of fun with cartoon styles. I'm one of the speedier hand-drawers in the company, so I frequently get called on to draw for other people's projects, something I really love doing.

I'm sure I'll do an actual comics story in this light, cute sort of style at some point. For now it's fun to switch gears between dayjob and personal work, and watch both gradually improve as a result of mutual influence.

My arms both feel like they're about to fall off (cold snap + working on large vertical surfaces for dayjob + being an idiot = ow), but I managed to bang out a piece for Wonder Woman Day that I'm not actively ashamed of.



( WONDER WOMAN PAUSES A MOMENT IN THOUGHT. )

Ink and oil pencil. Buy it at the silent art auction on October 26th and support funding for domestic violence shelters!

Now I'm going to go crawl back under my rock and not come out for a few days. No typing or cross-hatching for me.

It's been a slow day.

We had our quarterly teleconference staff meeting this morning. In order to keep my mind on all of those important company things, I, you know, took notes.

By which I mean drew lots of random females in profile. EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR!

I haven't had much time for personal drawing lately outside of the comic, but it's nice when people get me to draw things for them.




A couple of relatively quick recent commissions - one of Ariana that seems to have tragically been eaten by FedEx (reparations will be made!), and one of the goddess Athena as a leather dyke. And Hephaestus as, apparently, a trailer park loser.

Are you folks the best readership ever? Survey says yes!

Hm. Looks kind of like Six, doesn't it.

The medieval Danse Macabre theme, featuring the Death of the Plague going wild on period instruments in an attempt to lure various members of society to their doom, is always evilly entertaining, but this particular set from Bibliodyssey just cracks me up.



I love how clearly annoyed the nun wearing the bearskin cape is with Death's attempts to rock. She just wants to read her psalter uninterrupted isthattoomuchtoask.



On the other hand, you know this lady on the left is secretly totally into Death's hot, hot snake-popping-out-of-face action.

And, oh yeah. I almost forgot.



New Battlestar Galactisimpsons (the original set is here). I'll have 4x6 prints of almost all of them for sale at Emerald City this weekend. Where Jamie "Apollo" Bamber will be.

I'm so sorry, Jamie.

So very, very sorry.

There are two more, but they're a bit spoiler-y for this season. So you've been warned!

And by the way, I'm now three weeks behind on episodes, so keep your plot-current comments TO YOURSELVES, for the love of the one true Cylon god!

( Tory and Anders below the cut. )

I've been enjoying everybody's self-portraits as teenagers and as their current selves (although really, I would not mind seeing more of them from people who were teenagers more than five years ago).

So I finally did one.



Mine was actually pretty tricky, since I have always been a relatively self-consistent little Martian. I asked Bill what has changed about me, and his comment was (after a long pause) "...you wear more earth tones now."

( full size behind the cut )

I love that I have a dayjob that lets me get away with doing slapdash vector portraits of Tina Fey and passing it off as strategic company style development.

I can't tell if this is actually a meme or not, but it seemed like a fun thought exercise. And since tonight I'm going to hear Christophe Blain talk, I'm researching him anyway.

And listening to French radio. Just to reactivate my brain.

At any rate - I have plenty of favorite artists from whom I crib when it comes to other drawing styles, but these are the folks whose stuff I consciously think about when I work on Family Man. In no particular order, other than that they are all better than I am.

Consider this a supplement to the next episode of the podcast, which should be on its way right quick!



Jason Lutes (Berlin, Jar of Fools, Houdini)

( The full rundown behind the cut. I promise it's all pretty. )

Folks in Portland should grab a copy of the Portland Mercury today - it features a full page, full color comic about the Stumptown Comics Fest, fashioned by Bill Mudron and myself, with some excellent early hand-holding by Erika Moen!




I'll post a higher res version this afternoon, but for now, the Mercury's online version is pretty legible. I did script and layout/early pencils, and Bill did all the final art. There are more in-jokes and cameos in this thing than there are licks in a Tootsie roll pop. I enjoy abusing authorial privilege.

And with this feature, I've made it into five of Portland's papers in some form or another! This town is going to be totally sick of me by the time I hit my fifth anniversary.