Tag: art

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A 5-Part Update

This post is coming to you in 5 Parts, so let’s get right to it!

Part 1. If you did not see it yet, I finally posted something on the Women Warriors Project. You can check that out here.

Part 2. My awesome friend Chloe sent me volumes 1 and 2 of The Heroic Legend of Arslan and I am SUPER EXCITED, because we both mutually love Hiromu Arakawa and it’s great to see her work on other manga.

the heroic legend of arslan manga volumes 1 and 2 and jak and elsa fanart
Chloe also sent me some fanart a classmate of hers made, which also looks fabulous.

I’m going to write and post a review of volume 1 this upcoming Tuesday, reviving a feature I introduced last year, “Review Day Tuesday.”

Speaking of recurring segments on the blog, that brings me to,

Part 3. Favorite Artist Friday!

I’m going to rename this feature “Featured Artist Friday,” so it’s not just my favorite artists being featured.

Featured Artist Friday is going to feature lots of different types of artists. So expect to see comics artists, painters, mixed media artists, sculptors, or just people I find while I flip through my stack of business cards I’ve accumulated over the years from conventions.

Speaking of art, though,

Part 4. New Mini-Comics!

I made and finished a new mini-comic recently called “Duck for Dinner.” It’s a short little autobiographical story.

duck for dinner mini comic
Duck for Dinner… the mini-comic!

It’ll be up for sale on Storenvy soon.

If you would like a digital copy of the comic for, say, $0.99 (US Currency) please leave a note in the comments. I’ve been thinking of offering short 99 cent digital comics for sale through Gumroad, but let me know what you think?

Speaking of Storenvy, though, that leads me to,

Part 5: Crafting Stuff!

So I had a ton of excess paper and decide to bind some new books (because bookbinding is one of my new hobbies). I used a new technique I found the other day called the Slot-&-Tab method, which requires no thread or gluing.

bookbinding handmade books slot and tab method
Hand Made Books!

The thing is, I don’t have a use for these (although I’m keeping the grid paper book), so I’m thinking of selling them as filler notebooks or something on Storenvy. If you’re interested in getting one of these, drop a comment below.

And if you would like to see a tutorial, let me know about that, too, in the comments.

So what other things am I crafting?

Well, I have some T-shirts I don’t wear anymore…

t shirts
These shirts either don’t fit me or are just too bland.

I’m going to repurpose these into tote bags. Because tote bags are awesome, and you can totes (HA) use them in lieu of plastic bags when you shop, which is my favorite thing to do.

I’m not confident enough in my sewing skills to consider selling the finished totes, though, so it may be a while before I offer any for sale.

That’s all for today, but come back tomorrow, when I talk about a new artist for Feature Artist Friday!

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Updates on Superhero Ladies and Women Warriors

jen cho nagatana superheroine original character art
Jen Cho, aka Nagatana (click to enlarge)

The Superhero Ladies project is coming along nicely! I have 17 ladies already drawn and the month of January isn’t even over yet. Hopefully I can keep up the good work and have lots of awesome superheroines by the end of the month.

There’s a few characters in the project that I’m thinking of branching off into their own stories, or maybe even comics. So who knows?

Another project I’m working on is one I’m reviving from hiatus.

The Women Warriors Project.

I put it on hiatus for a few reasons.

  1. At the time, there was a lot of freelance work going on and I couldn’t update it consistently.
  2. It was hitting an artistic wall, where I felt like every piece I made for the series was getting worse.
  3. I wanted to experiment more with tools like watercolors and acrylics, and I didn’t have the resources or time to do it at the time.

But I’m bringing it back! With a few changes.

Firstly, there will be a new finished painting every month. Acrylic, watercolor, doesn’t matter. It’ll be a painting.

As progress is made on the paintings, I’ll be posting them on the Women Warriors Project blog. The intention is to make a chronological series of posts, showing a painting from initial sketch to finished piece. Tonight I made a sketch to develop an idea for the first painting, so expect to see it on the blog soon!

Know any cool historical women warriors? Leave their names in the comments below!

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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10,000 Mistakes and Why You Should Make Them

teapot set at focus exhibition bowling green state university
A pot from the FOCUS Exhibition at Bowling Green State University in 2008…or 2009.

As I’m writing this blog post I can’t help but think of all the posts I have written that have been scrapped. I have written and scrapped well over 20 blog post since I started updating consistently. I also made a video blog today, and scrapped that.

And it makes me feel like a failure because I’ve made these things and none of them work.

But there are little ideas within those failures that I feel like I want to revisit and build upon.

Today I want to talk about failure.

Failure is something that not a lot of people like to talk about. Some people actively encourage failure but they don’t talk about how that feels, and I’m going to say yes, it does suck.

It makes you feel like everything that you make is terrible, and if this thing you made is terrible then maybe everything else that you have made is awful too. It’s a quick path to beating yourself up and thinking you’re not good enough.

But you gotta take that energy (or what little you have left of it) and keep moving forward.

I’m actually (this will sound banana pants crazy) grateful that I failed today. Because even though I did fail in writing blog posts, I got an idea out of it, out of the things that I failed to make, and hopefully that will lead to a successful blog post or video blog.

It reminds me of the adage that was coined in my time as a caricature artist at Cedar Point. It was based off of the 10,000 hour rule.

There is a rule coined in the book Outliers that said if you practice something for 10,000 hours then you’ll become a master of it.

The caricature department took this and said when you start drawing caricatures you will draw 10,000 terrible faces before you draw a good one.

So get those 10,000 faces out now as quickly and as creatively as you can. Learn from them. Keep making terrible faces. And after 10,000 times you’ll start to get good.

I’m still making comics. I’m still making blog post. I haven’t quite reached the 10,000 benchmark yet for either of them but I have noticed that the more often that I do something, the better I get at it.

So the more blog post that I write the better I get at writing them. The more comics that I make the better I get at making comics.

Not every comic or blog post has to work, but you have to get it out of your system. Because once you get the bad work out of the way you move on to the next thing. And maybe the next thing will be good.

This conundrum of failure, and making 10,000 of something before you can get good, reminds me of a scenario from the book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. The scenario took two sets of pottery students. The professor told the first set of students they had a whole semester to make one very good pot. Then they told the second set of students they had to make as many pots as possible. This was done to see who would make the better pots – the students who focus on one pot the whole semester or the students who made as many pots as they could.

teapot from FOCUS exhibition bowling green state university
From the FOCUS exhibition at Bowling Green State University in 2008…or 2009.

They found that when students focused on making the perfect pot, the pots actually turned out worse. Because the students spent all of their time agonizing over how to make the pot perfect, artistically and aesthetically, and didn’t actually make it until the very end.

However, when students were encouraged to make as many pots as possible, they found that the more pots students made, the more great pots they had at the end. Not every pot was a masterpiece, but they had more great pieces than the students who made only one pot after agonizing over how to make it perfect.

And if you take anything away from this, I hope it’s that: that torturing yourself over making something perfect is not worth it.

Because there’s another masterpiece waiting for you, within you, already.

So make as much work as you can. Make as many mistakes as you can. And keep creating.

Because with every mistake you make, you’ll also make something brilliant.

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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I Was a Librarian

librarian selfie with books art sketch
(Click to enlarge)

Yep.

My first ever paid job in high school was being a librarian. Technically, I was a page, so my job was to re-stack books, DVDs, CDs, and other stuff people checked out and returned.

The cool thing was I was a page at a time when libraries just caught on to the idea that graphic novels were cool. So the graphic novel section was growing and getting all kinds of cool additions. This was how I was exposed to works like Cairo by G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker (which I reviewed here), Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa, and (most importantly) Making Comics by Scott McCloud.

I, as a page, was also supposed to clean up small messes. I have found many strange things in my time as a page, from abandoned wallets to an ash tray that was ripped out of a truck. But that’s a story I’m going to get into…right now.

I was sorting in the large print section when I found this aforementioned ash tray. And I was really confused. So I took it to the sorting room and approached the other librarians, saying “I found this weird ashtray. What should I do with it?”

My manager in her corner office said “BURN IT!” But one of the other ladies said she would hold on to it until someone claimed it. After all, it was an ash tray that belonged in a car. Someone should get it, right?

Ten minutes later I’m back in the large print, moving onto Non Fiction next to it, when a greasy guy in a leather jacket approaches me, looking nervous, saying, “Uh…did you by chance see an ash tray around here? It’s for my truck.”

True Facts.

Anyway, I was a page for two years until I graduated high school and went to college.

For a semester I had a minor in Pop Culture (because Bowling Green State University, my alma mater, was one of the few schools that offered classes in Pop Culture studies).

While I was studying this oddball field, I worked at the Browne Popular Culture Library.

Yes, this was a thing.

It was a very cool thing, too. It carried all manner of comics and graphic novels, and they even had dime novels from as far back as 1910. There were movie scripts, posters, and a ton of Star Trek memorabilia (I heard the library has the largest private collection of Star Trek memorabilia carried by a library in the United States). There were also pulp magazines, though they were rarely, if ever, read… The pulp was so old they were kept in special boxes so the light would not damage them, and if they were ever handled, it was with gloves, so the oil on your fingers wouldn’t damage the pulp paper.

The library even carried copies of the original elvish dictionaries written by J.R.R. Tolkien himself.

So with all of this awesomeness within our walls, you would think we were slammed with people.

But there was a catch: The Browne Popular Culture Library is what librarians call a “closed-stack” library. That means everything was kept behind closed doors, and if you wanted to check out anything, you had to fill out a form and a librarian (like me) had to run back and fetch it.

We had our catalog online, which is how you can find books in the Pop Culture Library in the first place. But once you got the book, it wasn’t allowed to leave the floor.

So…no, there weren’t a lot of people clammoring for the books there.

My time there was short, but I enjoyed it. It was the job that got me into comics as a cultural force, rather than comics as throwaway entertainment.

Because the cool things was: I saw a ton of old AND new comics in that library. I saw the original pulp magazines and dime novels.

And yes, the popularity of mediums changes. Dime novels aren’t really a thing anymore, and digest comics like Archie, I’m sad to say, are starting to lag.

But though the popularity of storytelling modes might change, the constant thing is that there are stories, and they are there, waiting to be read.

It’s fascinating to see the arc of popular culture history, seeing what was popular and what faded in favor of the next fad, and why the next fad was so huge.

Comics are, I dare say, the new fad in storytelling, because their potential is being rediscovered. Back in the 1950s, comics in the U.S. took a giant leap backwards (that’s a VERY long story I’ll save for next time), and since then comics as a medium in the U.S. has been playing catch-up with the rest of the world.

Comics are reemerging as a fad, and I would say that’s a good thing. It’s an artistic medium that deserves to be created with, studied, and read.

How long will that fad last? I don’t know. Tell me what you think in comments.

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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The Superhero Ladies Series Returns!

A while back I wrote a post about how I wanted to do a series of illustrations showing Superhero Ladies, dressed and posed like human beings, not like…whatever comic books thinks is sexy.

While there are ladies in comic books and graphic novels that are in charge of their sexuality, and there are superhero ladies who are clothed, they seem to be the exception, rather than the rule.

Thus, I came up with the idea of the art series Superhero Ladies: a series of illustrations showing superhero ladies dressed and posed like…actual people.

sojourner superhero ladies art series
Number 1 in the series.

I put it on the back-burner, though, because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to exactly tackle this series.

But then I wrote about my Goals for 2015. And one of my goals is to make more eBooks full of sketches.

So I had the idea, “How about I make my first eBook of sketches be the Superhero Ladies series?!”

So that’s exactly what I’m doing.

This actually ties in well with another one of my goals, which is to draw two sketchbook pages a day. So I’ve been drawing quite a few superhero ladies this week already.

Here’s a peek at just one of the new ones:

mary wildfox superhero ladies art series sketch
Mary Wildfox (Click to enlarge).

I forgot to mention that the Superhero Ladies series will feature entirely original characters.

So, no, I’m not going to be doing re-designs of famous superheroines like Spider Woman, Power Girl, Captain Marvel, or anything like that. That can be addressed in a different series of sketches altogether.

Nope. This series will feature only original characters, costumes, and (hopefully) powers.

I’ll post more sketches occasionally. I don’t want to post them all online because I don’t want to spoil any surprises I have in mind for the eBook.

Speaking of books, though, Johnson & Sir have a book on pre-order. I talked about that in this post.

I’m working hard to make sure there’s new prints, books, and more for you. If you have any suggestions or ideas of what you would like to see more of, leave a comment below!

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.