I haven’t been able to put this on the sidebar of my site. But I’ve created a Patreon Page. People can visit it, see cool stuff maybe you can’t see here, and make contributions and such-like. It’s what artists are doing these days.
You can also write me and ask for a commission. A watercolour of a photo you like, a family member, pet or scene. Here’s the link!
My comic strip I created with Richard Gagnon has flown the coop for the moment. I think I need to update my “comicpress” theme, and am afraid they want money from now on. Still, I’m working on it, and in the meanwhile, I did a little drawing of him to practice my digital drawing skills.
You know, I used to put up a drawing every day, and felt unhappy if I didn’t.
But these days, while I’m still drawing a lot, I’m not blogging as much.
Social Media is strange. I loved Twitter, but they seem to be doing as much as they can to ruin it.
Instagram is supposed to be the place, but they want you to put in “reels,” and their format for graphics always cuts something important off.
Facebook … I’m not getting what they’re doing with it. My notifications seem to have disappeared.
But even though some things need updating, this is still my space. “Have a great day,” as others are wont to say. I’m still surviving, and have new, interesting things to share.
Back in the early 2000s, I got to do a workshop at Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Book Festival with the great Gene Luen Yang. A movie adaptation of his graphic novel American Born Chinese is currently coming out. The book the movie is based on is an amazing exploration of being young and having a Chinese background when you are living in North America. Certainly opened my eyes to a lot. Here are a couple of drawings I created at the workshop. Not brilliant character design, but I was collaborating with the rest of the people at the table, and most of them weren’t artists.
He told me some interesting things. For instance, one of the hardest parts of drawing was getting your characters to stand up straight inside the panel. (computers can fix this, of course, but then you don’t have nice original art to sell). His other point was to have one story happening on the page, but then implying a second story going on inside the characters’ heads. But the coolest thing for me at the time, was hearing about Avatar: The Last Airbender. I picked the series up on DVD from the local video store, and it was a revelation to me.
Like, from about 2018 or 19? I used to put these up when I did them. But got out of the habit, what with Facebook and all taking over from personal blogs…..
Now this critter was painted on incredibly lightweight paper (one of those make your own greeting card packs). She cockled up very badly, but I was able to flatten her.
Reminds me of a story about a job I worked at, colouring cels for an animated TV show that never made it to air….
