BLOG ARCHIVES

2006

December 31st
THE BEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE
Polaroids from our wedding night.
December 30th
THE BRIDE
drawn on Christmas Day
December 28th
A WRITER WHO DRAWS
Saul Steinberg called himself “a writer who draws.”
December 28th
WHAT TO PACK FOR YOUR WEDDING
Sketchbook page of what I’m packing for our wedding weekend.
December 26th
PLUG FOR A FELLOW ALUMNUS
Jordan Tate attended Miami University’s Western College Program and earned a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2003. He is currently an M.F.A. candidate at Indiana University’s Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts. Some of his work is held in the permanent collection at the Kinsey Institute for Gender, Sex, and Reproduction. I [...]
December 25th
GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST
“Maybe I’m even extremely biased but, on my honor, there is something to this place! And this something can be sensed by a person with mettle who agrees that life is sad, monotonous — this is all very true — but still, nevertheless and despite everything it is exceedingly, exceedingly interesting.” —Isaac Babel, “Odessa,” quoted [...]
December 24th
THESE CODED DRAWINGS ARE REALLY MY JOURNALS
Bruce Eric Kaplan on his comics as a coded journals of his life.
December 22nd
MY NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION: COLOR
I’m going to teach myself color. It’s something I’ve never understood, and something I’ve never really been able to do. I’m sure that somewhere I have a subconscious understanding of it, but I just can’t consciously create effects using it. I suppose the solution is getting out a big box of crayons and starting to [...]
December 20th
WILLIAM BLAKE AND UNCLE SCROOGE, HAGGLING OVER MONEY
On the subject of money and an engraving by William Blake called “The Laocoon as Jehovah with Satan and Adam.”
December 18th
MORE MAPPING
Here’s another map I did with the ol’ sumi-e brush for an essay I’m working on. The piece of paper was really huge, so I had to take a photo with the digital camera. I had all this random junk floating around my head for the essay, but I couldn’t figure out how to put [...]
December 13th
BEAUTIFUL EVIDENCE
A mindmap of Edward Tufte’s BEAUTIFUL EVIDENCE.
December 12th
MY READING YEAR, 2006
Top ten favorite books I read in 2006.
December 8th
HARRIGAN ISN’T AFRAID
“harrigan isn’t afraid / after years of waiting / to be her husband…”
December 7th
HEY! THE XMAS CURTAIN CALLS
“My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.” —Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The New Millenium Drew these two pages while listening to a solo KCRW gig by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. Jim James’ voice + silo reverb = heaven. A beautiful equation.
December 6th
BIRDSEED (ONLINE COMIC)
“Birdseed,” a silent comic.
December 5th
MY LISTENING YEAR, 2006
Just me riffing on John Porcellino: Special treat: an updated page of every Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour show.
December 4th
WHAT IF WE GIVE IT AWAY?
A couple of comic pages and Cory Doctorow’s “give freely and they will buy” business strategy.
December 4th
A WEDDING EQUALS PENURY, BUT MEAT IS A REWARD
Two bits for today. First is an excerpt from the highly-recommended ESQUIRE’S THINGS A MAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MARRIAGE (which actually manages to be witty and informative at the same time): East Indian Hindu couples are married before a small fire, into which they toss flowers, water, seeds, and fruit, which are considered the four [...]
December 3rd
THE MUSES ARE TAKING A SMOKE BREAK (AND READING COMIC BOOKS)
The first two paragraphs of David Hajdu’s NYTimes review of Ivan Brunetti’s outstandingly awesome (Christmas gift of the year, hint hint…) ANTHOLOGY OF GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS, AND TRUE STORIES: Upholding its duty to officiate lay consecration in America, Time magazine recently assessed the latest candidates for anointment as the literary voice of the young generation, [...]
December 1st
MENTORS, APPRENTICESHIPS, AND IMMORTALITY
Couldn’t sleep last night, so I kept reading my biography of William Blake. Got to thinking about apprenticeships (Blake was apprenticed to an engraver for 7 years — from the ages of 14 to 21) versus the kind of classroom teaching most of us get these days. I’ve never had my eye out for teachers, [...]
November 30th
WILLIAM BLAKE, READING COMIC BOOKS
As a child, William Blake saw words and images together in the morbid mid-eighteenth-century equivalent of comic books.
November 29th
AND I LOVE HER
This is a Sharpie sketch I did of Meg this morning. Friday we start the 30-day countdown until our big event. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of sketching her… Last night we went to Joseph-Beth to see Harvey Pekar sign copies of the BEST AMERICAN COMICS. Not much action — Harvey gave a [...]
November 28th
BOOK REVIEW: FUN HOME
My book review of Alison Bechdel’s FUN HOME ran this month in Cleveland Magazine as part of Cuyahoga County Public Library’s “Choice Books” advertising series. We don’t have a working scanner at the library anymore, so I had to settle for a photocopy: FUN HOME is a really hard book to do justice in 200 [...]
November 27th
COLORBLIND HEADCOLD
The running around caught up to us. I don’t feel good enough to post anything else, so here are a couple of crayon/ink scribbles I did at my mom’s house over the holiday. I am, essentially, colorblind, and I only had three crayons, so give my color a break. Some wisdom from Tom Waits: “There [...]
November 25th
WHAT! EMBRYOS ARE BABIES!
One of the things I love about holiday road trips is all the ridiculous stuff you see along the highway. I like to keep the digital camera up front with us, just in case we see some gold… For the past month, there’s been a billboard over on Carnegie Ave (in between the Hot Sauce [...]
November 21st
WHY NOT MAKE IT A MONOLOGUE?
Facial expressions, hand gestures, pauses, and visual cues make comic a great way to approximate the experience of oral storytelling.
November 20th
DOUBLE-SPACED, 12 POINT, TIMES NEW ROMAN STRAIGHTJACKET
Short week, this week, what with the holiday coming up and all. Had a marvelous weekend full of running around and reading books. My reading habits are fluctuating wildly these days between non-fiction, books on design, and comic books. Not too much interest in prose fiction at the moment, although I’ve been dipping into Oliver [...]
November 17th
IT MIGHT EVEN BE AN INSULT…
David Byrne: “the word intellectual is never meant as a compliment, is it?”
November 16th
THE POWER OF GUNSMOKE AND PERRY MASON
This is the script excerpt from one of my favorite parts of the three-hour BBC documentary The Power Of Nightmares, where the godfather of the Neocons, Leo Strauss, is discussed, along with his favorite TV programs: VO: Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything—all values, all moral truths. [...]
November 15th
USING FLASH AND YOUTUBE TO MAKE A TRAILER FROM PRE-EXISTING MATERIAL
Plan inspired by a post on Dan Zettwoch’s blog and Stanley Donwood’s work for The Eraser: Now I just gotta learn to animate using Flash…
November 14th
WE’RE ALL SIDESHOW FREAKS SELLING OUR ODDITIES
- a midnight sketchbook page drawn after our annual viewing of Tod Browning’s 1932 masterpiece, Freaks My mind is still a little blown by the idea that there were really positive elements to being a sideshow performer. Check out these words from an NyTimes article about Ward Hall, King of the Midway: “Nowadays, it’s in [...]
November 13th
DANIEL JOHNSTON
On songwriter Daniel Johnston
November 10th
THE IMPORTANCE OF DOODLING
To loosen up in the morning, I pull off a huge sheet of trashy sketch paper and doodle with my sumi-e brush.
November 9th
R.E.M. PERSON
I promise tomorrow I’m going to post a nice pretty picture up here, but for now, The Dems won, Meg and I just finished kicking the GRE in the nuts, and it’s 60 degrees outside, so we’re going to relax and get the apartment ready for the company we’re having this weekend. In the meantime, [...]
November 7th
THE MIDWESTERN, MARRIED LIFE
Our house is a mess of GRE books right now, so I really don’t have the time to post much anything of any substance. But I did come across a really great paragraph from an interview with my hero, Lynda, about being married and artistic, and a setup that sounds like everything Meg and I [...]
November 6th
MP3 MONDAY: MOULTY!
I remember the days when things were real bad for me It was right after my accident, when I lost my hand… The Barbarians – “Moulty” [audio:http://www.austinkleon.com/mp3monday/moultybarbarians.mp3] * * * “Moulty” was a song by a Cape Cod garage band called the Barbarians, who in 1964 grew shoulder-length hair, wore sandals, and were fronted by [...]
November 2nd
HOW DO YOU SHOW THEM WHAT YOU’VE DONE?
A little exercise in information design/gallery hanging today: What’s the best way to let total strangers know what it is that you do? If you’re a multi-disciplinary artist, how do you express the range of your work? How can a portfolio page engage a viewer/newcomer as well as a piece of art? I like the [...]
November 1st
WORKING ASS BACKWARDS
Most cartoonists wait til the final stage of their process to pull out the ink and the brush. Not me. I like to get out the brush early in the morning, and do my rough sketches in sloppy ink. There’s something about the brush, the way it can cover a lot of surface in a [...]
October 31st
A HALLOWEEN TREAT: GHOULARDI SAYS, “STAY SICK! TURN BLUE!”
On Ernie Anderson, father of PT Anderson, otherwise known as Ghoulardi.
October 30th
PAUL WAS AN APOSTLE, JUDAS WAS AN APOSTATE
Greetings from GRE-studying hell! For the next two weeks, your humble entertainer will be busy learning obscure words. Words like “adumbrate,” “bedizen,” and “calumniate.” (He admits, he has only made it past the letter “C” in his Hit Parade.) To keep his sanity, your humble entertainer will still be scratching and posting pretty pictures, and [...]
October 30th
EXCERPTS FROM A TERRIBLE CALAMITY AT SEA!
An (abandoned) graphic novel-in-progress:
October 27th
COPYING
“I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.” – Lynda Barry This is my copy of some of the panels from a 1930s Gasoline Alley strip that [...]
October 26th
SKULKING AROUND BARNES AND NOBLE
I really need to get an office. Right now, our living room doubles as my workspace, and that’s bad, because when I step into the room in the morning, I don’t know whether to write, or take a nap on the couch. It’s better today, because the radio’s on, and there’s actually SUNLIGHT coming in [...]
October 25th
WE ARE LADIES AND GENTLEMEN SERVING LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
This sketchbook page is what happens when you put me in customer service training for 4 1/2 hours. The title of this post is the motto of the Ritz-Cartlon. Here is my own definition of customer service: tricking people into thinking they’re #1. Here is the secret to life: knowing that every person is the [...]
October 24th
THE GHOST OUTLINE OF A FACE
Art by Alzheimer’s patients becomes “more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic…sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.”
October 23rd
SHOWING PIGS, EATING PIGS, DRAWING PIGS
These are research sketches of pigs I did for a new comic called “Showmanship,” which is going to be about my experience raising 4-H hogs for the county fair. They were inspired by a lame-ass interview I saw of Jonathan Safran Foer describing why he’s a vegetarian that I came across while researching Everything Is [...]
October 20th
IT SOUNDS GREAT WITH THE VOLUME DOWN
My friend Brandon (who keeps refusing to answer my e-mails now that he’s a fancypants graduate student — maybe he’ll read this and feel guilty) once told me that in the lazy afternoons, he’d been watching soap operas with sound off, writing his own dialogue for the characters on the screen. I thought that sounded [...]
October 19th
WHEN THE ONLY CURE IS A CHEESEBURGER AND A MILKSHAKE
I thought it was unbearably depressing today. I spent a good part of the day surfing the internet, checking out Paul Hornschemeier and Married To The Sea (both boys from Ohio!) and drooling over the Tom Gauld comics I got by airmail yesterday. Now, Meg and I are going to Red Robin, and then we’re [...]
October 18th
THE GATES OF PARADISE AS A COMIC
A look at Ghiberti’s baptistery doors as a comic where each panel doesn’t represent a narrative moment, but a complete chapter in a larger story…
October 17th
A MARRIAGE GUIDE FOR WRITERS
Meg and I have this Peanuts strip taped to the fridge: Relationships are hard enough, but it takes a real champion of a person to be married to an artist. Lots of times you have to be a maid/cook, motivational speaker, a mother, and an editor — all at once. Lucy would never cut it. [...]