SEEKING ALWAYS FOR THE PICTURE
…the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture…”
—Paul McHenry Roberts, How To Say Nothing in 500 Words
I need to write in a visual way… for example, with cut-out words.
—Julie Doucet
Once again, I have redesigned the blog. After talking smack about sidebars, I realized that, duh, they can be quite useful and add to the content—but only if they’re used in a dynamic way…if the content of the sidebar changes with whatever page you’re viewing. With the new design, you’ll notice that “meta” information appears in the sidebar next to the post. Making optimal use of the web browser’s real estate. (Can you tell I do web geekery for a living, now?) Clean white to remind me that it’s the actual content that makes a blog. No more lightning bolts or black.
Poke around, let me know what you think.
PROCESS: T-SHIRT DESIGN FOR BOOKSLUT
A few months ago, Jessa Crispin asked me if I wanted to submit a t-shirt design for the literary website Bookslut. So I said, “Cool, let’s do it.” Last week I finally got around to finishing.
I really didn’t want to go for the obvious slutty-girl-reading-a-book theme, so after about a dozen abandoned ideas, I sketched this one:
Decided Jefferson would be my muse (the pixellated color cartoon is from the wonderful 1993 computer game, DAY OF THE TENTACLE):
Tighter sketch:
Carved:
Thought ol’ Tom needed a companion:
Sketched her:
Carved:
No idea whether the design will actually get used, but there you go.
PROCESS: LADY JUSTICE WITH A LAPTOP
I did this for our IT department at the Law School. It’s one of those ideas I didn’t have to think about very much: if you walk around a law school at finals, you don’t see students doing much but tapping away at laptops.
A rough sketch for the general idea:
Start cutting and pasting stuff into Photoshop from Google Image Search:
Draw a (slightly) tighter sketch:
Carve:
Then see a much better-executed idea in the NYTimes:
WEEKEND SKETCHBOOK
The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it on the toilet, it just weaves itself into your everyday life. It’s about little details. It’s not about grand sweeping dramas. Graphic stories are able to show incidental life without having to describe it.”
— Alison Bechdel on the everyday in comics
I’m passionate. I’m disciplined. I play a lot…[When I sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen,] I do a mark on the page, whether it’s virtual or actual paper. Once there is a mark, there’s no fear of not drawing something. It’s a funny thing, but it works every single time…
The way I work nowadays usually is…I don’t really draw a lot….I’ll go months without drawing, but I do keep a notebook…and write down dreams or ideas I have for stories. I just kind of keep filling in those pages and six months or eight months or twelve will go by and I’ll start to panic and I’ll say, ‘I’m never going to do another King-Cat,’ and then at some point…all this work that didn’t really make a lot of sense the day previously, it all just kind of comes together and I’ll think, ‘Ah, this is what the next issue’s going to be,’ and I’ll sit down and I’ll write the stories. I’m a person who allows myself some leeway. If a mistake happens in a comic or I sit down and draw and it takes me off on some tangent I didn’t anticipate, I’m open to following that wherever it may go. But I do usually have it pretty well thought out. But at this point I just see the comics in my head before I ever draw them. So when I have that thing kind of put together, I’ll draw intensely for a period of a couple weeks or a month or so. My comics are so simple, it’s a lot of work that goes into them before the drawing point, but when I actually sit down and draw them it actually goes pretty quickly. And then I’ll put it together, sit down with the pages, edit things and try to make an issue kind of cohesive. Nowadays, it’s still a kind of random thing for me, but I do try to kind of have the issue be a cohesive thing, like an album where these are independent songs but if you take them as a whole they’re a unified expression.
— John Porcellino
I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves….I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.”
— Daniel Day-Lewis
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