And lo, behold my second foray into self-help. The creativity zine walks along the edge of it, telling you how to do things better, but in a specific, semi-professional area. However, once you start talking about things like boundaries, you are in pure, deep self-help land. Which is just fine with me. Sometimes you have a series of months that make you realize you’re really bad at something. Sometimes you work your ass off to get better at them. And, more rarely, you then synthesize what you’ve learned into a zine. Behold:

My learnings are now your learnings. 32 pages, lotsa illustrations.

Including this, my favorite one in the book.

The whole project is near and dear to my heart, and it seems to be striking a chord in people, which is all I ever hope for. If you’re curious, you can see it out on l’Etsy.

…when my friend Amy puts up a new comic. I love her glimpses into the many worlds of being a librarian. And I love when it’s coupled with practical advice.

Listen closely, children.

What you see here is an embryonic zine. It is drawn, it is nearly completed. However, without being processed (as in removing that first unsatisfactory “bitchface” from the cover), laid out, and copied, it isn’t really anything yet. Just a lot of effort and some hope.

The real thing will be complete and corporeal this Saturday. See you then.

I’ll be selling comics, earrings, and tentacle jewelry at the Punk Rock Flea Market this Saturday. Among my wares will be my first new zine in more time than I care to quantify.

“Why, Breanne, what possessed you to finally create something new?” you might reasonably ask.

“Only the gravest, most important matters,” I would solemnly reply.

Here’s a peek at page eleven.

Srs bzns.

Or, “In which our author has a thing to say about current events.”

I have a particular–and particularly weird–relationship with the work of Thomas Kinkade. From the age of about 11 on, I’ve been surrounded by quite a lot of his work. Those reproduction prints with the little paint-daub embellishments? First, they filled my childhood home; after my parents split, the divided collection decked the walls of my mom’s and dad’s houses in Florida and Georgia.

As it was the mid-90s or so when my parents got sucked in, it took several years for Kinkade’s work to reach critical enough mass that I started hearing reactions from other people. With the company I keep, those reactions were seldom positive. Sometime around when you could buy needlepoint Bible covers with his paintings at your local Wal-Mart, slagging his work officially became A Thing. Like with most people of a certain type (of a certain age, temperament, and level of cynicism and sarcasm), I found myself turned off by a certain well-documented treacly quality. This mostly came later, with his weird and ugly forays into impressions of impressionism and his icky NASCAR and Disney crossovers. But his earlier stuff, the paintings of houses and cottages and nice gates and things? They weren’t necessarily what would go on my walls (maybe I’ll show you that some time, for context), but they made people happy, including people I love very much. To me, that can be enough.

Not all art has to say something. Not all art has to be representative of process or the emotional torture an artist went through. I believe it can be enough for art to make a person happy and to evoke certain things in their mind. This is why I hate decorator art – it does none of these things, and so it strikes me as a little sacrilegious, honestly. But Kinkade’s art? A shameless cash grab, sure. But just as surely, it touched a certain place in people. And I think that can be enough.

Lines and Colors has a nice, even look that puts Kinkade’s work in context, particularly when you read the comments too. The image I started with, however, is from here . Part two is here. Most of them are… kind of perfect.

Anyway. I get leery and weary when it gets trendy and too easy to slag the same thing over and over again. There are legit criticisms to make. I asked my gentleman friend, an actual trained artist person, what in particular bothered him about Kinkade’s work. He said it was the formula of it–that so much of it was just a pattern, like Bob Ross’s happy little trees, just glurge regurgitated in a series of forms. And I get that. If someone gets massively successful (especially through a sometimes hard-to-watch combination of smart moves and backstabbing), seeing them poop out the same thing in a fit of repeated muscle memory becomes galling and, yes, worthy of criticism. And, um, dude had his demons (which I won’t link here, because: tired of Googling). But, if you followed his official story without reading the more colorful elements of it, it’s an easy formula to make people happy. Large, beautiful, warmly lit houses surrounded by lush forests. Gardens bursting in impossible blooms. Vividly colored windows into an escape. Is it complicated? No, but not everything needs to be goddamn Pollock, does it?

There are legit criticisms to be made, sure, especially since dude did call himself an artist and try to assume a mantle of seriousness and earned emotional resonance and all that. When I’ve heard people get into a slag-fest, though, it moves past that pretty fast into a fit of laughing at anything with such a lowly aim as making people feel good for a little bit. (Good enough to part with several hundred dollars, that is.) And that, I think, is unnecessarily snobby.

And this is unnecessarily long. But, having been steeped in this stuff for more than half my life, it’s influenced me in probably weird and warping ways, and it’s led me to have some Things to Say on a subject that deserved maybe a Thing at best. But here we are. There’s just an element of the man’s legacy that I haven’t seen addressed much. Through a weird twist of my parents’ taste in art (and a trip to Maui where I spent WAY too much time in a small room as the lights were darkened to bring out the highlights in a series of paintings), I have an opinion on these things. And now I have given it to you.

Hello, internet! Been a while.

I contributed a super silly two-page comic to my comic group’s anthology. I’m going to turn this idea into an even sillier mini sometime in the next couple of months, so take a good look at the free shit.

We even got a little mention on Slog, and Paul Constant was kind enough to use part of my page as the preview. I was on Slog! And not for being a victim of a crime!

So go get some nice free comics. I understand they’ll work with your schmancy e-reader too. I’ll be squinting and reading them on my three-year-old laptop’s screen. There’s some beautiful stuff in there – I’m lucky enough to know some talented people. Now you go reap the rewards.

I’ll be back in a couple of days with a preview of another story I did for a different, not-yet-released anthology. Cheers!

I’ve crafted in one form or another since forever, as I’m fortunate to come from people who make things. The guest bedroom at my grandma’s house features curtains she made, a rug she hooked herself, and furniture made by my grandfather. I love staying in there. My mom has sewn and crocheted and made ceramics, and my dad is very broadly handy in a mechanical sort of way. Growing up, my best friend’s mom made crafts to sell at craft fairs, and their basement was a wonderland of ribbon and yarn and glue and plastic canvas.

Me? I do some of everything. I actually reined it in early last year, when I realized my dilettante tendencies were keeping me from finishing a single large project. In 2009, I took classes in metalsmithing, lampworking, chainmail, encaustic and acrylic painting, and I’m sure several other things I can’t think of right now. In 2010, I worked on Furlough and finished a scifi novel. And, well, attempted in vain to sort out the rest of my life, but that’s a story for another day.

I’ve made beaded jewelry since I was ten or so, but I’ve only ever sold it individually to friends and, occasionally, on my Etsy page. This weekend, I shared a booth at a local flea and craft market and sold my jewelry in public in an organized way for the first time. Lookit:

Pretty, no? Some of it includes beads I made myself at the torch.

I’ll be selling stuff again at the Punk Rock Flea Market on December 10th. I’ll have all the jewelry pictured plus some, and comics and zines, and my friend (and tablemate) Jenny’s beautiful handmade sketchbooks, and some foodie goodness she and I are going to make.

Because I’m still lucky. Most of my friends are makers of things too. It’s nice this time of year – there’s something about winter that makes me want to tuck into projects. I have about a billion things I want to knit, and I’m about to start on a small zine about my small cat, a companion to my Cat Lady zine. I want to cook a million squash this winter, and maybe knit myself another sweater, and do a ton of sewing.

I’ve also had an idea to make cat sweaters, inspired by a fortuitous visit to the Martha Stewart pets section late this summer. We’ll talk more about that later. It’s seems like a journey to a particular kind of heart of darkness, but I think I have what it takes.

It’s a glorious thing to be part of an event where you’re often asked, “You wrote all this?” and you get to answer, “Yep, I wrote and drew everything you’re looking at,” and the response is usually, “Well, wow.”

I had a very good time indeed at Short Run. I’ll elaborate soon.

Hey, all! I will be plying my wares tomorrow at Short Run. Prints and comics, and I’ll be selling my complete works, which I haven’t done in person before.

Now, as for me, I’d better get to stapling.

Short Run!