BY GOD! I will.

I’ve tried to do this before. Back when I was finishing Furlough two, I thought I might do that issue’s lettering via tablet, thinking that Ctrl-Z might override my natural tendency toward scrawl. But something was not right, and the evening ended as they often did at that point, with a lot of swearing and a lot of changed plans.

Well! I was at my cartooning/illustration group last night, and after some settings wrangling with my friend Tom, we got it to work properly, and my new project is to draw a bit with this every day. Current benchmark of success: it looks like a drawing I might make with a pen. Next: coloring? Details? Textures? We’ll get there when we get past where we are now.

All this is a fancy, backstory-laden way of saying, “Hey, I made this here drawing, lookit.”

I’ve been drawing this nose for a while, but it hasn’t found a home yet.

My business card lists a lot of titles (including the title Esquire, which I’ll explain to you if you ask me in person – short story, no, I am not a lawyer, but). I can add two, as of this week.

I’m lucky enough to be friends with Bonnie Tarses, an artist, weaving master, dancer, and several other titles of her own. She wanted to make a promotional video featuring her Almost Ikat drafting technique. I was called in to document it and to edit the result. This is it:

You can see it with some more context at her blog.

What I learned: this is super, super fun. I saw my share of film editing in college (to the point that I’m pretty sure I could splice actual film together with tape, if necessary), but I’d never done anything quite like it myself. Now I want to do more. How to Spend a Day Without Work and Have an Awesome Time. How to Serenade Your Cat Via Improv. How to Ignore a Pile of Stuff in the Living Room for Months on End – For Fun and Profit! The possibilities are endless!

So, I’m on Twitter now. I talk about comics and projects and also the occasional personal thing, which I don’t really do over here. You should come follow me and artificially inflate my ego via internet-based popularity numbers. That, and I’ll probably make you laugh, because I’m pretty good at that.

The other night, my drawing group spent part of the evening on a theme: Dueling Banjo Pigs..

This was my contribution.

I’m in that stressed-out mood that turns to something resembling anger, which makes me want to do nothing more than be unpleasant, kick things pointlessly, and have a few nice vodka-based drinks. Generally, this mood only comes about when I’m doing something I really care about, so I’m trying to frame it in those terms.

I am very close to finishing Furlough two. I’ve scanned and polished each page; what remains is to letter (gah) with a stylus (GAH) and then to do the things I consider simpler, like drawing and painting covers, laying out the whole thing, and drawing page 36. I think it’s going to be a tradition with me that, if i can help it, the last page of a given book will be a bullshit strip, which I will do only once almost everything else is done. When you’re doing something very long that requires a great deal of stamina, you can lose sight of the satisfaction of finishing something quickly. Writing and penciling and inking one page in one long session can set that to rights.

Now, to pictures.
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One of my very favorite things, since I started making zines and comics in earnest last summer (following, oh, fifteen or so years of just planning things out), has been getting reactions to my creativity zine. I’ve gotten really wonderful responses to it from people, and sometimes I feel like I can’t hawk it strongly enough at conventions, because I know that anyone who expresses interest in it would get something from it. (Mainly because I recognize their curiosity as being a parallel to the state of mind that led me to write the zine in the first place.)

It’s been reviewed on a couple of blogs recently, which is exciting. Alli Rense included it in a roundup of readables, and Drummbellina had very kind things to say about it as well.

As for me? I am still chipping away at Furlough two. I haven’t started today’s bout of inking, but as of the end of yesterday, 18 of 35 pages were inked. They need processing and all, of course, but generally I’m pretty satisfied with how they’re turning out. ‘

In the meantime, here’s a self-portrait I made as part of an inking test several days ago.

I don’t consider portraits or caricature a strong point of mine (yet), but I find it really easy to draw myself, and apparently pretty accurately at that. I think it’s because I don’t fear my own reaction – I won’t get pissed at myself for making my nose look big or my face look too full or my eyes look beady. I don’t care. And so it turns out ok. I suspect there’s a lesson in that.

Those of you seeing this may be new. In that case, here’s what you should know about me.

Here is Perspective, an eight-page comic by me. I don’t tend to do shorter work, so I hope you enjoy it.

Here is my Etsy store, in case you wanted to mull over a purchase before making it.

If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you will occasionally see silly stuff like this.

And here is an excerpt of my current comic, which has one issue out right now with three more to follow – the second of which I intend to debut in June.

I talk about my current projects, about miscellaneous comic-based silliness, about creativity issues and blocks and solutions, and about other comics and art I like. As in life, I don’t talk if I don’t have something worthwhile to say. I hope you tune in.

You know something’s difficult to make when such disparate companies as Crayola, Band-Aid, and various shoe makers can’t agree on what it is – let alone to make it right. Nevermind the fact that for, oh, 70-plus percent of humans, the industry standard of “fleshtone” doesn’t even come close.

But you know what? It’s not easy. Well-intended attempts at skin colors come out luridly bright, or weirdly yellow, or just flat and otherwise wrong. Finally, I turned to my favorite art professor, Dr. Internet, and found this site, which is so simple and so helpful. Seriously, bookmark that shit if you think you’ll ever even consider painting a person.

Even with directions, though, I’m never quite sure that an ok batch won’t be my last one. So this time, I stocked up.

Watercolors are so deceptively colored when wet – or when in any state except “dry, in a final version of your painting.” This jar, if you can’t read it, is pale flesh tone skin color.

(Also pictured: my paint-testing paper, several brushes, my bottle of paint-diluting water, my own water glass, the very edge of an ice tray used for mixing paint, my jar of brushes and pens, my sewing machine’s cover, a cupcake wrapper container recently used as a circle template, and my gilded teacup of rinse water. You may address all correspondence to Ms. I.M. Classy.)

Today’s other diversions: doing extremely sketchy thumbnails for Furlough two so I could get a rough pagecount (35!!!), heading to the copy shop to stock up for this weekend, enjoying the new episode of Answer Me This! while also enjoying a chocolate milkshake, eating two delicious veg burgers, and doing zero housework.