It’s been an interesting exercise in testing the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory thus far. I haven’t avoided a question and will try to answer all as deadpan as possible (until my naivety is shattered by something truly repulsive). Anonymity is like beer muscles for people’s intellectual cowardice.

I have gotten a few decent questions on the work of being an illustrator and that helps to balance out the inane stuff. Here’s the best question so far:

Well I can ask you a hundred different questions but I’ll stick to one. What is the best advice you can give a wannabe hopeful illustrator for getting into this market, discovering his/her style, and making some sort of impact.

As far as getting into the market is concerned, be patient, work hard. Put your work in everyone’s face and be an aggressive advocate for yourself. Be your harshest critic but also your biggest fan. Otherwise your insecurity will eat you for lunch.

Style wise, try not to think about it. If you’re drawing all the time, that will come naturally. You will make the marks that feel right to you, the ones your muscle memory has absorbed and saved and cataloged.

Making an impact? Being memeful helps. Make images that are loaded in advance to spread on the tubes. It’s a cynical stab at self marketing at its worst, but a genuine expression of interest in a given topic at its best. I see peers having great success with jumping on the story of the moment and making art to match.

“I’M WITH COCO.” That image was everywhere.

More importantly: do what you love. It shows in the work. That will get you more attention, more deserved attention, in the long run.

Sat. the 20th a lot of really talented artists are going to be drawing at Wildclaw Theatre’s Dance of the Demented. It’s a benefit for the Theatre’s upcoming production of Willam Peter Blatty’s Legion. You’re invited to come have drinks, draw with us, and raise money for the arts! So, bring your sketchbooks, dancing shoes, or iron gut to the Viaduct Theatre in Chicago.

9:00 PM to 2:30 AM
The Viaduct Theatre
3111 N. Western Avenue, Chicago

Google Map

Music by DJ White Russian, DJ Vapor Eyes, The Ordeal, DJ Miles Beyond, and DJ Chas Vrba.

Artsy fartsy assholes, such as myself, in attendance include: Jessica Joy (smART Show), Alex Wald (Ultraman/Shaolin Cowboy), J Anthony Kosar (Avatar/Buckaroo Bonzai), Tony Akins (Jack of Fables/House of Mystery), Dave Dorman (Aliens/Star Wars), and, hopefully, you.

I don’t come down a lot and I’d really dig seeing y’all at the event. I’m going to be nervous as shit and I suspect I’ll be very drunk and drawing giant penises for a live audience before the night is out. Should be a good time.

Five years ago was the first time I’d picked up a pen with the intent to draw since around sophomore year of high school. My initial attempts were pretty crude. I had no knowledge of anatomy to speak of and I certainly didn’t have an understanding of line. For someone who’d read comics religiously as a kid, I’d absorbed none of their drawing lessons, except for maybe the bad ones.

After some initial experiments for both an unauthorized Friday the 13th fan comic and a friend’s webcomic, I got my hands on a Wacom tablet with the hope to create pixel art for 2D platformers (and to a lesser degree, do print design work, my dayjob at the time).

My first digital work was radically different from what I’d produced analog. Lineweight variance was a given of the medium and, for someone who’d never touched brushes or nibs or anything other than a technical pen up to that point, digital seemed to promise capabilities that analog simply could not.

I met people online who drew things for money. Illustrators, they were called, and a goal blinked in my mind like the soft electric sex of a neon sign. Be. An. Illustrator.

My work changed rapidly and I reveled in the amount of detail I was able to heap onto images. I didn’t know much of anything about color theory, so I relied on instinct. The result was highly saturated colors and secondary and triadic color schemes that, five years ago, were a bit ahead of the ‘80s trend resurgence and more unique than they would be now. This style dominated my work for the next three or so years. I made my first forays into hand lettering. I forced my way into the jobs I wanted and was pretty fearless.

Hubris has a funny way of making its wielder plummet to the earth. The work I was creating was technically good in some ways, but inconsistent. I didn’t know much in the way of color theory, composition, or anatomy. Occasionally, something neat would happen in a piece, but I didn’t understand exactly what the magic sauce was that made it work. I started to doubt my work. My lack of a formal art education undermined my confidence. My previously prolific work life slowed to a crawl. I did only the bare minimum work required of me. Pay work got done, but personal work all but shriveled up and died. This crisis of confidence coincided with a series of crap events. My dog died. The economy collapsed. I got a Cintiq thinking it would allow me greater control and might push the next evolutionary stage of my work and it did the exact opposite.

I spent the better part of the last year making up for my lack of confidence. I moved back to analog materials in an attempt to circumvent what I felt was a lack of precision in digital tools. My precision had outstripped the Cintiq’s. I drew from life and read everything I could on anatomy, color, composition, linework, and mass. I breathed a sigh of relief as work picked up and I felt productive once again.

My digital work changed. Painterly work seemed better suited to the dull instruments that digital offered. I embraced a larger scope of interest than the limited color work which had been my bread and butter.

My work has entered a state of serious flux. I struggle with my lack of formal art education. I’m a work in progress, but I’ve come to hope that I will always be. I’ll never be satisfied with my work, but that just might be more blessing than curse. Here’s to hoping that 2010 proves that true.

Wallpaper sized version and process on Flickr.

I’ve been working on mass drawing/painterly pieces for about five months. Evolve or die.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of his work.

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I’m going to try a new style of blogging. Rather than a topical post that seems article-like, I’m going to do a daily open thread, updating the post if something good comes along, and talk about what I’m up to, what my friends are up to, and what I saw, read, or consumed that’s worth repeating.

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I got my Rosemary & Co. brushes some time ago. After some break in time, they seem like a great buy. For the money, hard to beat.

I just bought a bunch of Kolinsky Sables from Rosemary & Co. A friend of mine, Kiel West, introduced me to Rosemary’s brushes. She’s a woman in England who hand-makes all her brushes at a fraction of the cost of other manufacturers. Manufacturers who seem to have an inverse quality to price ratio of late – I’m looking at you, Windsor & Newton.

This will be my first order. I can’t recommend them from personal experience yet. She comes so highly recommended, and with prices so affordable, it’s hard not to get excited. Just look at how much brush I got for so little dough:

1 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 1 = $6.41
3 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 2 = $20.91
3 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 3 = $25.28
1 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 4 = $9.80

1 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 1 = $4.58
3 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 2 = $14.14
3 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 3 = $15.87
1 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 4 = $5.82

1 x Bamboo Brush Roll. = $7.36

Sub-Total: $110.17
Shipping to the USA: $8.48
Total: $118.65

$118 for 16 Kolinsky brushes with shipping. Wowee. Unless these are the single most atypically useless Kolinsky Sable brushes ever made, that’s a miniscule amount of money.

I’ve convinced myself to start a few comics after I get back from a trip to Prague in the next few weeks and embark on the latter path. We’ll see! But I digress…

For the Paste illo, I managed to feature my friends as ghosts haunting Jim Carroll (Known, musically at least, for “People Who Died.” He’s a great prose writer; author of The Basketball Diaries). Who better to haunt him than the people I interact with on forums? They’re kind of etherial friends. They exist on the tubes and nowhere else from my perspective. That’s sort of eerie.

I got a bunch of them to submit photos of themselves and proceeded to place them into the illustration in a paint by number fashion.

I used the same method to make my BRAINS Threadless tee. That image featured ~40 unique heads and is the current tiled background for my blog. It’s an easy way to make a crapload of people happy, har.

After roughing in the approximate locations of all their faces, I started in on the loose pencils, seen here in green.

Here it is inked and colored:

I’m not too wild about it. It was one of my last fully digital pieces and the sterility of the medium seems more obvious to me now than it did then.

Same goes for this guy, the LA Weekly cover. It was a bit of a rush job, time-wise, as a prior commitment for the cover didn’t work out and I batted clean-up. I’m happy with what I was able to accomplish, but I wish I could’ve done more in hindsight. They liked it a bunch from what I gathered, so I guess I should stop being so critical of myself. No one is a bigger heckler about my work than I am, that’s for sure!

Here’re the pencils for the first version of cover before their input:

And here are the pencils after their input:

The beginning of the inks:

And the final product:

Two things: there is a ton of bleed in that image. Her hands are cropped and there’s a ton taken in from the sides in the final. I wasn’t responsible for -and this isn’t the final- text. They dropped that in for the finished image. A friend in LA was good enough to take a photo of it:

An official fix would be nice, though. Hear me, Apple & Wacom! Old man Frenden shakes his fist at you with scorn and malice!

Apple support forum discussion on the topic.

Me lamenting Wacom’s monopoly of pen-based input devices and their lack of customer support on Twitter.

I sure do love my $2400 brick!