Zeetha!

I’ve mentioned Girl Genius before, so I’ll just point in that direction and say read it. Zeetha is an awesome character but while I like her, I’m not totally invested in her, which is probably why I felt comfortable taking her quite tight character design and flubbing it as part of my learning process.

This is the ‘go faster and be looser’ part of that process. Again. The process is a cyclical sort of thing. On the bright side, there has been some clear progress. This one took about three hours total, and there were no outlines at any point in the coloring process.

Now, I implied there was news.  I’ve been spreading my branchy little dendrites over the internet.

Ever wanted to buy any of my drawings? I am now a member of a little artist’s association called Paper Ribbons, where you can buy both already made pieces and commission things based on a style choice and a short statement. Paper Ribbons is aiming to make art buying make a little more accessible. Pricing is based on size, so it takes some of the uncertainty out of trying to assess artistic value. (They make it my job, rather than yours.) My Paper Ribbons page.

If you’re more into my jewelry, I also now have a facebook page. Mostly because two people in one week gasped in horror when they wanted to ‘friend’ me and found out that I didn’t have one of those buttons. (They don’t actually issue them at birth. Surprisingly.)

And there’s always my etsy, which has been updating lately. Which reminds me, I’ve got some new pieces I need to take pictures of. Boo pictures. Hooray updates!

At the head of the list of awkward questions to ask creative people:  ‘where do you get your ideas?’

If you’ve ever asked a creative person this and gotten a exasperated glare in response, try not to take it personally. You’re just the eleventy-seventh person to ask that question, and about 85% of the time, the artist you’re questioning has no idea where their inspiration came from. I’ll save my Freudian speculations on why that might be for another time, because right now I’m introducing an irregular feature on Spiral-Bound Sketches.  Basically, when I title something ‘Inspiration’, that post will be one of  the 15% of the time when I do know where my inspiration is coming from, and I’ll try to explain it. Either you will find this enlightening, or it will convince you that all artists are crazy, to varying degrees.

So, on to today’s post. Recently, I had an excuse to send one of my friends a letter. Normally, I’m not one to send letters. The only time in my life where I sent regular letters was from the age six to twelve, where I was required to send my Great Grandmother a letter once a week. As you might imagine, a six year old isn’t going to be much for sentence structure, so I started out sending mostly pictures, with a few words. Eventually the words got to take up more of the content of the mailing, but the picture part was always there too. So now, when I do send a letter, it feels a little odd if I don’t include some sort of drawing in it.

This friend of mine has a favorite artist, by the name of Alphose Mucha.  I’ve learned that I can influence my sketching style (as many authors can influence their writing style) by consuming an awful lot of one unique artist. So I looked at a lot of Mucha. (I did a similar thing with Mike Mignola in March.) This is a fast process (about an hour) when I share major stylistic qualities with the artist I’m trying to ape.  In this case, both Mucha and I love to do clearly outlined forms, and we like to draw ladies who sit around looking pretty.

So that’s how this came about. As to the exact subject, I couldn’t come up with a single thing to write. So this lady with a blank piece of paper in front of her was going to be sort of an apology for being really bad at writing letters, but then the drawing itself took too long to finish, so I didn’t wind up sending the letter.

Fail.

But hey, blog post.

Yeah… So the next installment of the game is going to be late.

This is partially due to having actual for-pay work eating up my art time, (more on that later, if the client approves) and also because the next installment has been an utter bitch to make.

So, here’s some filler. But wait: it’s filler that doesn’t suck!

These are some full-page spreads I did for a CD bookelet about two years ago.  For those that are curious, the musician is a friend. But I don’t just listen to his music just to be polite, I listen because it’s good.

I’m not really happy with this, but I’ve found that’s a recurring problem whenever I try to draw a character that really matters to me: I obsess, I still can’t get it right, so I overwork it. (if I were working with regular old pencil and paper for example, I’d have erased a hole in the page.) The result isn’t bad exactly, but it is overwrought, and it looses some of the natural grace of the original idea.

Oh, that’s Agatha, by the way. She belongs to Phil & Kaja Foglio, and lives over at Girl Genius. Girl Genius has an artistic style that perfectly matches the thematic content, which is… Hmm. I’d tell you what it’s about, but I won’t because I don’t want to give anything away, it’s all too awesome for me to risk messing it up. Suffice it to say that it’s relentlessly silly, (though with some serious themes about identity) manically detailed, and there’s always a reasonable likelyhood that someone will throw a bomb at you.

Not my character. This lady belongs to Joe England over at Zebra Girl. I heartily recommend giving his comic a read. The writing and plot starts off a bit sitcom-y, but he finds his feet after a bit and then things get interesting. The art starts off pretty good and gets pretty damn good. Not even close to my style, but inspirational nonetheless.  I also love the recent turn he’s taken toward, well, going balls to the wall with his art.

Besides, I’m obligated to like anyone whose avatar of choice is a pissed-off bunny.