Friday, Feb 18, 2005 8pm -11pm

Comics 4 Comix Fundraiser

Comics and comix collide as the funnies meet the funny in a

fundraiser/silent art auction for San Francisco’s world-renowned Cartoon

Art Museum. Join the Bay Area’s funniest folk for a night of laffs,

food, drink and fun. And bid on original art by some of the brightest

stars in comics today. Tickets are sliding scale $15-$35 and can be

purchased in advance by calling the museum at ext. 300.

This event coinsides with the first day of Wondercon. Visit the Cartoon Art Museum at www.cartoonart.org

Today is another day. I am armed with my new Motto: BE, DO, HAVE, so it is time to make someting happen. My goal is to finish up the art today. Scary. I will be posting later this evening.

A while back I had some funny constructing some minature set pices to represent the Boarding House living room in my comic. Here is one of them: the Radio with a plant on top.

The model was made on a Minela Folder. I will post some more later this week.

Sometimes you hear and idea and it just seems to stick. That happened this weekend.

A friend of mine had gone to the first ever adult cartooning workshop at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. The class was taught by Michael Jantze, the creator of THE NORM comic strip. What Mr. Jantze mentioned to the folks in that class was a simple phrase that seems to make perfect sense to me:

It’s so simple, but it can mean so much. Now this is my ‘telephoned’* version of its description, so it might not be right. But as I believe it to be:

BE-who you are, in my case an illustrator/cartoonist. You do not have to be doing it as a career, just BEing the person you are.

DO-Do the work, put in the time, make it happen.

HAVE-the results of the other two, sorta BE+DO=HAVE.

A good motto to live by indeed.

If you where at the class, or originally said it, and I have not explained it right, please don’t hesitate to comment.

* The kids game of Telephone has a group of folks sitting in a circle. One person starts by whispers a phrase to the person next to them, and then that person to the next person again. When you get all the way around the circle you see if everyone heard the same thing, or if it got muddled, as rumors do, by the time it finds its way back to the start.

Well, time to take a few steps back and see what’s happened. Here is the semi-inked pages from 1-13-05.

Here is how they are after working a lot on them yesterday…

These pages where brought into the final project document in Adobe In-Design. I replace what I had there all ready with these pages. This gives me a better idea of the final product.

Here is a page of fixes. As I have mentioned before, I have had some time to analyze the final product that I had hoped to print after Comic-Con. But the money was low to self publish, and then I got the opportunity to improve some things that where bugging me. I have learned a lot of stuff in the last few months.

and of course I inked the logo and boarder design in the previous post.

So far, so good.

THIS….

TO THIS…..

The wording by themself will appear in the back of the book above the section that allows me to tell you about the book you just read.

Today I am working to get all the art done, with the hopes of scanning it tomorrow afternoon.

LESSON LEARNED: Everything takes longer then you think it will!

Since I have the opportunity to alter some work I was originally going to accept as done and print, I am doing what ever I can to make it better. Below is an example, a completely reworked panel (originally on the top left corner of pg20 ‘comic-con’ edition), that shows Victor Grassroot asking about the card he found in issue #1. The first step is to do some exploratory sketches, then I traced the original panel and penciled in the characters.

Next I will ink and render the panel, then scan and replace it in the final document.

I also have created a decorative boarder to use in the future and the title for the ‘news and notes’ section.

Ok, the title is bad joke. I went to an ART CLASS taught by the fantastic Watercolorist, Dorcas Moulton (me4hue.com), at Merritt college in Oakland, CA.

I mostly went to see if a change of scenery would be good for working on Beyond the Great Chimney, and it was. Most of the 5 new pages are almost done, and I am going in and replacing a few of the previous panels to accommodate the new pages. So if you have a copy from Comic-Con 2005, its going to be a bit different.

Here is one of the pages I was tackling (note: I took this earlier in the day, more has been done since). Here is a perfect example of why I am excited about having a bigger issue (32 pgs vs. 24 pgs), to be able to put more details in. Now we see the singular entrance tower to Agacon’s penthouse lair and the details of the elevator, main door, and entrance room.

Lots more tomorrow.