A Coyote Tale

Me and Casey Silver from 80% Studios.

Event News

I had a blast at the BLICK Artist Alley event on July 16th.  The event was organized by Ladykiller with fabulous comics artist Rhodora Jacob and organizer extraordinaire Danielle Davis on point.  

I sold enough minicomics to buy a replacement laserjet printer and got to goof off with my table mates Casey Silver of 80% Studios and cartoonist/illustrator Robert Tritthardt.

Also, I was accepted to be one of the curated comics exhibitors for the 2016 Short Run Comix and Arts Festival!  The festival happens at Seattle Center on November, 5th of this year.  I am REALLY happy that my application was accepted, as I am planning to debut some new work there, including my collaboration with Anne Bean, Coyote and Butterfly Woman.

Coyote and Butterfly Woman

I've only just met comics writer, cultural critic and raconteur, Anne Bean, in the past year.  In 2015, she was awarded an Artist Trust GAP grant, in support of the creation of four comics based on fairy tales from around the world, and a coyote tale that originated in Nez Pierce tribal mythology.

Magpie with a human eye.  That guy sees everything.

The coyote tale, Coyote and Butterfly Woman, centers around Coyote needing to subdue the powers of Butterfly Woman, who is standing in the way of his travels.  Anne revised the story to reflect modern power relations between genders.

We discussed the possibility of me taking the story on as it's illustrator.  

I have had experience updating the Bohemian folk tale, Jezinkas, and have ties to Indian country through both relations and through my work with Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center.  Anne's story is heavy on content, and I was attracted to the magical realism element of the project, so I here I am, illustrating a coyote tale.

Coyote hitches a ride in Eastern Washington.

I'll be honest - this has not been an easy comic to climb into.  I usually draw my own stories, so I automatically feel strongly about the ones I'm compelled to surface in my art.  Anne's writing is visceral, and I had to spend some time with it and process a handful of issues before I got to the mechanics of the drawings.  

There is a character sporting a confederate flag hat.  There are on-page depictions of violence.  The google image searches alone were daunting.

First, I had the idea to experiment in making ugly drawings to reflect the ugliness of some of the story elements.  No, no and no.  I drew pages of work that will never see the light of day.   I think, ultimately, it's a good thing.  I had to work through that as part of the process.

Butterfly Woman in the works.

Luckily, we have until mid-October to get the story done.  I'm a third of the way through, have worked through the major issues and drafted the main characters.  Now I'm working on the fun part - the inking.

In November, you will be able to pick up a copy of the story, along with other work by Anne Bean and me, during Coyote and Butterfly Woman's debut at Short Run 2016.

Girl On The Road posts about comics, publication and community on Tuesdays.

Night of the Crow

 

Quoth the raven...

I have friends who call me a synchronicity vortex.  My life is riddled with strange coincidences and deep irony.  It's why I say I'm spiritual but not religious.  I've seen too many things come together at once to know that more than human consciousness is at work in this world.

This week, I've been finishing a 4-page comic called "Night of the Crow."  It's a surrealistic bit of  autobiography from my life as a painter, after completing an exhibit of giant crow paintings at the Balazo Gallery on Mission Street in San Francisco.  The show got great reviews, my house mate installed the paintings in our space when I returned, and then things started to get strange.

Me and my housie, circa 2004

A Sacramento Side Story

One of the hardest things about putting together my graphic novel, Girl On The Road, is that there is no way to include everything that happened in the time frame that the story spans.  Paranormal crow activity may be interesting, but I think including this incident would take away from the story arc and make for a disjointed reader experience.  Sacramento is a featured location, but the events from Night of the Crow are probably not going to make it into the Girl On The Road script.

That is why I am super-psyched that I'll be able to tell the story in a different venue.  The anthology it will be published in doesn't go to print until 2017, so it will be really fun to file it away and forget about it.  When I finally see it in book format it will feel like a Christmas present.

Some nights are like that.

Home Schooling

My main reason for finishing Night of the Crow this week is that I wanted to

learn from executing the story.  I need more practice with both character development and the human figure.  I also have to get used to drawing myself, over and over and over again.  Just doing four pages of self portraits made me feel like a narcissist.  200 pages will take some getting used too.

So, Night of the Crow.  It was not directly working on the graphic novel, but I feel more confident returning to the big project having test-run some new techniques in a tiny story.

One More Awesome Side Project

I'll be working on one more awesome side project - a collaboration with comics writer Anne Bean.  She is one of the people who has already received an Artist Trust grant to build a suite of new comics with a different illustrator taking on each story.  We're creating a full-length minicomic adaptation of the Nez Perce story of Coyote and Butterfly Woman.  I'm VERY excited to work with Native themes and anthropomorphic imagery.  The story is under production and scheduled to be premiered at Seattle's Short Run Comix & Arts Festival. 

Short Run Is Accepting Applications

The Short Run Comix & Arts Festival is now accepting exhibitors applications, by the way.  Check it out.

Girl On The Road posts about comics, publication and community on Tuesdays.

The Grants Game, Part 3 - Superstition

Time . . . Enough

Roy from Blade Runner.
That guy never forgets his deadlines.

If you're an artist looking for grant funding, Seattle is a pretty great place to be.  We likely have more grant sources for individual creators than almost anywhere else in the United States.

That also means more deadlines.  Today I completed an application to an agency called Artist Trust for their GAP (Grants for Artists Projects) fund. 

I'm not usually one to finish an application on the day it's due.  I keep this very exacting spreadsheet of deadlines--for anthologies, grants, whatever needs hitting--and I try to get things done ahead of time.  Especially for grants.  Even on a fairly easy application I schedule a minimum of 8 hours to complete it.  EIGHT.  Because, for me, it's not writing the narrative that gets me.  It's the time it takes to format files and upload them that is the killer.

If you are submitting 10 pages of comics, and maybe you have them in a PDF at 600 dpi for printing.  But the granting agency wants them in individual JPGs at 72 dpi but at a minimum of 1920 dpi on the long edge but with a file size no larger than 5 mb.  MATH!  My arch enemy.  This is exactly what I was up against today.  Then actually uploading and labeling the files is taking the grantmaker's online system forever.  Then I'm standing in the rain like Rutger Hauer, gripping my hand and pleading with the universe for more time.

Clocking in at a mere 4.7 MB!

Very Superstitious

Ah well, I did get everything uploaded and the submission is in.  

I had the exact same problem uploading files for the City Artist grant I submitted earlier this year.  I wasn't this hard up against the deadline, but I was having plenty of trouble with their online grants submission site.  I was cursing the screen while I watched the spinning beach ball of doom that is Macintosh telling me that it's processing something.  And I was listening to an album that I consider part of the soundtrack to my graphic novel - So Tonight That I May See by Mazzy Star.

The album hit it's last song and I got panicky.  "If my files aren't uploaded by the end of the album, I won't get the grant!" THAT is what my brain suddenly decided to throw at me.  It makes no sense.  I have no idea where it came from.  I tried to tell myself it was ridiculous.  But I was still deeply relieved when the uploads finished before the final strains of the song.

Even when I was grantwriting for agencies, everyone had rituals and superstitions.  There were grant dances.  Laying of the hands on the outgoing paper proposal.  Always the constant race to the post office.  (At least THAT part has been eliminated by online submissions)

It's Only Weird If It Doesn't Work

I'm not a huge sports fan, but when the Seattle Seahawks went to the Superbowl, they ran an ad campaign highlighting people's sometimes odd "lucky" game day traditions.  The catch phrase was "It's Only Weird If It Doesn't Work."

I was awarded the CityArtist grant.  So there's that.

I'm not encouraging superstition, but if you've got something that works for you, then go for it.

My lucky Star.

And, of course, give yourself enough time.

I really don't know how I feel about the application I turned in today.  I could have used one more

night to sleep on it and do a FINAL final review.  I'm just glad that I went through the process--don't ask don't get.  Extra score bonus:  I now have an updated artist resume and I also articulated a sub-theme of my graphic novel that I hadn't really pinned down before.

Also--true story--I took myself out to lunch to celebrate/recover and the diner was playing Mazzy Star, Fade Into You.

 Girl On The Road posts about comics, publication and community on Tuesdays.

Though I Walk Through The Shadow of Uncanny Valley . . .

Mark Campos at Bistro Montage in Portland,
featured here with Moxie, My Sweet.

Living with a fellow cartoonist has its benefits, particularly when they are a long-standing feature in the minicomics world.  My housie Mark Campos wrote the anthology Moxie, My Sweet - illustrated by some of the finest cartoonists Seattle has to offer - and has drawn stories for anthologies like Not My Small Diary and Fantagraphics Treasury of Mini Comix.  Mark is not only experienced in the practical aspects of making comics, his head is full of cartooning history and theory.

I'm not like that.  My comics tool kit contains little more than combining a disparate background in fine arts and poetry as an approach to telling stories.  I have limited knowledge of the medium and it's context and having seasoned cartoonists to turn to while I attempt creating a graphic memoir is invaluable.

Uncanny, Isn't It?

Panel with self-portrait on a Chicago train platform.
What is wrong with this picture?

Creating Girl On The Road hasn't been precisely "Write script. Grab pen. GO!"  I've had to make decisions as simple as page size and as difficult as fictionalizing elements of an autobiographical story.  Somewhere in between, how to stylistically approach drawing people is one of the hardest things I've wrestled with.

The book is partially travelogue, so I want backgrounds that deliver a specific location in the story. But the core story is relational, so I want characters that are expressive.

My attempts at marrying photo-realism and expressiveness have not gotten me where I'm going yet.

Back to Mark Campos.  As I sit cursing at the kitchen table over the fact that an image I drew straight from photo reference looks like a mutant, he factually chimes in "It's 'Uncanny Valley'."  And DAMMIT if he's not right.  It is.

Things That Look Almost Human Creep Us Out

Screen grab from Manly Guys Doing Manly Things
by comics blogger Coelasquid.

Uncanny Valley is a term developed by people in robotics.  As certain corporations race to invent the humanoid robot that everyone will love, they keep running into the problem that robots that look like humans freak real humans out. 

There's a dry Wikipedia article about it, but I found an absolutely AWESOME blog about the Uncanny Valley effect as it relates to comics here.  Funny as hell.  References Soundgarden.  You should check out "Close But No Cigar" on Manly Guys Doing Manly Things and get a hard laugh out of it as well as some good information.

What I got out of it was reinforcement that I need to put my hands up and step away from the light table.  My just-slightly-off photo-realistic drawings of people are just-slightly-off-putting.  Even if I had an exact photo reference for every panel of the book, it wouldn't be enough to carry the characters.  But at least I have something of a measure to judge against when assessing my next crop of drawings.  It might keep my book from falling into the Uncanny Valley.

Thanks, Mark.

 Girl On The Road posts about comics, publication and community on Tuesdays.

Hey! Ho! Let's Go!

Draft title page for my sample
chapter "Girl On The Road,
I-90 1994"

As part of my grant proposals in support of the graphic novel, I outlined that I would use my blog to document my process as I go.  Well, I've officially dived into the drawing portion of things, and here's where I'm at.

Discipline 

I've been told more than one time that I need to write every day to be a writer, told to draw every day to be a cartoonist, and famously informed by the poet Eileen Myles "You wanna write a book?  Write a book. That's the only way you're gonna write one."  So OK.  There are things I'll finally be applying to accomplish my first graphic novel. 

 

Here's my short list:

Draw A Page A Day

At least draw every day, with the goal of a page a day, six days out of the week.  I'm only on page #4, so my due date for raw art on my sample chapter is going to be the end of May.  Since my first and second days were dedicated to an elaborate front cover image set in a sunflower field and an equally elaborate draft title page (above), I'm hoping I can complete two or more pages of art on some days to make up for the truly challenging visuals.

Schedule Business Hours

On the seventh day, I blog.  I build and update my website.  I finally scan work to my ETSY shop (Check check).  I research outside work and draw commissions.  I'm going to concentrate on scheduling as much of the work as I can for completion on Tuesdays.

Just Say No

Panel detail from page #4. 
The Chicago Picasso!

I said yes to a lot of really interesting projects over the past year - most of which somehow culminated over the span of only a few recent weeks.  I love anthologies.  I love art galleries.  I've thoroughly enjoyed creating work for themed art shows.  AND I'm not going to get any further towards my aims as an artist until I complete a graphic novel.

So I need to apply some pretty strict criteria to what I say "yes" to moving forward.  Basically, unless it's a paid illustration gig or something I have a truly deep personal connection to and can complete in a reasonable amount of time, I'm going to be turning projects down.

I am going to contribute to My Small Diary Issue #19 and, of course, Prince did just pass away, so yes to the Prince-themed art show, dammit.

 Girl On The Road posts about comics, publication and community on Tuesdays.

Girl On The Road

Myself and Roberta Gregory
enjoying the awesome vibe at Hometown Heroes.

Starting this week, I'm going to be focusing a LOT MORE on the process for the creation of my graphic novel, Girl On The Road.  I did want to note a quick few things before I do.

What A Week

It started, for me, on Friday night with the first ever Hometown Heroes, a new Seattle event featuring independent Seattle comics creators.  I posted a ton of photos on the Hometown Heroes Facebook page, but here is one of me with pioneering female cartoonist Roberta Gregory.  The event was packed and really, really fun. 

Two handsome cartoonists,
Sarah Romano Diehl with Marc Palm at Comicon.

Sunday I tabled the I Heart Comics art table at Emerald City Comicon.  I waded through oceans of super fans in cosplay to share a space with fellow Seattle cartoonists Sarah Romano Diehl and Marc Palm.

Monday I dropped off two large illustrations I produced for the Science +/- Art show at Twilight Gallery.  The show officially opens this coming Thursday, and I'm excited - what a great last commitment to have before delving back into relative solitude to work on a book-length comics story.

My portraits of Jay Defeo and Eva Hess, depicted with their iconic
art works and the chemical symbol for one of the toxic mediums
they worked with that may have lead to their deaths.
They will be on display until the first week in May at Twilight Gallery.

Back Into The Fray 

Misfire!  My first stab at a first page for a
sample chapter of Girl On The Road.
I decided against it before completing it.

The work I've been doing for anthologies and gallery shows sometimes feels like a distraction from the real work I've cut out for myself.  I've been wondering if signing on for so many projects hasn't been a form of self-sabotage.  I'm not going to get any farther as a cartoonist, period, without completing a graphic novel.

However, I feel like I have been upgrading my drawing skills, and have been able to experiment with some stylistic choices that I wouldn't have if I were already working on a book-length narrative.  There's going to be a lot of visual choices to make moving forward, and I think (hope) that all of the projects I've put my shoulder into this past year will be informing those decisions.

I'm going to be spending the rest of these weeks reviewing the work I've already done - going back over the maps and timelines, the sample chapter scripts, and trying to set up a framework to move forward with.  The plan is to wake up Monday morning and treat the book like a full time job.  I'll keep you posted.

C-log posts on comics, publication and community that publishes on Tuesdays.

The Hurt That Heals

Update #1:  

Thinking about my 2015/2016 in terms of John Porcellino's "The Hospital Suite" gives me hope I can turn this thing around, yet.

Update #2:

In a long late night conversation with Mark Campos, we came up with the idea mining the wound hard enough for the art might just retrieve the bullet and allow you to heal.  And maybe the bullet is diamond pointe and maybe the wound shines like glass on a ruby lake.  

At least it only took 'em 1 try
(as apposed to 8, yes 8!) to set the IV this time

This week's blog is going to be short and....sweet?  Not so much, as I've been spending more time in hospitals that outside of them over the last couple of months and last week was no exception.

Lets start out with some of the good parts.

OK! OK! OK HOTEL!

Artist Jeff Milhalyo and Royal Room
co-owner Tia Matthies.

I wrote last week about my much-anticipated enjoyment of the OK Hotel Family Reunion.

Seattle's Royal Room, whose owners also ran the OK Hotel from 1987 - 2001, is a great venue.  The shows were perfectly booked, well attended and I sold a lot of my little illustrated histories of the venue.

I also got to acquire some art as well, in the form of a limited edition vintage calendar from back in the day, produced by the lovely and talented and full-hearted Jeff Milhalyo.

I attended 3 out of 4 of the nights before I fell ill again and was back in the hospital on Monday, just getting discharged this morning.

The Hurt that Heals.  If it doesn't kill 'ya.

Debbe Penne, whose death on the crash of Alaska Flight 261
is part inspiration for "Girl On The Road"

Don't get me wrong.  Art can be this amazing, joyful, fun activity that is a celebration of all good things.  But a lot of what I work with is dark material--things that have hurt me physically and/or emotionally in the past.  The graphic novel that I've working on is created from several of these incidents, and digging far enough into them to make a comprehensive, cathartic yet funny and page-turning story means feeling a lot of that hurt again.  

I'm starting to realize that the work going into the art is bigger than the art itself, and I'm going to need a lot of support around it.  It means building up this concept of self-care, which was completely foreign to me until I nearly killed myself from lack there-of.  And, of course, enjoying my friends who are still here.  I have this lovely creative community.  I may possibly be misguided by the notion that if you use art to cut deep enough into the wound, it might just heal you--and done well enough, heal others as well.  I have no proof of this hypothesis, but I'm working on it.