Hello dear reader,
I know it’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted in the blog and I’m just letting you know that I’ve decided to dust off the website crank and rev up my ol’ blog again.
A lot’s happened during the time the blog has been on hiatus (officially on hiatus since 2017). During this time I’ve gone from juggling working many different part-time jobs (retail, teaching, illustration, comics) to working full time as an artist (which still involves most of those things — but fortunately no more retail). I’ve co-founded and run an award-winning comics festival, assisted in running a zine fair, printed multiple mini-comics, run (what feels like) a million comics art workshops in schools and libraries, and attended two Comic Art Workshops (one in Indonesia and one on Dangar Island — which I mention specifically because of its cool name). I continued to play roller derby (I’ve been playing for more than 10 years now!) and eat pizza. There was a pandemic. I tried to learn skateboarding (still working on that one). I got an amazing agent who is helping rep me and my work. I moved out of the city and bought a house in the burbs with my partner (we have a huge backyard now, filled with plants and birds AND we have a room each for our studios). I have read a LOT of comics. And most excitingly (for me), my graphic-novel-in-progress, Oh Brother, was picked up by the publisher Penguin Random House!
(Ahhhhh!)<————— (combo excited and terrified scream.)
Since moving to full-time freelance last year and having the book picked up, I’ve been thinking about bringing back my blog, as I first started writing it when I began working on the Oh Brother project back in 2016. Originally it was to keep track of my progress on the book for a grant acquittal but it quickly became a nice way to reflect on what I was learning, celebrate the successes and help me to make sense of the quirks of long-form comics making.
At this stage I’m not sure exactly what form the new blog will take — there will definitely be posts about working on Oh Brother and making comics. But I also think I’ll post about what I’m reading/enjoying, ideas I have and other projects I’m working on. Some posts will be long and some will be short, there might be several posts in a week or none for a few weeks. I worry that if I set up a strict posting schedule that I will inevitably get busy and not be able to live up to my self-imposed perfectionist pressure and then not do anything at all (and feel terrible about it).
One thing I do know is that I want to slowly replace my social media presence (I really struggle with balancing social media & mental health) with my website. But at the moment social media is still a pretty necessary tool for me as a working artist. My current plan is post everything/most things to my blog and then cross post to instagram with a short caption and a prompt to check out the full thing on my website.
As I mentioned above, I’ve been wanting to start the blog up again for a while, but, you know, perfectionism. So instead of overthinking it (any more) and planning it to the nth degree, I’m just going to jump in, start her up and see how things go and let them develop naturally.
I hope you’re looking forward to coming along on this ride with me!
Gx
Following on from my last post about how the design of the characters in my graphic novel, Oh Brother, have changed over the 7-ish years I’ve been working on the book, this post is about my absolute favourite thing: drawing emotions!