Trying to make my studio a more amiable place to work in prep for a very crazy new year. Getting distracted by the stuff I’m supposed to be throwing away. Made this collage.

Sometimes I wish I was a collage artist. It’s so immediate and direct. I was very into this sort of thing when I was a high-school student, when I discovered the Dadaists and this book of Surrealist games.

As seen in front of my apartment. Brooklyn, NY.

I’m reading a really great book now, called Galore, by Michael Crummey. It’s a folkloric story that takes place in Newfoundland. Listen, I don’t usually do extracurricular book illustrations, but I love mythological settings with rituals and witches and bad teeth…

OH! And speaking of Newfoundland, if you’re in Toronto you must see the David Blackwood exhibit at the AGO. Even ol’ Skeptical Sam was blown away.

(In case you’re interested: from Publisher’s Weekly: Starred Review. Crummey (River Thieves) returns readers to historic Newfoundland in his mythic and gorgeous latest, set over the course of a century in the life of a hardscrabble fishing community. After a lean early-19th-century winter, a whale beaches itself and everyone in town gathers to help with the slaughter. But when a woman known only as Devine’s Widow—when she’s not called an outright witch—cuts into the belly, the body of an albino man slides out. He eventually revives, turns out to be a mute, and is dubbed Judah by the locals. Judah’s mystery—is his appearance responsible for the great fishing season that follows?—is only one among many in this wild place, where the people are afflicted by ghosts and curses as much as cold and hunger. Crummey’s survey eventually telescopes to the early 20th century, when Judah’s pale great-grandson, Abel, sequesters himself amid medical debris in an old hospital where his opera singer cousin, Esther Newman, has returned and resolved to drink herself to death. But before she does so, she shares with him the family history he never knew. Crummey lovingly carves out the privation and inner intricacies that mark his characters’ lives with folkloric embellishments and the precision of the finest scrimshaw. (Apr.) )

This man won the St. Patrick’s Day dress-up challenge, in my book.
Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

I haven’t been posting too much sketchbook stuff in here lately. It’s because I’ve been working like a crazyperson trying to finish up some big book illustration projects that hopefully I’ll be able to share soon.

I gave a talk at Parsons last week. There was a theme that kept on coming up (maybe it’s just on my mind): Faith. Not the religious kind, but rather how a life in the Arts demands quite a bit of it. Following a life in the Arts is a leap of Faith ALWAYS. No matter if you tackle the freelance life when you first get out of school, or are transitioning from a day job or whatever. There are no guarantees that your work will connect with anyone, or that you’ll make a living from it. Or, for someone in my position, a little more established, that you’ll be doing this in 40 years’ time. (It’s for this reason that I have infinite respect for those illustrators have been doing this for a lifetime, REGARDLESS of whether I personally like their work or not.)

You can only task yourself with creating good, honest work, because that’s one of the few aspects of all of this one can actually control. In fact, “creating good, honest work” is the meat of it. The life-long labor that is difficult and sometimes not fun, but a mysterious compulsion. The rest of it is a semi-delusional Faith in the Universe that it things will work out; that you’ll be able to feed yourself, shower regularly, take a vacation, not feel the need to stick your head in an oven.

1. The Studio will be closed (again!) from Nov 25- Dec 2nd. I will be checking email though.

2. The Comics Journal offers an interesting analysis of SKIM.

3. I designed these tees for Desert Island comic shop! They’ll be available at the BCGF! Which I will be attending. I will be signing at the D&Q table on Saturday, 6-8. Info in link.

4. A big thank-you to Craft Goddess Jenny Hart at Sublime Stitching, who mentioned my Monster Quilt on her blog today. Fun fact: it was one of Jenny’s starter kits that actually eased me into embroidery. Tiny world.

5. Math is hard. I’m taking a quilting class…. and it turns out quilting is a little more than just picking out delightful fabrics and happily humming along with your sewing machine? But I persevere. I will show you the results in a few weeks. Respect to the little old ladies, y’all.