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.

This is actually a killed cover. I threw in some extra bits from my old sketchbooks to fill in the space left by the type, etc. You might recognize some of these kids.

Click to enlarge.

“He was a hard-working, capable man who did not drink and was not without a certain fancy and feeling for the form, but was nevertheless an atrocious tailor. His work was ruined by hesitation. The idea that his cut was not fashionable enough made him alter everything half a dozen times, walk all the way to town simply to study the dandies, and in the end dress us in suits that even a caricaturist would have called outré and grotesque.” -Anton Chekov, The Privy Councilor, 1886