DRAWING BOARD DIARY #2: "JOYRIDE!" Part 2

Tuesday, November 4, 2019 10:07 am

NOTE: Just a word of explanation here. This month I'm trying to focus on posting more on my various blogs and a lot of that effort is me trying to finish the numerous posts I've started earlier, either begun months or even years before. This is one such post.
Originally started back in June, it covers a number of topics I was preoccupied with back then, but eventually, we'll get back to where my head is now in November. Hope that makes this post more comprehensible... maybe?


Sunday, July 7, 2019  8:18 pm

...So, I'm trying to get my shit together as usual.
This post is pretty much a follow-up to this post, hence, "Part 2."

The main subject to these two posts is I'm just fucking trying to draw a comic book page. That's it.
I'm also trying to just get into a rhythm of drawing ANYTHING, too.
The last new thing I drew and finished, I think, was the movie poster to Rhonda and Mark Parker's* feature film, MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, back in August 2017. Actually, I'm amazed I pulled that artwork out of my ass; okay, I slightly missed the deadline originally established by Rhonda, but made their premiere deadline, at least.
But, I digress (as usual), dammit!

I want to draw a comic book page (or pages), now.

The first "Drawing Board Diary" (DBD) post talks about a couple ideas I had for a short story, but of course, I keep expanding on the ideas, my usual m.o.
Anyway, I'm still trying to settle on a story to do.
I also have this weird sci-fi thing called V IS FOR VOID I came up with, a sort of variation on another idea called SPACE JUNK. If anything, VOID is a re-iteration of JUNK, although JUNK was originally a single character idea with one or two peripheral characters, and VOID was focusing on a couple or at least two characters.
I think my problem is my lack of confidence to commit to an idea and just DO IT.

I also have a few unfinished drawings/and or ideas I'm thinking of finishing:

1. Gorilla Ranch Girls (GODLAND fan art)
2. Beatbox-ish fan art (mostly just a pig with a mohawk and funky glasses and then overly drawn out of desperation). Here's a really crappy picture of it so far:

3. Re-make of my one-page comic page story, "Karen's Dilemma"/INTERPLANETARY ROMANCES debut.
4. This drawing I JUST started a week or so ago in my sketch book, a woman holding a pig and...? It was something I was drawing but had no idea what I was doing. I then started thinking about it and came up with a name for the two characters, CRANBERRY AND CAMEMBERT, and they're encountering wild outer-space aliens: Truffids! Get it? Triffids + Truffles? Camembert's the pig. Pigs and truffles? Yeah? No? Er...

November 5, 11:26 am

And... we're back.
Yeah, so... I'm re-reading this stuff from about 5 months ago and basically, my mindset is always the same in that I'm thinking of a project to work with a certain amount of obsessive intensity and then, just as quickly, another idea comes along and I more or less abandon completely whatever it was I was so devoted to and preoccupied with for a short period of time (day, weekend, week, month(s)).
Besides these drawing projects, I also have notebooks that I accumulate, feverishly write in ideas for new projects, which I then inevitably forget just as impulsively and reflexively.

grrrrrr...

November 7, 2:28 pm

Well, I haven't done much of anything today. I start work at 4:00 pm today and this morning I had hoped of getting something done by way of household chores before work, but then I started watching TV while eating breakfast, then I fell asleep abit, but mostly I'm looking at the weather outside and we're having our first light, wet snow of the season and I'm, like, crap. I have to work in this stuff tonight? Guh. Just not in the mood, yet.
So, I really shouldn't be on the computer, either. But let me do a quick cut and paste here and then I'll move on.
I actually started another post as well a few months ago and I'm just going to add it to the end of this post because it's all about my art goals for the year. I actually made a list:

February 6, 2019

GOAL 1: Put together my drawing table.

GOAL 2: Finish my story for the Apple Corps Comic.

GOAL 3: Create a piece of merchandise for Society 6.

GOAL 4: Finish THE CAT'S MEOW.

GOAL 5: Finish SWAMP SQUAD OF THE DEAD.

GOAL 6: Illustrate Visual Encyclopedia for JOURNEY OF THE AVENGER.
Part 1: Do 10 illustrations.

GOAL 7: Update my Portfolio.

GOAL 8: Create a website for my work.
-Before I buy a domain, etc., I must have at least 10 individual cartoons of TABLE SCRAPS ready.


Thursday, August 8, 10:53 am

Okay, here's an update sports fans: I HAVEN'T DONE JACK SHIT ON ANYTHING YET.
And, that's still a good list, so I'm not going to amend anything.
Meanwhile, tomorrow is the beginning of the 2019 Buffalo 48 Hour film project and I'm heading up Team BM-VM's efforts to make an entry this year.
I still have a bunch of last minute preparations to address before tomorrow's start at 7:00 pm, but this is my game plan for the rest of August:

1. Aug 9-11: Focus on the Buffalo 48 Hour Film Project

2. Starting Aug. 12: Focus on drawing. Attempt to do a drawing a day (give or take). When I get to 10 drawings, re-assess my progress and speed.

3. Aug. 23-29: Enjoy the Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival.

So, the seven goals seem solid enough.
And as for my plans for August, well... I did #1 and #3.

I'm thinking of calling this month, #BetterNovemberThanNever, as a way to justify finishing up some artistic loose ends, like Inktober drawings, for instance.
NOTE: JOURNEY OF THE AVENGER is a sci-fi/adventure book that Sam Qualiana wrote and is currently re-writing. It's his first effort and he had compiled a reference of strange creatures and aliens that populate his novel, with drawings by him (and some by his brother) along with descriptions. I saw it and I thought I could do a better job of illustrating the creatures and he said sure, give it a shot. So, that's yet another project I impulsively forced myself upon.

Anyway, I should get going.
More later.

*local filmmaking pals of mine, writer/director and cinematographer/editor respectively.

P.S. BTW, I don't know what the (occasional) deal is with Blogger. Every now and then, I'll make corrections to a post and thoise corrections don't seem to stick. So, if you're wondering why sometimes font sizes don't seem to be consistent from one blog to the next, it's not intentional! I try to correct it and it seems to have gone through, but then when I look at the actual blog, it hasn't. No clue why. So, similarly, I tried to correct the colors of the font above where I list my art goals in February and then comment on it in August. I tried to make them all blue, but obviously, for some reason, Blogger has different color schemes in mind. Whatever.

DAY 19: UPDATE - Work and Art Project Status

When I got laid off Feb. 5, one of the things I wanted to do was kind of overhaul my blogs in an attempt to get back into some sort of regular posting. Seeing it's been two damn weeks since I last posted anything here, I can see it's easier said than done.
So, that's why I'm here now.

WORK UPDATE:
Actually, this is a good day to post a work update because... I'm going back to work tomorrow!
I got a call last week from one of the managers in the Distribution Dept. where I used to work. I got laid off from our Maintenance Dept. Well, some of the personnel and hour cuts I knew were going to happen after I got laid off (conceptually speaking, I didn't know who was actually going to be cut) finally happened in Distribution. Two people were laid off outright, and at least a couple positions were cut down from full-time to part-time (2 days = 16 hours). Well, one of the guys who got cut to 16 hours decided to just leave, that part-time wasn't going to work for him. So, that's why they called me, to see if I was interested in working only part-time. In my case I was, but my situation was different than the other dude's. Part of me was interested in trying to make money creatively via freelance/self-employment, although you wouldn't know it by anything I've done since being laid off, other than cleaning up some blog infrastructure among my three Blogger blogs and posting a couple times here. But, I still am interested in trying to pursue that avenue. However, the possibility of having some stable source of income was very attractive compared to having zero income, so I said yes. So, I'm going back to my old company, but I'm working part-time and in a different department. Meanwhile, I have also filed for unemployment and will be theoretically collecting a portion of that as well.

ART UPDATE:
Meanwhile, as I described in a previous post, I hoped to create a mini-comic as one of my first art projects. Thus, in typical Kimmel fashion, I'm not focused on working on one story but I'm actually juggling two different comic stories. In addition, part of me wants to publish these stories in a mini-comic format, but part of me also wants to send it to Ka-Blam Digital Publishing so I can hold a genuine comic book in my hands that I can say I created.
Ugh! I can't fucking decide! (what else is new)
Which is also why I'm working on two stories.

FIRST: There's one very strange story that I'm doing for a comic book title I'm impulsively calling:
A FISTFUL OF THIS!
I've been toying with this story for the last month (or two-- hell, maybe longer! Time has no meaning for me, even when I was working full-time, but even moreso now...). It seems to be a pseudo-Superman parody but then it goes... elsewhere. Originally I was thinking it was going to be a one-off sort of deal-- my attempt to just crap out an 8 page mini-comic and get that off my back. But as usual, once I started thinking about it, I could see how I'd be able to continue the story into a series or even a multiple series. And that notion segued into me remembering Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown's YUMMY FUR. YUMMY FUR was this very strange 80s comic of odd tales that after a couple issues, the tales started connecting into a more deliberately longer and continuous narrative which became ED THE HAPPY CLOWN (and if you're unfamiliar with this book, believe me, the adjective "happy" is ironic). Stories that originally seemed to stand alone in early issues of Brown's comic as short, absurd, non-sequitor sort of ridiculous things (such as "The Man Who Couldn't Stop" where a man is shown sitting on a toilet, and then after a few panels of the same image he finally thinks, "I don't seem to be stopping.") started to actually be part of the narrative continuity of the other stories. Until, soon, each issue was focused on telling this bizarre story with Ed as one of the main characters. So, with that thought in mind, I'm toying with using this first FISTFUL story as a springboard into other tales. I guess I'm envisioning FISTFUL as a loose anthology of strangely related tales, for lack of a better term.
Meanwhile, a few days ago another artist friend of mine linked me to one of the products she was selling on Society 6, a website I was unfamiliar with. I had heard of the online Etsy store, and I actually thought she was selling stuff through there, but I guess I was wrong. Anyway, I took a look at some of the things she was selling and, looking to support her, I decided to sign up to the site as well and then "like" her various designs. Check them out yourself (she goes by Lady Tanya Bleudragon). I like this design in particular.

SECOND: After looking at the S6 site and signing on, I wondered about submitting a design myself. My first idea was to use something old, something I've already done, simply to expedite things. I started considering comics or illustrations for concepts I originally began in college. I went to Buff State (Buffalo State College, part of the SUNY system), and although I never finished my degree, one of the great experiences I had was working on the Buffalo State RECORD, the school newspaper, for a couple years. The last year I was there I was Co-Graphics Editor with Joe Wocjik. Anyway, there was this weird sci-fi romance parody I had done to fill up a big space on the comic page one day and it was a personal artistic highpoint for me, not only in terms of creative accomplishment but also because I finished it in time for the deadline. It worked on it 11 hours straight from blank page to finished product. Yeah, I was a totally different person back then!
Getting back to this Society 6 site and coming up with design ideas to sell, the idea of selling T-shirts with my comic designs has been very seductive to me as a goal for a while. What the hell. I'm going to give it a shot. You get a small commission for everything you sell, but you don't have to create the products ahead of time, the site creates the products (art prints, T-shirts, tote bags, etc.). They're the investor.  So, I'm going to do a re-make of this one page comic story and try to make a T-shirt design out of it.
The initial idea is to do a full 10 x 15 page of the comic artwork that stands on its own story-wise. The original story was a square image because that was the space I had to fill for the paper. Here it is:

Photocopied from the Buffalo State College RECORD circa... uh... early 80s, maybe 1983? The direct inspiration for this comic was there was an unexpected snowstorm in early spring that year, and while I was home (snow day!), all I did was read my Silver Age FANTASTIC FOUR issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I was so energized by reading them that it directly led to me creating this comic story at a single sitting when the opportunity presented itself. Okay, the same day deadline I had bearing down on me also forced me to finish in a single sitting as well.

My decision to remake this story as a T-shirt design was also inspired by a few favorite T-shirts I own. One is an off-white T-shirt that I got from Walmart which has great B&W line art by Leinil Yu depicting a visually busy collection of various Marvel heroes engaged in battle, with Spider-man in the center. Also, I have this amazing Paul Pope shirt that has various panels of his artwork on the front and a single character drawing on the back. So, with these brilliant examples guiding me, I'm plunging into this damn enterprise.
Right now, I'm in the re-writing stage of remaking the above little comic story. The title's already been changed from KAREN'S DILEMMA to PATSY'S PASSIONATE PREDICAMENT and I'm creating a "host" character to introduce the story, a la the Cryptkeeper, etc. Part of this overhaul is to improve/update the artwork. Plus, fix up the writing. Like, make the Victorian romance elements in the story a little more obvious (or actually existent), and especially strengthen the end of the story which shouldn't be hard because it's ridiculously inane. Even from the viewpoint of using absurdity as a means to getting a laugh -- the ending is rather stupid and disposable.
Also I'm trying to think/develop other possibilities for designs/self-marketing, like using this host character as a mascot in at least a couple ways: 1) as a recognizable character from an anticipated portfolio of my work; and 2) to also promote the possible existence of an infrequently published series of a space romance comics anthology, which may or may not still be called INTERPLANETARY ROMANCES. I keep going back and forth as to how good or bad a title that is. "Interplanetary" seems like a big, clunky word, but I don't know. Big and clunky is part of my verbose charm...
Meanwhile, in the original comic (above), the story is presented as the concluding segment, but I only did this one installment. For the remake I intend to make the story complete (beginning, middle and end) but if that's the case, I really won't be able to contain it on one page. From a comic book story perspective, multiple pages is fine. From a T-shirt perspective, well, no. But, I think I can work with that, too. Once it's done, I'm thinking I'll just "cut up" the various panels and make a 10 x 15 collage of the story with perhaps the coolest images, etc, in the mix. And maybe I'll draw a new image of the hostess character to superimpose over the whole collage and that might make a cool T-shirt design. So, I got some ideas here...

All I need to freaking do is clear off my drawing table, be able to WALK comfortably in my "workroom" to get to my drawing table, and start drawing.

*takes deep breath*

BUT, I'm going to eat something first.