bravesailor

For me as a freelance illustrator/cartoonist, every day brings it’s own particular delights and dissapointments. Here’s a look at one of my usual days in my studio, aka THE EPIC COMMAND CENTER!

8:20  - I’ve had my eggs and kimchi and it’s off (about 15 feet off) to the studio where I put in about half an hour of drawing in my sketchbook to warm up my brain for the day.

8:50 I sit down at my computer to finish my last character sketch for a book project I’m working on. For some reason this little guy has been particularly tricky.

10:15 I’m satisfied with my work on Little Ghost, so it’s time to move on to the rough draft of the  proposal I’m putting together. For the moment, I’m spending a lot of time writing. Depending on my mood, my writing tends to be either vague and muddy or warm and full of charm. Today, I’m somewhere inbetween, maybe warm and muddy.

1 pm Time for a LUNCH BREAK and I really take a whole hour to make a swamp slime smoothie and watch an old episode of Chopped, which I find strangely mesmerizing. Refueled for the day.

2 pm Email! Update Tumblr! What’s happening on Facebook?

2:20 Back to the proposal. Compile, make notes, move things around. Add sketches where final images will be.

5:20 The Gym. Where I run 3.5 miles! Getting close to my goal. Then dinner and coconut milk ice-cream. mmmmm . . .

7:40 Now it’s time to shake my money maker – I mean, do some commissioned work for which I get paid. Finishing up the pencils.

10 pm It’s time for my daily phone call with accountability buddy Katherine Roy, where we spend some time talking about what we’re working on (she’s the rock star of children’s book illustration!) and a little time just goofing around.

10:30 Time to ink!

12:00 pm Quitting time. And it’s off to bed after reading a story from Karen Russel’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

12:40 Pass Out. THE END

For the last two years I’ve been doing a regular cartoon for King Arthur Flour’s Baking Sheet.

The thing that gets me fired up about making the gags, is that the process takes me out of my usual work mode and into a silly-problem solving frame of mind. After I’ve made some initial sketches, I think, “What would the gag be like if I turned everything upside down? Or what would happen if aliens were really fond of pop-overs?”

As Robert Mankoff (cartoon editor of the New Yorker) says about how to make a great gag, “There really is no trick—you just have to think of them.” And generally thinking about cartoons leads to making a lot stinkers in additions to making a few great cartoons.

That means, while I’ve made quite a few great gags that been printed in glorious ink. I’ve also amassed quite a few rejects. Some sketches just aren’t funny, some are unfinished, and some just aren’t a good fit for the brand.

Here are a few cartoons that didn’t make the cut for one reason or another, that I happen to be fond of.

I like to draw skeletons and ghosts, all manner of dark twisty things.

These are sketches of tunnels and the underground lair of the Necromancer Nikola and his half-dead son Modie. It’s not the most pleasant smelling of places, and certainly not the cleanest, but it is their bone and coffin filled home.

What I haven’t figure out yet is what Modie plays with. What kind of toy’s do you buy a nine year old boy who is half corpse ? Do you get him a vampire dinosaur? Robot zombies? A mummy ninja? What a perplexing quandary. His poor father must have the worst time with birthdays.

This is Modie. He says hello.

It’s my last live model session for a while, just as I was getting warmed up. This week, costumes! Which made drawing the model extra fun.

I’ve been reading from The Agony and the  Exstacy by Irving Stone, a novelized version of the life of Michelangelo Bunarroti. There’s a lot I can say about the purpleness of the prose, but all the art history crammed in it, makes it an indulgent read for an art-history nerd like me. While drawing in a session with a live model this week I thought about the renaisance artists and their passion for the human form. Guys like Michelangelo and Da Vinci were passionate enough about getting anatomy right that they stole dead bodies to dissect them against the treat of being excommunicated or damned.

I haven’t gone as far as dissecting cadavers, but this sure is fun.

Here is my latest cartoon for King Arthur Flour’s Baking Sheet. Pretty delicious!