It’s Never To Late To Change Direction
This coming Saturday, I’m running. I used to proudly proclaim that I only run when being chased, but that changed earlier this year for two reasons.
Archive for the ‘news’ category
Wisconsin Vacation Sketches
This past weekend, I took a much-needed three-day vacation to Wisconsin. My last vacation was my trip to Panama three years ago. And I don’t mean that was the last time I went somewhere cool, I mean it was the last time I had an extended period of time not doing work. I need to do get away more often!
These are the three sketches I managed to churn out in that time. I wish I’d had time to do more drawing, but considering I haven’t had the time to do any drawing for myself most of this year, I count these three pages as a victory nonetheless! I truly believe that an artist needs to create for themselves just like an athlete needs to continually workout to be in top shape. A year from now, my goal is to have my business (and clients) organized in such a way that I can spend several mornings a week sketching for myself as a warmup, and produce something for myself at least every other week.
While I was in Wisconsin, I stopped by Arcadia Books in Spring Green, which is owned by James Bohnen, the retired artistic director of one of my clients, Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. Lisa and I hug out with him over the weekend and saw the show he directed at American Players Theatre. While at the bookstore, I picked up Scottie Young‘s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which I’ve been craving for some time, and French Milk, a diary comic/sketchbook/travelogue from cartoonist Lucy Knisley, whose work I now realize I’ve seen before, and who only days ago moved away from Chicago to live in New York. I recommend checking out both.
HOW Design Conference
This weekend is the HOW Design Live Conference, which is located in downtown Chicago this year. It’s a massive event created by HOW Magazine which encompasses four sub-conferences: HOW Design, which is kind of the general design conference; InHOWse Managers, which is for designers and managers who work within a company; Creative Freelancer, which is for those of us that work for ourselves; and Dieline Package Design, which is what it sounds like. The full conference is quite pricey, so I opted to just attend the Creative Freelancer conference, which runs Thursday and Friday.
If you want to keep up with what I’m experiencing while there, point your Twitter feed to #c_riff. I’ll be dropping observations both days, and have a big post about it on Monday. If you happen to be in the area as well, drop me a line!
Return of the Blog!!
It’s been a long long time coming, but the GrabBagComics redesign HAS FINALLY ARRIVED! After I had to move the blog from Blogger to WordPress, I never had the time to devote to learning the ins and outs of WordPress, and the functionality of the site suffered. But now I finally took the time to learn how WordPress works and learn enough PHP coding to be dangerous, and here are the fruits of my labor. If you find anything that doesn’t work, let me know, cuz I wanna keep this thing shiny.
A few caveats: I haven’t touched the Dumbstruck archives… yet. As I work on fleshing those out and continue working on compilation books, I’ll be restructuring all of that, but it will happen over time. A bunch of older Dumbstruck posts are missing images because I moved a directory around a year or so ago, and I’m not burning to fix all that soon. Sorry. Also, this site doesn’t look good in Internet Explorer 7 or earlier. I could make make the necessary adjustments, but my time is better spent. If you don’t have at least IE8, I’m sorry, but, deal with it.
Finally, I’m happy to say that I will be posting here no less than twice a week. Sometimes it will be projects that I’ve recently finished, sometimes it will be new Dumbstruck comics, sometimes it will sketchbook drawings, sometimes even design tutorials. I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff and trying to stretch myself artistically more than I have in the past few years, so stick around and tell me what you like and what you don’t. And thanks for checking this out!
And now, without further blather, COMICS WOOOHOOOOO!!
Fair warning
I’ll be out of town for much of the week, so updates may be sporadic, but I’ll try and have at least one comic for you before the end of the week, as well as this week’s tattoo promo.
