Other Projects

One of my new year’s resolutions for 2006 was to make time to work on creative projects other than my comics… I often feel the need to spend every possible creative moment of my time on Friends. So with that goal in mine, I have a couple of new projects to try out:

I love stationery and letter-writing materials of all sorts, so I am going to try and make a new stationery design every month for the rest of the year… it’s really nice to be working on something that isn’t trying to have some depth of feeling or meaning to it; it’s just cute! I am going to be posting my new designs on Etsy where the hand-made stationery lovers of the world can purchase it (I will also have my comics up, for good measure). My first design, “Snail Mail”, is up now:

I really love watercolors, but I’ve never really been able to tackle it in the past, the slipperiness of the medium just threw me for a loop… but bolstered by what I felt has been an increasing versatility in my ink wash illustration I’ve decided to give it another go. Since I first moved to San Francisco I’ve wanted to do a series of illustrations “36 Views of Sutro Tower,” (inspired, of course, by the incomparable Hokusai) as I’ve often been struck by how often that ubiquitous landmark will pop into view behind various everyday scenes here… A restful (yet unnatural!) background presence underscoring and countering what is going on in the foreground view. I have decided to combine these projects, so hopefully I will be able to improve my technique quite a bit between View One and View Thirty-Six… Here is my first try, as well as another, separate sketch (the Tower wasn’t visible that day!). I will post these as I go, which will hopefully keep me on task…

As a side note, lately I’ve been reading the collected Concrete by Paul Chadwick… very good and inspiring, I remember really liking his work when I would see it back in the day (as a teenager I loved a lot of the stuff that Dark Horse was putting out), but my appreciation for him has really grown now that I am trying to craft my own comics and stories. Mr. Chadwick is very good at interweaving the “big themes” he wants to touch on into the minutiae of Concrete’s (rather unusual!) daily life. You get the sense that he definitely knows where this is all going (Chadwick, that is, rather than poor, befuddled Concrete!) and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the story unfurl over time.