One of my favorite ongoing gigs in the world is providing artwork for the business classes given by my wife, Katie Lane.
Katie is an attorney who specializes in representing independent creators, and she also devotes a sizable chunk of her time to education – introducing current and future creative professionals to useful tools for tackling the uncreative side of the industry.
If you’re going to be talking to artists, you’d better have a compelling presentation! We’re storytellers by nature – you can’t just unload a wall of jargon-y bullet points in Times New Roman interspersed with a few pixelated stock photos and expect to blow us away.
Luckily for all of us, Katie’s a great storyteller too, and her presentations are full of relatable characters who walk (and stumble) through tricky but familiar business scenarios. And luckily for Katie, she’s married to an illustrator who loves envisioning some of these folks…
…(and getting to use her fun black/white/grey/orange color scheme).
So here are some of my favorites from one of her most recent online courses. If you’re a creative pro interested in buffing up your business skills, learning more about how contracts work, or making negotiations a little less stressful, I highly recommend Katie’s blog and Twitter feed!
Another month, another set of daily drawings! Here are some of my favorites from the last thirty days.
Sirin and Negret from Kate Milford’s lovely middle-grade novel Greenglass House.
From the latest edition of Publisher’s Weekly / Children’s Bookshelf, an exciting announcement!
You’ll be hearing and seeing plenty more about this in the months to come, but for now it’s exciting just to say in public that it’s happened! I love this story and the artistic challenge it represents for me, and I really look forward to speaking with a young audience. Thank you to Barry and to Susan for taking me up on it!
A few recent art of the day entries from September/October. It was a very busy month with lots of conferences, public appearances, family visits, and travel, so I was grateful to sneak in what doodles I could!
Most of my spare drawing time was devoted to Your Distant Homeland, my short story companion for Dave Kellett’s extraordinary space opera comic Drive. I kicked off a series of guest works that will be syndicated alongside the main story over the coming year. The final page goes live on the website later this week!
Here’s the first of the story’s 14 pages. Click to visit the Drive website to read it at full size!
I’ll be in Seattle this October 10-11 for two special events! First off, on Saturday the 10th, I’ll be attending the official launch party for Jason Bhlmahn’s new card game Pirate Loot, hosted at the fabulous Ballard game store Card Kingdom.
I drew or contributed to over 100 illustrations for this super-fun party game, so I’m very excited to see it in real life! The party starts at 1pm (Facebook event details here), and game designer Jason Bulmahn, graphic designer Mari Kolkowsky, and art director/illustrator Scott Kurtz will also be on hand. There will be pirate cake, copies of the game for sale, and all the usual amenities the Card Kingdom has to offer!
Then on Sunday the 11th, I’ll be emceeing the first Seattle version of the Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses (BAHFest) at Town Hall. Contestants compete by presenting patently ludicrous (yet strangely logical!) theories about Big Science, then the audience and judges confer on whose theory is most compellingly ridiculous. The keynote speech will be delivered by Matt Inman (creator of The Oatmeal). We expect a sell-out, so grab your tickets now!
