Found myself creating an alternate version of yesterday's piece today.

My RSS fetcher (Newsflow) was overflowing with too many unread posts (600+), so I spent a bit of the morning skimming through 100+ posts until I decided it's okay to obliterate all the rest and start fresh. Every once in a while I get into the habit of developing The Fear [of missing out], but then remind myself that it's okay to not keep up with all the things and just limit to the input my lifestyle's bandwidth can handle. Just as we gotta be realistic about our output, it's not a bad idea to be realistic about our input (and hey, maybe that'll give us more time for more output 😁). Removed a few feeds and unsubscribed from a few newsletters to bring it down to a manageable input flow.

Today is farmshare day where we pick up a box of fresh veg before venturing to the supermarket for kitchen staples. Papertowels and handsoap were still nowhere to be found last week.

There should be enough time to fiddle with a TSG page which I estimate will be finished by tomorrow.

It is a steamy 29C/85F today and very oppressively humid. Inbox down to 2, iced coffee keeping my brain in operation. No coconut oil in this one (it would solidify). Instead, a spoonful of coconut sugar, which I'm told is even healthier than the raw turbinado stuff.

#Journal #Work

What can I say? I've never been particularly good at escapism.

This is one of those things that came to me and I just had to immediately get out of my system in absolute heat.

Available from Garage.Ganzeer, by the way. Limited to 100.

#work

I lied; I couldn't let it go. Cut out the two figures that were bothering me the most and I think the page is now much better. Will probably redraw them and paste directly onto the original pages (because I hate having sub-par originals).

Tried the thing I wanted to do with the gutters and I think it works (Although, what is included right now is just some preliminary text for a quick mockup, just to get a sense of the look of the thing). You get a real train-of-thought vibe, like this character's mind is really at work and he just can't shut it off.

My initial idea was to have it all handwritten instead of typed, like such:

Looking at both of them now though, I can't quite decide which one I like better.

#Work #TheSolarGrid #MakingComix

Not the best to be honest, but it's one page in a 400+ page book, so I may have to learn to live with it.

There's an exhausting idea I'd like to try out with the gutters, but that may have to wait till Monday. A bunch of house-maintenance stuff to do this weekend.

#Work #TheSolarGrid #MakingComix

Coffee is shaken, not stirred. That's what creates the foamy top, together with a tablespoon of coconut oil and a dash of goat's milk (I used to take my coffee extra sweet for years, but I've been off sugar for two months now and the coconut oil—although nowhere nearly as sweet as sugar—cuts through the bitterness some).

It's time to ink today. For which I'll be using a series 795 Round Loew-Cornell #2 brush for the first time (I usually use Trekell's Kolinsky Sable Round 7000 series in a size #3 for brush work, Zebra's G nib for, uh, nib work, and Staedtler pigment liners—mostly 0.3 and 0.1—for straightforward “cleanline” styles).

(Which should not be confused with the European “Ligne Claire” approach, which still offers a degree of line-weight variation. That's what the Loew-Cornell is for, it's what Chris Ware uses. The Kolinsky #3 is what Eisner used, and offers thicker strokes. G Nibs are used by Naoki Urasawa (I think?), and pigment liners are used by Mignola.)

Excited to see what the Loew-Cornell will do.

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My good friends at the Boulder Weekly have decided to publish my demented vision of the future and use my art on their cover this week.

Still working on that cursed “isometric” page in THE SOLAR GRID. It's coming along rather well (albeit a little slower than a “standard” comix pages).

Elsewhere in the back of my mind, I'm thinking of the weird surrealist art that used to adorn many science fiction paperbacks of the 60's and 70's, and that maybe, just maaaaaybe... I might like to do something along those lines for THE SOLAR GRID once complete and collected.

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Not a good day for migraines, not when I'm drawing something that requires a high degree of precision.

This kind of isometric perspective that is typical in the work of Chris Ware doesn't come naturally to me, mainly because... well, I hate rulers. Not as much as, say, Paul Pope (who draws buildings and stairwells and cars with the same organic brush-strokey energy seen in his figures), but still; this kind of approach is all rulers.

To be fair, a facet of all my work is probably the tension between “accuracy” and its complete opposite.

Good things can come out of migraines btw. There's this page in Chapter 1 that I distinctly recall being hit with a migraine attack the day I was working on it.

In fact, that particular page wasn't even planned at all. I only included it because of the attack. And it's probably the only bit in the entire chapter infused with a degree of humor. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I was living in LA at the time, which, shit already feels like a lifetime ago.

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Yes, I finally introduce the aliens.

Not sure anyone reading THE SOLAR GRID was expecting aliens.

It is 9:43 am in Houston and I've been up for at least 6 hours. Two-three of which I spent trying and failing to fall back asleep. My mind is awake, but my bodily functions are very much dead. Today will be a sluggish day at the drawing table.

Still, I am foolishly determined to finish a full page of comix today, inking and all.

The air is pleasantly cool and the blue jays populating the palm trees outside do not sound as pretty as they look.

The spread above is from my sketchbook where I've revisited the design of the alien(s) I'm about to introduce in the actual comix pages. If you look very closely at the page on the right hand side, you can probably make out some of the alphabet I devised for their language.

Don't really have the headspace to figure out how to develop it into a font, so will have to hand letter that shit.

Lovely.

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Quick housekeeping update:

Newsletter went out late last night, and my inbox is down to 34. I should manage to bring it down to zero by tomorrow. Ganzeer.com has been updated with the handful of things I unleashed in 2020.

I also removed all the widgets I had on the front page for Twitter, Instagram, and this here blog because the way they were embedding wasn't ideal and I wasted too many hours trying to make it better. Figured I can settle for just links without agonizing too much about it.

Cleaned around the garage a bit too. The coming week should be good.

#journal #work

In an effort to provide reading material to English-language readers living through self-isolation, the fine folks at Oh Nothing Press have made the first issue of CREEPER MAGAZINE available for free digital download.

Within its pages lies weird crime, bizarre philosophies, and genre-exploding fiction by an array of colorful individuals such as: Helena Papageorgiou, Elytron Frass, Sean Oscar, Tom Syverson, Sophie Sauzier, M1k3y, Ben Nichols, Jon Weber, Ben Mcleay, Benoît Debuisser, I. Caniveau, Murdoch Stafford, Lachlan Barker, Bart Kelly, J Clement, Corey J. White, myself and many others. Enjoy.

#work