Greetings, friends! I’ve got a new comic in the world!
There’s a lot of talk about Wonder Woman in the world right now, thanks to the new film about her opening this weekend, but who is she really? You can head over to The Nib today to read all about her history as a feminist icon, patriotic symbol, and modern warrior thanks to writer Sarah Mirk, colorist Joey Weiser, and myself! I’m really pleased with the final result of our efforts.
If you dig these comics, you can keep ’em coming by supporting my work on Patreon. (And biggest thanks to those of you who do so already!)
This is my seventh year doing Hourly Comic Day, and it’s really such a delightful thing. For those that aren’t familiar: it’s a global art project where folks draw a panel for every hour they’re awake on February 1st. It’s a wonderful way to discover new artists, take a look at what everyone’s up to, and chronicle a day out of each year. This year I just happened to be wrapping up a couple weeks in Hawai’i, so there’s a bunch of tropical escapades in here.
You can read the whole comic over here on Medium. I love having these annual visual check-ins that remind me of where I’ve been every February since I was a junior in college—especially if this tropical trend continues. Wonder where I’ll be in 2018…
Did any of you participate? I try not to read people’s till I’ve posted my own, since it wigs me out and I get self-conscious, but now I am FREEEEEE. Link me to your entries in the comments or on Twitter.
It’s been a busy week here on the island of O‘ahu. After completing our three-week ocean crossing aboard R/V Falkor last Monday at 8:30am, the ship immediately went into prep mode for a host of different events to help promote the results of our cruise. Chief among these was getting the gallery show at The ARTS at Marks Garage open, which meant getting my land legs back as quick as I could in order to hang all my completed pages from the comic I’d just drawn at sea.
The opening party on Friday night was a truly fantastic time, and I’m so grateful to everyone who came out. It was also Chinese New Year, so we had a visit from some dragons!
Photo: SOI
If you happen to be in Honolulu, the show is up through February 3rd, and features all the original artwork from my comic and work from all the other Artist-at-Sea participants from the last three years. There’s painting, animation, fiber arts, music, and (my personal favorite) A KNOT BOARD MADE OF ETHERNET CABLE.
Ethernet Knotboard by Lead Technician Colleen Peters (who supported Baggywrinkles on Kickstarter and led to my joining Falkor in the first place!)
My inner fancywork nerd is screaming with glee.
SO: now that all that’s over, and I’ve taught a variety of classes to high schoolers and kindergarteners at local schools, it’s time to release the finished comic online. CUE TRUMPETS:
You can read the entire comic and learn all about multibeam mapping right here, and the PDF is free to download on Gumroad (just enter $0 at checkout and you’ll be able to download it without paying a dime). In keeping with Schmidt Ocean Institute’s open sharing of information policy, the comic is licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial/Attribution, so you can print it, color it, share it—whatever you want, as long as you aren’t turning a profit and you provide credit to the original source.
Physical copies of the comic will be available in the next few months. If you’d like to be first in line to know when that happens, you can sign up for my email list here (I send out updates once a month).
Thanks, as always, to my stalwart supporters on Patreon, who directly enable me to take these trips and bring back educational comics for you all to read and enjoy.
This trip with OHP was a great opportunity to refine my practice of joining organizations as an embedded cartoonist, merging the duties of a deckhand (line handling, climbing aloft, maintenance, etc.), educator (teaching classes on scurvy and nautical trivia with Baggywrinkles as my de facto textbook), and artist (frantically sketching the students and their activities at every turn). Each trip I take I feel like I’m getting a better handle on this format, and how best to adapt it to different kinds of experiences.
You can read the whole comic online right here, or purchase a copy in print via my store.
While I completed all the artwork during my time aboard, getting the scanning, cleanup, and formatting squared away in-between all my traveling from August to November proved tricky, hence the lengthy lagtime. I’m thrilled to finally have it all put together. Here’s a look at the trip in photos:
The Oliver Hazard Perry is America’s newest sail training vessel. You can learn more about her and her programs at OHPRI.org.
Big thanks to my supporters on Patreon for making this comic possible! If you want to join them and get a behind-the-scenes look at these pieces as they come together, head on over here.
I had a ton of fun wrapping up these watercolor paintings for my top-tier backers on the Baggywrinkles Kickstarter last week. Here’s a look at the final lineup of paintings:
Clockwise from upper left, we’ve got El Galeon (hiding behind PDX YAR’s First Mate), L’Hermione, Brig Niagara, and Kalmar Nyckel (in disguise under a different paint job, for reasons outlined in this Tumblr post).
In the process of getting all of these done, I learned a bunch about making time-lapse videos, which you can check out below:
I put up an informative essay each month about some aspect of my creative process, along with a load of other content for folks to read/watch/listen to/generally enjoy. I serious adore Patreon as a platform for making more of this work possible, so if you haven’t already checked it out, go take a peek! (There’s a lot of free stuff there, too, if you don’t want to commit to chucking some money my way each month.)
Fittingly, I’m writing this blog post from the deck of the Oliver Hazard Perry, a new tall ship in Rhode Island that I’m currently working aboard as a visiting artist. But that’s secondary to the following exciting news of the day: I’ve got a new comic up on The Nib!
For the last few months I’ve been researching and illustrating this brief introduction to the modern world of sail cargo—a movement driven by environmentalism, optimism, and countless volunteer hours. There are a surprising number of operations around the world working to convert tall ships into viable cargo-carrying vessels—or build new ones from the ground up.
It’s a trend I find deeply fascinating, and my only regret was not being able to fit more of my research into this introduction. The sailors working on these vessels are the embodiment of enthusiasm and dedication, and I really enjoyed talking with them during my research.
Of particular interest right now: Sailcargo Inc. are launching their Kickstarter to build a dedicated cargo vessel (Ceiba) from scratch in Costa Rica! Keep an eye on their website for details on the launch.
Fairtransport are also making great strides in building a coalition of sail cargo vessels around the world. Their website has a wealth of information, including vessel tracking and more. View all the ships in their network here.
Brigantine Tres Hombres, Photo Credit Hajo Olij
Of course there are also efforts being made to implement modern sailing technology on existing container ships at a grander scale. To learn more about the DynaRig technology behind parts of that movement, check out this article. There’s some fascinating stuff afoot, and even though it’s moving slowly, progress is being made.
I’ll have more news after my week aboard the Perry, but until then, enjoy the comic!
As you may’ve noticed, I’ve spent the last three(ish) months working on The 100 Day Project, a creative game of sorts where participants try to create something every day for 100 days. I chose to illustrate meaningful objects from my life with little vignettes of text.
The final collection, A Life in Objects, is now up for sale! I’m printing a facsimile edition in three, 40-page pocket notebooks—the same size as the originals (3.5×5″)—with a fancy belly band.
The books will be printed locally in Portland at Eberhardt Press, and I’m hoping to debut them at SPX in September.
If you absolutely can’t wait to read the whole thing, why not buy the PDF edition on Gumroad? I promise it’s got all the same treats inside.
I’m incredibly proud of how this collection came out. More news to come once the printed books are on their way!
If all this Baggywrinkles news has you itching to read the book before it officially hits shelves on September 9th, I have excellent news: the book is now available on ComiXology!
Big thanks to the team at ComiXology Submit for getting the book up and running on the site, and for giving it pride of place in the Indie New Releases section. We also got a lovely shout-out on Dave Carter’s Digital Comics Picks of the Week feature, alongside fabulous titles like Lumberjanes, Island, The Fix, and Howard the Duck! Thanks, Dave.
Something a little different today: a process GIF from a recent illustration commission! This cat portrait was done start-to-finish in Manga Studio with Frenden’s blue pencil and Hairpin Sable inker brushes.
You notice how the cat really comes alive in that last frame when the white highlights in the eyes come into play? Every time I add those to a piece I get this really vivid memory of going to art classes as a kid.
My teacher’s name was Sharon Butler. She was a realist painter from South Africa who painted waist-high stones to look like living cheetahs, crouching in the greenery outside the studio. The two rooms in her establishment were filled with the perpetual, chalky scent of pastels and Prismacolor pencils. We’d get pieces of illustration board handed out every time a new project began, cut down to the appropriate size. I completely lost track of time every session I spent there. My only job was drawing, as well as I could.
This was pre-internet, so Sharon kept a morgue file in the inner room. It was a metal filing cabinet—dull beige and taller than I was at the time—crammed full of photos and magazine clippings. There were folders for horses and dolphins and birds and architecture and chairs and people and costumes. Every manilla folder had a grouping by subject, and since Google simply wasn’t around yet we’d fight over who got the best picture of the dolphin to draw from.
I drew a lot of animals when I went to those classes with Sharon. She’d stop by while I was struggling to render a hummingbird as something other than a crude cartoon, giving suggestions on how I could better train my eye to see what was actually in front of me. The second-to-last touch, before the fixative stopped our pastel smudges from scattering off the page, was to add a dot of white in each eye. She taught us to use a Q-Tip or the back end of a paintbrush.
At the time it felt like wizardry—the amount of life that tiny dot of white could bring to an otherwise flat animal.
Those of you following me on social media may’ve noticed a new series of drawings going up over the last couple weeks! I’m participating in The 100 Day Project, which comes to us via Elle Luna and The Great Discontent. The premise of this project is simple: make something every day for 100 days. That’s all. Could be anything; a written word, a cake, a joke, a drawing, a button. I’ve actually been pitching it as a do anything for 100 days project—so one could even eat an apple a day or something similarly arbitrary. I think it’s the regularity of the ritual that’s important. There’s also value in creating something small every day and using the exercise to break down our inhibitions around perfection, but regularity breeds ritual, and ritual can take many forms.
Anyway, I’ve opted to use up the many, many Scout Books and Field Notes sketchbooks I’ve been accumulating from various events by chronicling 100 objects in my possession with words and pictures.
The format involves a drawing, however crude, and as much context about the item as I can cram on the page. It started here:
And has continued apace for the last couple weeks.
I love projects like this that require relatively little commitment on the day-to-day, but add up to something vast over time. I’m really excited to see where this goes. If you’d like to follow along, take a peek at my Instagram page or follow along on Twitter.
