Tag: lecture

Education

How to Kick Ass at Kickstarter (Video)

Last month I had the good fortune to return to The Animation Workshop in Denmark to teach a week-long course in their Graphic Storytelling department. You might remember the talk I gave two years ago, The View from Aloft, where I distilled my foundational philosophy about social media, online communities, and gratitude economies. This presentation follows up on that framework by talking specifically about crowdfunding and Kickstarter. Thanks to the school’s exceptional video rental equipment there’s now a very nice recording up on YouTube:

I get a lot of questions from folks looking to learn more about this weird practice. It can be the most soul-crushing, time-consuming, heart-tormenting process, but also an incredible jolt of energy, affirmation, and community involvement. Between the generous souls who support me monthly on Patreon and the people who launch individual projects of mine via Kickstarter there’s no doubt that my career would look very different without crowdfunding.

Everything that’s made my campaigns work feels like it’s come from watching my friends get smarter and better every time they launch a project, so it’s great to have this recording to pay it forward to more people. I hope some of you find it useful if you ever launch your own projects (and I hope you do).

Good luck out there!

News

Curiosity and Creative Mornings

Hi friends, I am very excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at Creative Mornings this Friday (October 6th) at 8:30am at the Armory Theater here in Portland.

Creative Mornings is a free monthly lecture series where speakers appear on stages all over the world to deliver thoughts on a communal theme—all before 10am on a Friday. This month’s prompt is PIONEER, and I’ve crafted a talk all about belonging, childhood passions, and curiosity that I am super stoked to reveal.

I’m also hand-drawing all my slides, which has led to working on things like this all week:

WHAT IS THIS PERSON DOING WITH THAT FIRE EXTINGUISHER AND ALSO THAT BABY? Come to The Armory on Friday to find out.

Seats are free, and the CM Team provide donuts and coffee to get you pepped up in the early hours. All you need to do is reserve a spot through this website. I look forward to seeing you there!

News

New Talk: The View from Aloft

I have new video up from my time at The Animation Workshop in Denmark, where I was teaching a class on webcomics and social media earlier this month. (This is the first time I’ve had video footage of my public speaking—thanks, Sam!—which is really exciting.) If you’re a person who makes things on the Internet, or a person who wants to make things on the Internet, or a cartoonist, or a budding creator—this probably has some utility for you.

Things I cover:

  • How I ended up doing what I’m doing now (full-time adventure-cartoonist-ing, most days)
  • How social media has enabled me to succeed in crowdfunding, freelancing, and basically everything else
  • What sailing has in common with being an artist (it’s more than you think)
  • Communities and gratitude economies and how they shape our work
  • My unified very vague theory of How the Internet Makes Us Better People
  • What you can gain by giving your work away for free

I had so much fun teaching at TAW, and I hope this talk distills some of the stuff we were exploring and discussing over the course of my two weeks there. If you enjoyed it and want to see/enable more, feel free to check out my Patreon page! I post a ton of behind-the-scenes, nitty gritty, creative-in-the-trenches stuff there every single week, and I’d love to have you on board.