This is a dash-off, last-minute illustration I did for a Financial Aid article at the Law School. A little too cutesy, a little clip-arty, but hey, it was Friday afternoon. (The burnt orange sky is to match the official UT color, not to suggest an impending financial apocalypse…although I like that reading.)

Y’all have a good weekend.

This is the first and last time I’m ever doing this. (Alright, I take it back.) I’m only posting the last half of yesterday.

Posted at the HCD site, too.

If you can create a process that short circuits some of your own worst habits, and you really believe in that process, eventually you’ll get a sweater, a nine-foot painting, chicken enchiladas, a Web site, a marathon.

—Brian Oberkirch

“To spark my creativity…I often re-use pieces from my other works .. basically collaging my own stuff…”

—Nate Williams

I’m so ashamed at the low output of this blog that I’m posting a couple of sketches, hoping they will somehow make up for it. (My Tumblelog has been bustling with activity, but it doesn’t really count.) The sketches are for a design to go on an apron that Meg wants to sew.

I’ve got a couple of posts in mind for next week, most notably my thoughts on David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts, which I’m finding to be an utterly exhausting read. I’ve got about 150 pages to go. Here’s the fine stack of books I’ve got waiting for me once I finish:

…the soundest advice is to be seeking always for the picture…”
—Paul McHenry Roberts, How To Say Nothing in 500 Words

I need to write in a visual way… for example, with cut-out words.
—Julie Doucet

Once again, I have redesigned the blog. After talking smack about sidebars, I realized that, duh, they can be quite useful and add to the content—but only if they’re used in a dynamic way…if the content of the sidebar changes with whatever page you’re viewing. With the new design, you’ll notice that “meta” information appears in the sidebar next to the post. Making optimal use of the web browser’s real estate. (Can you tell I do web geekery for a living, now?) Clean white to remind me that it’s the actual content that makes a blog. No more lightning bolts or black.

Poke around, let me know what you think.

The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it on the toilet, it just weaves itself into your everyday life. It’s about little details. It’s not about grand sweeping dramas. Graphic stories are able to show incidental life without having to describe it.”
— Alison Bechdel on the everyday in comics

I’m passionate. I’m disciplined. I play a lot…[When I sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen,] I do a mark on the page, whether it’s virtual or actual paper. Once there is a mark, there’s no fear of not drawing something. It’s a funny thing, but it works every single time…

— PASCAL CAMPION

The way I work nowadays usually is…I don’t really draw a lot….I’ll go months without drawing, but I do keep a notebook…and write down dreams or ideas I have for stories. I just kind of keep filling in those pages and six months or eight months or twelve will go by and I’ll start to panic and I’ll say, ‘I’m never going to do another King-Cat,’ and then at some point…all this work that didn’t really make a lot of sense the day previously, it all just kind of comes together and I’ll think, ‘Ah, this is what the next issue’s going to be,’ and I’ll sit down and I’ll write the stories. I’m a person who allows myself some leeway. If a mistake happens in a comic or I sit down and draw and it takes me off on some tangent I didn’t anticipate, I’m open to following that wherever it may go. But I do usually have it pretty well thought out. But at this point I just see the comics in my head before I ever draw them. So when I have that thing kind of put together, I’ll draw intensely for a period of a couple weeks or a month or so. My comics are so simple, it’s a lot of work that goes into them before the drawing point, but when I actually sit down and draw them it actually goes pretty quickly. And then I’ll put it together, sit down with the pages, edit things and try to make an issue kind of cohesive. Nowadays, it’s still a kind of random thing for me, but I do try to kind of have the issue be a cohesive thing, like an album where these are independent songs but if you take them as a whole they’re a unified expression.
— John Porcellino

I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves….I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.”
— Daniel Day-Lewis

While I am carrying on a conversation with someone, I find that I am drawing with my eyes. I find myself observing how his shirt collar comes around from behind his neck and perhaps casts a slight shadow on one side. I observe how the wrinkles in his sleeve form and how his arm may be resting on the edge of the chair. I observe how the features on his face move back and forth in perspective as he rotates his head. It actually is a form of sketching and I believe that it is the next best thing to drawing itself. I sometimes feel it is obsessive, but at least it accomplishes something for me.

—Charles Schulz

Yesterday Meg and I went to the Texas Book Festival. We were hoping to catch Shalom Auslander at the book signing tent, but he didn’t show up, so we walked downtown and got some Jimmy Johns and ate it on the lawn of the capital. Beautiful day. We finished up lunch and went to the House Chamber (which is pimped out beyond belief with the most comfortable leather chairs I’ve ever sat in) to listen to Tom Perrotta read:

After that, we went to see the always-fantastic-certified-genius George Saunders:

That last panel is a response to a (kinda lengthy) question I asked in the Q & A: “You’ve written about Charles Schulz and Peanuts before. David Michaelis’s new biography questions whether Schulz was as good of a family man as we’ve been led to believe. You strike me as a genuine family man, and I detect the great theme of work vs. family in your writing. So what do you think is the relation between being a good artist and being a great family man, and which do you think is more important?”

That night, we walked downtown to see a screening of Little Children at the newly-reopened Alamo Ritz. I love Tom Perrotta, but he really seemed uncomfortable in the setting:

All in all, it was a great day.

From my friend Tim (his daughter’s name is Jocie):

Do you take requests? Josie is writing a story that features a “channel dragon”. I had never heard of this, but she had written a handy definition in the footnotes (!) of the story: “Channel dragon: A nickname given to dragons from Venice. Don’t say it to their faces, though — they get mad.” If you could dash something off, maybe post it on your blog, that would be TEH AWESUM.

Do I take requests? I do when they involve dragons in Venice: