tommy

Idk I might have asked you this before or someone else may have but I was wondering if you would talk some about your art practice like. Routine and the like? I think I remember you doing Lynda Barry exercises?

Well either way thank you!!!!

Oliver!!! Yes!!! I'm so glad!

I have to preface this by saying that I don't even work on art every day, much less comics. Last October I picked up knitting on a whim and spent all my free time making hats while listening to an audiobook of Moby-Dick. I made a lino print for the first time while sending out JW #1, fell in love with it, and have spent the last month or so carving and printing and experimenting. I go on painting jags, collage jags, writing jags, and I have two (2) guitars that are sitting in the corner patiently waiting for asteroid Kiana to circle back to them. I've been this way my whole life, and I am trying to work with it and not against it. HOWEVER. There is a hardcore Type A perfectionist inside me that wants nothing but consistency. This part of me abhors the flightiness, the mutations, the bouts of melancholy -- if there must be a Quest, it cries, let it be towards a singular Goal!!!!

For recovering perfectionists there really is no better teacher than Lynda Barry. She has a list of materials, she has dozens of exercises, she has you set time limits. According to her books she is quite a strict teacher in-class, demanding a lot of time, effort, care, and attention. All of this is wonderful. She boxes you in and sets you free.

"Making Comics" is the essential text. My favorite exercise is Monster Jam.

Here are a few of mine, all done left-handed to minimize the influence of the Type A chatter who lives in my brain. I have dozens and dozens of pages of these monsters. Barry recommends this specific process a lot: lay down the lines under pressure before your brain can catch up, then add color/patterns/details, under no pressure at all, while watching/listening to something you like.

There are several iterations after this - you draw their parents, an older sibling, a lover. Then you go back to the beginning and draw, in 6 panels, the story of their life. It somehow always presents itself.

1. cup one testicle at a time using both hands, best performed during or after a warm bath or shower

2. examine by rolling the testicle between thumb and fingers, use slight pressure

3. familiarize yourself with the spermatic cord and epididymis, tube like structures that connect on the back side of each testicle

4. feel for lumps, change in size or irregularities, it is normal for one testis to be slightly larger than the other