Ian Bradley Creative

I get interested in the forms, and I sculpt what I'm thinking about to see how objects are formed. I don't let the details go by. I want everything defined that is out there. Some people say to me, don't worry about that stuff, it's the overall effect that counts. But to my way of thinking, the overall effect is the result of all those details.

It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. [...] I still haven’t drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.

Overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It’s the effort to make the “now” responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can... Overwinding also happens when we try to experience the satisfying catharsis of a well-crafted five-act play in the random flash of a reality show. It happens when a weightlifter takes steroids to maximize the efficiency of his workouts by growing his muscles overtime. In these cases it’s the over-winding that leads to stress, mania, depletion, and, ultimately, failure.