Haaaaay

I've been taking a break from doing the daily strips, in case you haven't noticed.  For right now.  But I started to put them all on a Tumblr, where they go up twice a day, if you feel like reading them again!  I'm in that weird place with my next project where it's all in my head, and I've written about it, but it's just sort of cooking in there.  So while it's in there I've been trying to do some other projects to occupy myself.

Like, redrawing more comic pages!  I think this is a really awesome thing to do while I'm thinking about how I want to draw my next project.  I want to be a better cartoonist, and I want to work hard and spend time on each panel.  So I decided to copy Pascal Girard, whose work is deceptively simple.  It was HARD.  But fun.  It's copied from page 21 of his book Bigfoot.  I decided to do inkwash, because I wanted to practice that (the original is digitally colored...)





Here are a couple other things...

A few months ago I submitted this as a rough draft to the New Yorker.  Maybe I'll try coloring it...



And I made this painting for my friend Ramona.   She's almost 3.  She wanted a painting of a Green Kitty with Clovers.  I love this kid!




It was a trade for this awesome portrait that her dad, Ryan Spahr, who is an amazing tattoo artist in Mechanicsburg, PA, did for us.

The Kids!

Oh, the kids.

The one on the top right is Freddy in Space, in case you were wondering.

I'm taking a break from doing my daily strip this week because I am substitute teaching! I'm an art teacher for the week at the K-8 school that my mom teaches at. It's awesome so far. And it's only been one day and I'm exhausted. I have no idea if I'd be able to do this all the time...I've kind of been trying to figure that out. But really I should just enjoy it, and not make it into a existential crisis.

Today I taught kids how to draw Freddy and Frank, and then they came up with some of their own characters. I was feeling weird about just having kids copy my work, but then I realized how essential copying is to cartooning, and that you can learn so much from it. Just seeing that I make Frank the dog from just a bunch of scribbles, and that they can do it too, is empowering to them, I think. It makes having a real book seem not so far away. One kid even made a whole scribble world after I showed him how to draw Frank.

AND speaking of copying, Chuck and I started a tumblr on Saturday night called Redrawn. In my previous post I showed that Amanda Vahamaki page that I redrew, which was inspired by Chuck's James Sturm page, which was inspired by Michael Litvin's Tatsumi page, etc. etc. Also, Tom Hart had been doing this project for a while; picking a random page from a comic and redrawing it. So we decided to collect them all on this blog, to encourage more people to do the same. Anyone can submit. DO IT. I think I'm going to do another one soon.