#24HCD.

I survived 24 Hour Comics Day - my first ever. And I am really not completely sure how I handled it so well mentally. I was never really tired for the whole 24 hours (tried to sleep, but couldn't), had only 1/6 cup of coffee (I do not drink coffee), and finished my 24 pages in 22 hours, well before the deadline. Saint Yaktopher must have been smiling upon me. The more I read about other artists' struggles, the more weirded out I am. Uhhhhh. How did I do this?

But. There are some things that I think helped fuel my success.

1) A cooler full of food. Nutritious food. I brought yogurt, trail mix, snow peas, goldfish crackers, cranberry juice, a Bolthouse Farms protein shake, green tea, string cheese, apples, and bananas. A few fellow artists said that their main downfall, besides inherited sleepiness, was the Taco Bell they brought. That must have been unpleasant. I basically kept shoving snacks into my face the whole time and so I never got hungry.

2) Arrange your sleep schedule beforehand, if you can. The day before, I took an extra afternoon nap and went to bed as late as I could so I could wake up at noon or later to feel charged by the 6 p.m. start time. Of course, this is easier to do if you're an unemployed slob like me. I also "fasted" and didn't draw for the 3 days beforehand, just to build up my mojo.

3) A page an hour. That's what you need to do. 24hourcomicsday.com suggests sketching for 15 minutes and drawing for 30 minutes out of every hour, leaving the other 15 minutes for breaks, meals, proofing, stretching, and attempting to shake off those RMIs. Seriously do not fuss about details or making it look completely realistic and amazing. You are not Jack Kirby... and even if Jack Kirby was participating in 24HCD, his work might not look like Jack Kirby. It's not wussing out to use a single broad Micron pen and do it in just black and white on 8.5x11" copy paper. Having a clock in sight is a really helpful reminder, too; try to keep just ahead of that hour mark. If you can squeeze a page into 30 minutes, that's even better. See #6.

4) A support person. My husband helped me set up and came to visit me around 2 a.m., and again at 11 a.m. to see me through to the end. He was able to come back with stuff I needed or had forgotten, and kept up my morale.

5) Headphones and enough MP3s to easily last the whole time and then some. It's even better if this is on a smartphone. (I don't have a smartphone, so I borrowed one.) I had easy access to Google images, which saved my bacon on at least a dozen occasions. You wouldn't know it because apparently I cannot draw lions to save my life, despite references. But like I said... details. No fussy-fussy.

6) Know when to employ artistic tricks that will save you time. A full page spread can break up the story and create an illusion of elapsed time - a breath of fresh air. Also, busting out of frames periodically will save you from doing backgrounds. Silhouettes are another big help. This all, too, displays your prowess with the comic form.

Hugh the elephant wants to be a pirate.

Breaking the 4th wall let me be creative and tongue-in-cheek in telling the story.

It was a lot of fun.

So that's about it for now. I hope to post the whole thing on my site as soon as I can withstand scanning, cropping, and color-correcting 24 pages... and submit it to the 24 Hour Comics collection at Ohio State University! What an awesome event.

Star-bellied cornhole.

I didn't know about cornhole until I moved to the midwest. It's not really a sport catered to yuppie Pacific northwesterners. But I've taken a liking to it. Recently, the dad-in-law asked me and my husband to make him a custom set. He would do the woodwork and general planning, and I would do the final painting and sewing.

To start with, we did a "test run" on a set for ourselves. I attempted a '50s pin-up beach girl thing with mixed results. We made a lot of mistakes. We learned what to do and what not to do. Well, mostly me. The boards are pretty "meh" artistically, but hey. You can still toss a bag of corn at 'em just fine. So, whatever!

Now that we've got our game faces on, we've done up the official set. Dad-in-law is a huge fan of children's books, and that means, of course, Dr. Seuss. So we decided to go with two teams: Sneetches and star-bellied Sneetches.

I used the lessons from the last set (yellow acrylic does not hide pencil lines! for the love of God, primed wood is not a sketchpad!) to dutifully reproduce some Seussimals. Something I have to keep drilling into my brain is that reference materials are there for a reason; you draw what's there, not what you think is there. It is, single-handedly, the toughest lesson for me to accept in all the art I do - but whenever I do accept it, my work instantly becomes 200% more awesome. I actually sketched a number of Sneetches yesterday, trying to grasp Seuss' linework and flow. So I felt pretty confident duplicating it.

Hard at work. One stroke at a time.

Because acrylic is... acrylic, I went ahead and did two coats of the outlines. Time-consuming, but totally worth it. Of course, I re-discovered a brush that does a mean chisel, but it was when I only had about 10 more strokes to do. Next time. Always next time: a fresh opportunity to do better. For now, I'm still super happy with the results, and pleased that I approached the work in a very thoughtful and successful way.

We had the idea of making star-bellied bean bags, too. Applique is super meditative.

My husband and I are an awesome team. Like Rocky Balboa says, "we got gaps". It's so great to have someone to work next to, on the same project, doing different tasks. And I think dad-in-law will enjoy the set.

Children's book progress.

I have had serious motivational problems with this project. It was offered to me around Christmastime, when I was already busy with other commissions, but I said that I would get started regardless. My first draft came with such smoothness, ease, and aplomb that I haven't been able to reproduce those results in a cleaned-up final format. Furthermore, the deadline of "whenever" and total creative control - from illustration style to number of pages to grammatical editing - have been oddly damning. It's sad when a project that starts out so fun and breezy turns into an object of dread and pressure. I literally wake up and think, "oh, God, I need to work on that" and throw the covers over my head. That's the sort of guilt I tend to experience: one that's so deep that it paralyzes and thereby prevents any progress from actually occurring!

The more time passes, the more I realize my bipolar disorder - diagnosed only a few years ago -has been the constant life-and-death cycle of my creative life. The euphoria of a new idea - hurling myself headlong into developing anything from a comic book to an operatic suite - quickly followed by the deep, sinking depression of perceived "failure" - wherein I can barely summon the motivation to play video games or feed myself - makes for one difficult process. I have been struggling a great deal in the past few weeks, trying to grasp what it will take to find the middle ground between these two stages. But the fact is, I've never found one for longer than a day or two. I can't consider myself a "professional" artist, nor expect "professional" results, until I can firmly take my mental wellness in hand. It's been a long process, and will continue to be so... as frustrating as that is to admit. I would love to think that if I did X and Y, art would just flow out of me eight hours a day and I would be blissfully happy. It's going to be more like A-Z, in some agonizingly encoded order. And maybe even then, it will be 2 hours a week. I just don't know.

Patience.

Fast friends.

Customer service.

I interact with a lot of very interesting folks. The other day, a customer instructed me to pick out a specific quantity of cherries - but only "the good ones" - and said she would come back later to check on my progress.

As you're standing there, alone, putting cherries on a scale one at a time, you can't help but feel like an ass.

Moomin!

Another little Postcrossing doodle. Being my first Moomin, it's hard to loosen up and let the shapes flow.

Political cartoon.

Not my best, but I really just wanted to express this idea. I have actually attended a protest, and been keeping very informed as to what governor Rick Snyder and his supporters want to do in the state of Michigan. Actually, they're already doing it, despite thousands of protestors in the capitol and dozens of protestors following the governor everywhere he goes. The basic gist of it is that education is getting cut by $300-500 per child across the state, the poorest 20% will see a tax increase that is 10 times that of the richest 1%, the earned income tax credit is disappearing, and whenever a municipality enters a "financial emergency" (which they inevitably will, under these conditions) the governor can hand-pick people to replace elected officials. As in, whoever you voted for is gone. These Emergency Financial Managers have no term limits (and a salary cap of $160,000 a year, I hear) and can totally null whatever contracts they want - which is the shrieking pro- or anti- union footnote that's garnered the most attention, unfortunately. Oh, yes, those greedy unionized teachers (?). Meanwhile, businesses see huge - HUGE, as in 80+% - tax cuts. I don't know where these political geniuses think the desperately poor are going to shop, but I don't think the tax cuts will create or support any real, sustainable local jobs, since the poor will only get poorer and have no choice but to sell their souls to Walmart and the like. Cutting taxes to businesses accomplishes nothing unless people have money to spend on said businesses. This, plus the budget being argued about over in D.C. (that I'm too exhausted/cynical to even track anymore) means that it's a popular idea to cut vital services - community health clinics, afterschool programs, and so on - for those who are already un- and under-employed, hungry, struggling in the downturn. How is the workforce of this country supposed to get back on its feet? How do you squeeze blood from a stone? It's an absolutely absurd fever dream of the rich.

Anyway, enjoy the cartoon. I have other ideas for our multi-million dollar CEO Snyder's likeness, considering the fact that he constantly hides from any public debate and rebukes legitimate questions about his policies with quotations like the above, and insinuations of the public's baseless hysteria, immaturity, and ignorance. This is the delivery room into which I bring you my first political cartoon. And it is full of rage.

Baby!