The Sum of David

So I was catching up with Justin last week and he asked, quite casually, “So what’s your next deadline for David?”

Ha.

I’m one goal-oriented sucka*, so my brain kind of stalled for a second when I realized I hadn’t set one yet (What? Preposterous! Unconceivable! I’ve been done for almost two months!). While my mind was sputtering (what is it now…? June. Or July? And then, what’s next: August? I mean, there’s like 200 pages, so that’s how many pages per day? Yikes!) my mouth responded with a cool “Uh, September 1st.”

Ha.

One way I make sure I meet my deadlines is to tell people, so I have to burden some self-imposed shame if I don’t make it… so I guess Sept 1st is now official. If I’d thought about it for longer, it might have been October 1st, or maybe even November 1st; but now it’s September 1st, which is sooner. Like, 30 or so days sooner. And I wrote SIX WHOLE LINES this week. Yeeg.

Which brings me to consider the illustration work that is eating all my Writing Time. So, in light of that: I’m taking a month off. Dammit. I will not be taking any new projects in the month of August, so if you want to commission me for something pretty before then, please let me know soon. I’ll be a wild, drawing, burn-me-out-to-blindness machine until July 30th. At that time, I will trade my Wacom for some good ol’ fashioned keys. Illustrator will be turned in for basic Word. And exhaustion will once again be based on the brain and not my eyes because of my ITTY-BITTY-MICROSCOPIC-SPECIMEN OF A COMPUTER SCREEN.

* See also: crazed, obsessed

WearPittsburgh’s released two new designs, both created by yours truly.

Babushka League is my favorite design I’ve done so far. The concept of putting a kerchief on a bowling ball is funny enough; add that to the musings early in its development on “how do we make it more Polish?” and the resulting sausage and pierogies in among the pins… and this was the most fun. I think the final design had to lose the flowers because of printing restrictions, but I’m posting the original here.

…aaand now I’m hungry.

Iron Man was all kinds of amazing. I’m not a Robert Downey, Jr. fan, but okay… he totally won me over. No one else could have pulled off a better Tony Stark. I don’t know how they toed the line between believable and corny, but I bought it. Ten!

I got to relive a little of the excitement of Harry Potter. A friend of mine found himself (happily) unemployed and used his new free time to begin reading again. He went from reading “nothing, ever” to “the whole HP series, over a couple weeks.” It’s so nice to geek out over a fantasy series I absolutely adore. Especially when it’s done over pie. As far as I’m concerned, Heaven is spelled P-I-E.

I finally read Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and was totally underwhelmed. Pullman did a nice job constructing the world, and I enjoyed the bit with the armored bears… but I didn’t find the story all that engaging. When it ended, I didn’t feel at all interested in what Lyra was doing next — rather, I was just glad she was going away. I’m not an expert, but that can’t be an effective way to start a trilogy. Also: where was all the controversy? I realize I’m on the wrong side of the fence to be offended, but I didn’t get much of anything in the way of “killing God”… Pullman portrayed the church as one would relate the far-reaching power and somewhat questionable practices from a couple hundred years ago. Calm down, people.

A girlfriend lent me Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewels Trilogy. I will admit Daughter of the Blood was pretty slow going at first; as in, I didn’t get into until page 277 slow, but I did eventually buy into it and the characters and the world. I’ve only read the first book, but unlike Pullman’s His Dark Materials, I’ll be continuing with this series. A warning, however: the whole society is based on sex and the dark, magical, power-hungry society revolving around it — and it’s not always pretty. Sometimes it’s unapologetically graphic. So if you’re faint of heart, maybe try something lighter.

Currently, I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith. Pratchett’s one of my favorite authors EVER. I was fishing through my bookshelf for one of his to lend out (he has his own shelf in my house), and got wrapped up in wanting to read them all over again. Wintersmith is in his Tiffany Aching series, which is decidedly more YA than the other Discworld stuff I’ve read. His imagination is just kickin’. It gets my brain fired up.

Okay. Enough monkeying around. Back to work.

Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators is presenting four lectures this year called “Speaking of Illustration” to showcase nationally and internationally recognized illustrators. The first was on Saturday night and featured Jacob Thomas, an Art Institute of Pittsburgh alumnus living in New York as a professional freelancer.

He grew up in a small town, joined the Coast Guard for a while, went to art school and then (successfully!) made The Move to New York city where he spends his days making a living doing illustrations. He’s relatively young — as in, freshly into his thirties — and he has done so much in his years since leaving the Art Institute. His clients have included The New Yorker, Bath and Body Works, AIG, Forbes Magazine, Esquire, The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Wall Street Journal, Vibe Magazine, ESPN Magazine… and more. His work has been recognized by NY Society of Illustrators, CA Illustration Annual #46 Cover, CA Fresh Section, American Illustration, HOW International Design Annual, Print’s Regional Design Annual, and Semi-Permanent.

So yeah, he’s got it — how do the kids say it? — going on.

It’s one thing to read about people that succeed in their fields; it’s another thing entirely to hear them speak about it in person… with a slideshow, no less. Thomas was casual, funny and came across as very approachable. His style is fun and fresh, with strong inking and vivid colors that smack you in the face (in a good way). There’s also a surprising amount of motion to each piece, which I find fascinating, and a yummy gritty quality that makes them more real.

As robust as his career has been so far, he was clear at the end of the presentation that his journey has taken a lot of hard work. He showed an abbreviated version of his process, a painstaking combination of hand drawn artwork and computer work. Plus, in the wake of many rejections over the years, he’s just kept trying which should be a lesson to everybody. I certainly saved it somewhere in my brain, and plan to pull it out when I get my next 20 rejection letters. In fact, I wrote “TENACITY” on a piece of 17×11 paper and hung it in my studio when I got home.

And, seriously: I thought I was goal-oriented, but this guy puts me to shame. He is a To-Do-List Master. Coast Guard in Hawaii? Check. Art school? Check. Professional New York Illustrator? Chickity-Check.

I originally moved to Pittsburgh to attend the Art Institute in the hopes of becoming an illustrator. Between you and me, I only took Graphic Design because it had two Illustration electives. Not one of the smartest decisions to base my education on, but thank goodness it all worked out. I found my illustration class to be lacking, although not because of the teacher: my brain just wasn’t ready for it yet. Around the same time, I broke out of my blood-feud with computers and fell in love with design. Six years later, I find myself full circle, designing for a living and doing illustrations on the side.

Sooo… semi-professional Pittsburgh illustrator? Check-ish. I’ll take it.

This was a great event. PSI plans to do three more of these, and I hope I’ll be able to make them all. It was insightful, interesting and the inspirational jolt I’ve been looking for since finishing my novel. It got me excited to create again. And I’ll definitely be on the lookout for more of Thomas’s work.

*All of the images in this post are Thomas’s. I don’t know the legality of posting them here, but I’m happy to remove if I’m contacted to do so.

A fair warning. For the sake of humor, this may be sexist for a moment.

It amazes me that many men spend so much time trying to appear rough and tough and, well, manly, only to revert back to a child’s mentality when they are hit with a cold:

I don’t like to adhere to stereotypes, but it’s like this was filmed in my living room. If I was in Britain, of course, and married to that guy from Hot Fuzz.Josh is nearly back to 100%. He’s kind of like Wolverine when it comes to illnesses, so *shing* and a couple days of hibernation put him back up to functioning levels. I, on the other hand, have apparently become susceptible to things settling in my lungs, so I’m nursing my third round with bronchitis in six months.All that aside, we celebrated Josh’s birthday last night at the Carson City Saloon. Thanks to everybody that came out! I knew the night was a success when he came home at 2am, intoxicated to spins on $4 pitchers of PBR, and fell asleep with a big grin on his face.

Be sure to tell him happy birthday, and be sure to do so loudly.

Josh Sager posted this on his blog first, but I must also share. I think most people would be able to identify with at least one aspect of this video, and probably more if you’ve been in school in the last ten years.

Alas, I’ve never had the pleasure of the classic, college lecture where you and 200 of your classmates fill an auditorium to learn for grades; but I know without a doubt that it wouldn’t have been conducive to my education. It certainly wouldn’t have done anything for me socially. I was never a class star, but having some level of human interaction with teachers fought my natural instincts to wallflower. I have seen speakers in the lecture setting, but that was for undocumented personal benefit, without any sort of papers or class submissions for grading. Seeing what I do of Josh’s workload as a teacher, I can’t imagine having to grade for that many — his time is consumed so much as it is trying to grade for classes of 20 to 35.

He’s been preaching about education’s outdated model for a while now, and his position lends itself to some flexibility in how the information he needs to share is broadcast. He’s always stretching the model a little. I imagine a 4+ year institution would be much, much harder to stray from the system that’s been making it money for decades and possibly longer.

I feel that all levels of education — K-12, technical or traditional college, etc — should above all instill the desire and ability to continue learning after you leave the institution, despite the major or whether you actually acquire the piece of paper that said you were there the amount of time you intended to be. I suppose some of the kids in the above video must have that drive out of necessity, but does surfing the web and facebook for hours a day allow for that urge to foster?

I’m not looking for answers, exactly. It’s merely food for thought. In my humble opinion, it is an individual’s responsibility to continue their own education after leaving whatever formal schooling they are able to secure for ourselves; especially when some fields — like graphic design — that degree means significantly less than your talent, potential and portfolio. There’s independent legwork needed in growing/maintaining knowledge, whether personally or professionally.

On a related note: After being involved with two Podcamp Pittsburghs (+ one bootcamp), I have finally begun to embrace one of the featured medias discussed there. Again. Podcasts pretty much rock my world, and once upon a time, I had subscribed to several. But they began to steal room on my hard drive, I wasn’t listening to them as much as I should have and, lamest of all excuses: my iPod didn’t have a screen. I never knew what I was listening to.

Between you and me, I still don’t know the names of half the songs in my library.

I was planning on taking a brush up course in French in the next six months. Instead, armed with a shiny new screen and some inspiration, I checked to see if there were any “Learn French” podcasts out there. iTunes lists nine beautiful options, and all are free downloads. There’s german, spanish, japanese, and more. I’m test driving two of them right now, and I may just start at the beginning to get my brain back into the swing of things. There’s a broad range of levels, too, depending on where you’d like to start.

J’adore l’internet.

Mr. Baconpants moves faster than maximum warp. Here’s a little vision of the Apacolypse I’ve deemed “Dance of Destruction.”

What better way for Cthulu and our future artificial masters to decide humanity’s fate than by dance? I submit that this will be how all conflicts are solved in the future. Be able to say “I told you so” during our unfortunate end. Available at Chestlaser.com.

Besides the disturbing Valentine in the last post, I’ve been keeping myself busy-busy with life in general. Here’s the current skinny.

Writing: I’m nearly halfway finished with The Sum of David’s sequel.

I’m beginning to think I started the story too early, which means I’ll end up cutting/condensing the first few pages. The story will take as long as it takes to tell, however, so page count is really secondary to my concerns, even though I do want to keep it about the same size as TSoD. We’ll see what happens. In my experience, this stuff usually works itself out. And trimming is always easier than having to add and recalibrate a portion of the plot. For a while, I was actually more worried about…

Well, it isn’t writer’s block, exactly. It is more like the Midas touch, except everything produced via my fingertips is stinky poo instead of wonderful shiny gold. I had a very successful write-o-thon last weekend, but haven’t been able to do anything worthwhile since then. The dialogue is wooden and fake, the action forced, and any dramatic revelations seem out of character, over-acted or blah.

This was in a blog draft I wrote last week in an effort to confess some sins and refocus. To my surprise, it actually worked. I got some solid writing in Saturday and Sunday. There are some points that I know will shift in the revision — and that’s a bummer of a feeling, when you’re putting down words and you know for a fact they aren’t going to stay — but it’s not the verbal vomit like it was last week. Whew!

Illustration: I’ve got lots on my plate, but in the most wonderful way. I’ll post current projects upon their release. For the moment, you should check out Chest Laser, an online independent clothing store. Matt Gondek has created two nifty designs so far (including the logo), and more products will follow as the store expands.

I’ve got a couple ideas slated as personal development on my agenda, too. My character designs need a little more variation, for example, so I’ve got an idea for a series that should stretch my abilities on that front. It will still be that ‘cute evil’ style I happily fall into, but hopefully in differing shades. I’m also looking forward to working with some fresh people, and that will be exciting. Who knew people would actually want the stuff I love to do anyway?

Dance: My plan to take one class a month is still on track. I’ve taken four classes at PBT since the new year and I’m loving it.

*Illustration at top is a chapter icon from The Cauldronborn. The story should probably never see the light of day, but the icon is nice — it heads a chapter where the protagonists visit a fortune teller that sees into the future by throwing a tantrum over her freshly baked cookies. Then she eats the cookies and goes into a trance. …it doesn’t have to make sense; it’s the future, maaaan.

Wikipedia is the downfall of my productivity at work.

I will read about most everything with some level of interest, although history oftentimes wins out. Why? It’s the stories, made even more powerful because of the reality behind them. My genre of choice might be fantasy for entertainment, but I can’t ignore the human factor of our past — the actions, inactions, passions, and what people are willing to risk their life over.

I did some link hopping from a chocolate company to underground teaching and opened up a facet of WWII knowledge that I’d never thought about or been aware of; concerning a subject I most certainly take for granted everyday.

In 1939, the invasion and subsequent occupation of Poland marked the start of World War II. The Nazi doctrine determined that the Slavs would serve as manual labor to the Germans, and they did not require an education. All education in the country was banned. The punishment for breaking Nazi law was, as in so many cases, death.

However.

Those who escaped the deportation to concentration camps or the Nazi’s murder of the nation’s leaders, politicians, artists, and potential trouble-makers organized a network of underground universities. They arranged lectures in basements and crowded apartments. Underground printers were established to provide them with materials and books. In 1944, there were hundreds of teachers and thousands of students. High school students risked their lives to learn grammar, geography and mathematics, receiving certificates from their “non-existent” schools that they could use to enter “non-existent” colleges.

The moral of the story? Knowledge is power. The Nazis understood that, seeing as how they tried to take it away from the Poles; and the Poles recognized what losing education would mean and held onto it even at the risk of execution. Whether it’s formal or not, don’t take your access to information for granted — you never know when you won’t have it anymore.