Every month I drop a new 5-Day project, to help you add some variety to your daily creative practice, or to serve as a ramp to gently invite you back in if you’ve fallen off. Whether you make art for the pure joy of it or if you’re a working creative professional, I encourage you to try a Ten Minute Artist practice.

The practice of creating something for yourself daily, even if only for ten minutes.

In this project we’re going to talk about MAKING COMICS

One last thing before we begin: I’m starting another cohort for Gameplan: How to be an Artist on July 6th and you can get a preview by turning that on here.

Welcome to Day 5 of : Making Comics

Comics employ words & pictures to communicate.

But one thing that is sometimes misses is that words in comics ARE pictures. The art of lettering, is the art of Drawing, not writing letters. As an artist, shifting from writing letters to drawing letters helps your words have more clarity, emotion and impact.

And if there is one piece of advice that yields tremendous results it’s this:

Draw your letters, not write them and draw them slowly.

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Every month I drop a new 5-Day project, to help you add some variety to your daily creative practice, or to serve as a ramp to gently invite you back in if you’ve fallen off. Whether you make art for the pure joy of it or if you’re a working creative professional, I encourage you to try a Ten Minute Artist practice.

The practice of creating something for yourself daily, even if only for ten minutes.

In this project we’re going to talk about MAKING COMICS

One last thing before we begin: I’m starting another cohort for Gameplan: How to be an Artist on July 6th and you can get a preview by turning that on here.

Welcome to Day 4 of : Making Comics

Today I want to talk about Character and Story.

And we’re going to get to draw dinosaurs!

In the book Storyworthy, Matthew Dicks, breaks down story into a simple formula. An unfortunate aspect of making art is that at some point you need to pay attention to craft and technique. You need to know how the magic trick is made.

He uses the first Jurassic Park Movie as an example and reveals that it is not a story about dinosaurs. What then is the story of the movie about?

When you discover what the story is about… what a story is…

Then to you at least, some of the magic becomes lost.

What you gain in return is an understanding of the craft, the inner workings and mechanics. Today I’m going to demystify some aspects of story and character.

Let’s start with story…

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Every month I drop a new 5-Day project, to help you add some variety to your daily creative practice, or to serve as a ramp to gently invite you back in if you’ve fallen off. Whether you make art for the pure joy of it or if you’re a working creative professional, I encourage you to try a Ten Minute Artist practice.

The practice of creating something for yourself daily, even if only for ten minutes.

In this project we’re going to talk about MAKING COMICS

One last thing before we begin: I’m starting another cohort for Gameplan: How to be an Artist on July 6th and you can get a preview by turning that on here.

Welcome to Day 3 of : Making Comics

Comics work via a particular kind of magic.

By drawing a frame or a panel you are enlivening that space. Within the frame with words and pictures you capture a scene, a moment in time in all its detail and character. Then you draw another scene.

But that neither panel is where the magic happens. Your two scenes are merely an invitation for the viewer to experience the magic.

But you cannot make the viewer happen, the viewer does.

Today we will talk about six transitions you can create between panels, but in order to use them effectively you need to understand how the magic of comics work.

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Every month I drop a new 5-Day project, to help you add some variety to your daily creative practice, or to serve as a ramp to gently invite you back in if you’ve fallen off. Whether you make art for the pure joy of it or if you’re a working creative professional, I encourage you to try a Ten Minute Artist practice.

The practice of creating something for yourself daily, even if only for ten minutes.

In this project we’re going to talk about MAKING COMICS

One last thing before we begin: I’m starting another cohort for Gameplan: How to be an Artist on July 6th and you can get a preview by turning that on here.

Welcome to Day 2 of : Making Comics

My goal in this series is to give you everyday a new way to fill a spread with combinations of comics and words.

To collect memories and ideas that can become seeds for future things, but also joyful and informative in themselves. To be completely honest I’m selfishly building my own set of ‘Templates’ if you would like to give me a 4 panel comic everyday. For now this is a kind of private practice, but my hope is one day I will be making comics for public consumption.

The template I gave you yesterday is one I have used for years, and it’s an easy default. But now I want to stretch myself.

The first panel from day 1 answers the question: “What I did you do yesterday”. Today’s comic will focus entirely on that. The reason the question is what you did yesterday, and not today, or a week ago… is because there is a right balance of detail from memory, but also some of the less important details have already been forgotten.

It’s like trying to remember a dream.

Are we remembering, or maybe imagining…

There is something precious about the memory of yesterday, in that, like a dream this level of detail soon expires, and so capturing it allows it to live on in your artist diary.

I learned this exercise from Lynda Barry’s book ‘Making Comics’. She calls it ‘Four Box Diary’.

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Every month I drop a new 5-Day project, to help you add some variety to your daily creative practice, or to serve as a ramp to gently invite you back in if you’ve fallen off. Whether you make art for the pure joy of it or if you’re a working creative professional, I encourage you to try a Ten Minute Artist practice.

The practice of creating something for yourself daily, even if only for ten minutes.

In this project we’re going to talk about MAKING COMICS

One last thing before we begin: I’m starting another cohort for Gameplan: How to be an Artist on July 6th and you can get a preview by turning that on here.

Welcome to Day 1 of : Making Comics

In the image above you will see two books I bought with the same title 16 years apart. I started with the Scott McCloud book, because that was the one recommended by comic superstars of the day.

I probably resisted the Lynda Barry book, partly because I already read a book on ‘Making Comics’ that felt exhaustive. Now I know that the books couldn’t be more different.

Scott’s book was all about the ‘rules’ of making comics. Which in hindsight is not the best place to start, useful, but it’s like learning grammar before learning how to cry for milk.

Both crying and speaking are effective forms of communication, but one comes from a direct and primal place and the other contains layers of protocols and accepted norms.

Lynda Barry teaches, comics as a natural language.

Scott McCloud teaches us the Rules.

I’ll dip into both books, and I’ll give you a framework to explore both the natural language and grammar of making comics in your daily ten minute practice.

We’ll learn by doing, starting with this assignment:

Daily Comic & Meditations

An assignment.

I acknowledge that you will probably need 10 minutes for the comic and another 10 minutes for the meditations, so if you’re pressed for time, break the assignment up into 2 parts and spend 10 days on them rather than 5.

For the next 5 day’s we’ll be setting up spreads in our Artist Diary, like so:

On the left page, we will start with an exercise you might now be familiar with which is the Ten Minute Visual Journal Method, it’s a starting point and we will evolve it each day.

Draw 4 squares, that serve as panels and use them to answer these 4 questions.

What did you do yesterday?

What are you working on?

What’s coming up?

What are you grateful for?

Grammar notes:

Notice how on my page the ‘gutter’ or space between panels don’t align on the top row and the bottom row. That is your first lesson in leading the eye, this method, leads across the page after the first panel instead of testing it to move downwards.

A present side effect is you can have frames of different proportions which can be useful for pacing and framing different subjects.

You see comics capture a series of moments, and the width of a panel is one way to make the moment linger, of flash by.

Primal Language:

Now fill the panels by answering the questions. Imagine yourself inside the panel experience in the moment, whether drawing the past or the future, draw it as if it’s the present. Enter the moment and live it on the page. If you imagine or remember a conversation from that scene, write it down.

Don’t over think it.

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This is not a program to help you become a Children’s illustrator, unless that is what you want to become.

But at the moment a lot of my examples and experience comes from being a children’s illustrator, so bear with me. I had just finished my first Children’s Picture-book Course with (100% Recommend), and I had 5 portfolio pieces, I threw together a website and started reaching out to agents.

One agency wrote back with a list of things they needed to see to consider me.

Kids, animals, consistency, diversity the usual suspects…

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When I was starting out on my journey to become an artist for the second time, I stumbled on this strange book.

It was a recommendation by Mathew McConaughey the actor, via a podcast, and the book is called The Greatest Salesman in the World. It’s by Og Mandino. It’s a strange book almost game like in quality, prescriptive and directive. I recommend it, just take a pen or Sharpie, and cross out the word salesman and replace it with whatever you like.

The book works just the same, for me I cross out salesman and wrote ‘illustrator’.

Remember at this time I was unemployed, and living off savings at the beginning of a pandemic.

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said this, or something like this…

Once you find your tools you’ll find your style. As you start getting drawn to the artwork of certain artist, it makes sense to explore the tools and methods they use to make their art.

It might surprise you, you might discover that the thing you like is the marks certain tools make. Or you might discover that there are certain types of art that you might enjoy consuming, but not creating.

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The style conversation is a tedious but necessary one.

The consensus is to keep working, and style will mysteriously and magically emerge. And there is truth in that, the problem is, what do we do in the meantime? It took me 40 years to come to my style.

The conversation is so tedious that many would sidestep the question about style altogether and instead talk about voice.

The way I would see that is that style is like clothes and voice is the body.

There are two problems.

1. The only way to develop your voice is to use it, and this development takes time, decades, and who is to say when it is ever ‘ready’.

2. All benefits of Style and Voice come from being it being recognizable.

I would argue that one needs to resolve these problems and develop something like a professional style, in order to enter certain markets as a professional.

And that this step can be done by anyone, in ten minutes.

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Once in my previous job working in a tech startup.

As a small team we collected 1000 emails in 3 days from potential customers at a trade show. We did that by talking to them, sometimes individually, other times in groups.

The internet is a great way to reach true fans, but possibly the most powerful way to make a connection is to go direct.

In my case I flew half way around the world to attend a trade show, but there are other ways to go direct.

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Fans want to know what you’re working on.

Start there. Create a regular cadence of letting your fans know what you’re working on. This is easy if you’re always working. You might have seen a trend on social media that says, ‘Don’t show your work, show you working’.

How exactly we do this is a matter of taste and style and just as important as what we share.

Let’s start with a list of do’s on and don’t’s

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Once you’ve decided what to offer your True Fans, you need to make sure they can find you.

To do this, you need to be findable.

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To have fans, the first step is being a good fan.

It’s like dating advice, how you find a good partner is by being a great partner yourself. By being the best possible version of your have. Fans respond to generosity. That is the best place to start.

And the best place to practice generosity, is to join fan clubs.

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Project Notes: This week we’ll be getting a bit more personal in our diaries as we question our goals as creatives in relation to money, some of us might have no goals for our art related to money at all, and then it might move on to selling something at a weekend market, to making a living. In every case we’ll explore the questions. For the assignments, feel free to share sparingly, cover some key details if you need to or be as open as you like.

"To be a successful creator you don't need millions. You don't need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans."

— Kevin Kelly

That’s a relief ainnit.

As a kid of 5, or even 25, I hardly knew what a million was, it was an abstract unattainable concept. It was equated to making it, in any field, it felt like any thing worth doing was only worth doing if you could get a million something out of it.

Sell a painting for a million dollars, sell a million copies of a book, have a million dollars in the bank, and so on… But how do you get from anywhere to a million. And more importantly is a million even the right number?

Kevin Kelly’s famous article, transformed that idea, and should probably be credited to why the creator economy is even a thing.

Today we’re going to be talking about numbers, specifically the money we will need to earn from our art, to just do the thing. ( if you have no intention to make money from your art, I hope you will take this as a form of general knowledge, or perhaps, a ‘what if’ exercise.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, use week 2 as a menu of options if you need some ideas.

Writing on stage has been about showing your work so you can make it better.

Many aspiring artist have a closed loop of making something, then trying to make it better, without showing it. They think that showing their art is a once and done, and so it has to be absolutely perfect.

In reality showing it, is a repeatable step.

We can show our work to different audiences and at different stages. We can show iterations and developments and sequels and side shows, and every time we show it we get feedback and can use it as a chance to make it better.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, use week 2 as a minute of options if you need some ideas.

I read when I was 11 that being a comic artist is great work if you can get it.

The article in Wizard Magazine went on to explain how every comic fan want to draw Spider-Man, and at the time there were only a couple of opportunities to do that, so everyone was fighting for the same spot. And that lead me to believe that being an artist or an illustrator was an ultra competitive job where, you’re goal was to be the one.

To outdo everyone else and get that scarce job. I was wrong.

Obviously.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, use week 2 as a minute of options if you need some ideas.

I’m going to share this sketch from my sketchbook on substack notes today along with the story behind why I made it.

Sharing this way, is away to start a conversation around the work we are doing. In the same day I’m also going to share a page from a book I’ve illustrated or some work related thing. I’ll share something you made. And I’ll probably share something about my newsletters.

I probably share more than most, you will need to find your own cadence.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, use week 2 as a minute of options if you need some ideas.

Today we think of our practice as a means of collecting tried and tested material

Crafting something is a long uncertain process a maker should show her work

— Austin Kleon

A comedian is someone who can do the most terrifying job on earth (speaking in public) and make it seem effortless.

A comedians prowess is measured in minutes, how long are they able to stand on a stage in a room full of strangers and make them laugh, reliably. It’s measured in minutes not because it’s a test of stamina or mental prowess. It’s measured in minutes because everything the comedian says on that stage is part of an act.

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Project Notes: Continue working in your artist diary for 10 minutes a day, if you don’t know what to work on use week 2 as a menu. This project explores one aspect of interfacing with an audience, in the tech world you might call this discovery or product market fit, next week we’ll be talking about earning true fans, this is not that yet… this is the step before, figuring out who you’re making art for and what you want to make for them.

Today we will ask when is a work of art done?

All in all the creative act is not performed by the artist alone…

the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting the inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

— Marcel Duchamp

A work of art is never really done is it.

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