odd doooodles (must do)

The other day Wendy N. Wagner shared an essay that hit all sorts of home-runs for me.  Everybody's Free (To Wear Pyjamas) by Liz Kessler.

an excerpt:

"Enjoy the freedom and independence of being unpublished. Oh never mind; you will not 
understand the freedom and independence of being unpublished until you get a book deal. 
But trust me, in ten years you’ll look back at those early notebooks and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much autonomy you enjoyed and how many long, lazy days you were free to spending working on a single chapter.

Your handwriting is not as bad as you imagine...

 

Write one sentence every day that excites you." ~read more.

It made me miss my sketchbooks and notebooks and spending time filling pages full of odd doodles and notes and mixed media experiments  just to get the crazy stuff out of my head.  I don't keep a regular sketchbook anymore. Which makes me a bit sad. So, inspired by this post. I picked up pen and paper yesterday and for an hour I doodled crazy stuff, just like I used to. Gonna try and do this every day.  Thank you Wendy. And Liz.

sept 2013 odd doodle happened.

The haters in your head

Yes. This. All of it. 
"One voice telling me 'your not interesting enough" and another voice telling me 'you're not honest enough'...If I'm going to be honest, I haven't figured it out. At all. So I guess I'm just gonna throw this out there, see if any of you have similar experiences."

Thank you Jay. 

All things Glitter & Mayham.

Over at Apex Publications I wrote a post about creating the cover of Glitter & Mayhem (preliminary sketches, reference material, etc).  At Worldcon I finally got to see the book in print and yowzaaahz! It's even more beautiful than I could have possibly imagined! (And the stories are epic and diverse.)  If you want a chance to win a free copy of Glitter & Mayhem, Apex is holding a pin it to win it contest:

"To win, all you have to do is pin the Glitter & Mayhem page from the Apex website (or you can simply repin it from here) and pin at least 10 other things you feel best encompass the theme of the anthology on a board you call Glitter & Mayhem. Once you have your board complete, put a link to it in the comments of this post."

You have until Sept 24 to do this. GOOD LUCK!

And now, some pics from the Glitter & Mayhem release party :)

at the San Antonio Rollercade w/ G&M editor John Klima

glittery at the rollercade, Mikolaj Habryn, Liz Gorinski, Rachel Swirsky, Seanan McGuire, and I.

yes I dressed as the disco ball.

(glittery on the roller rink)

Strange New Words

Another little project I'm doing work for, Ari Marmell is kickstarting a collection of his short stories. (And I'm doing the cover art).

Fireside! (year two)

This actually launched last month but things were kinda hairy around here, so, belatedly: FIRESIDE YEAR TWO IS A GO! With new fiction and art every month. Here's a sample of what I'm doing for them over there:

illustration for The Journal, written by Ken Liu. Fireside issue #5.

Fireside is also publishing a serial by Chuck Wendig: The Forever Endeavor. Brian White and I discussed how to do work for that, something that would be stylistically different than the rest of the illustrations. Here's what resulted:

illustration for episode one of The Forever Endeavor written by Chuck Wendig. Fireside issue #4

This is just the start. More coming soon and regularly. Fireside magazine is a subscription based online venture. You can purchase individual issues or subscribe for the whole year. More about how here.

Mormons in Comics (thank you Theric)

Salt Lake City just had their comic con and I'm disappointed I missed it.

It was with delight I found out that Theric Jepson included mention of me in his (long distance) presentation about Mormons in Comics.


(He mentioned both Being Born , the piece I created for the Sunstone comic edition, as well as Traitors and Tyrants, the comic that John Nakamura Remy and I created for Monsters and Mormons.)

It was delightful to go back and remember both those projects, also it was an honor to be included in an amazing lineup of other fabulous artists and creators.  Thank you Theric. 

HUGO!!!!

Well, over the weekend, this happened.

I win the Hugo in the Fan Artist category! (Thank you Andrew Williams for taking this photo)

 Congratulations to all the nominees and winners! Here is the live recording of the ceremony. (The Fan Artist category is the first Hugo announced, about 56 minutes into the ceremony. And yes it's nerve wracking for me to watch it, even now.)

Video streaming by Ustream
 

With much gratitude to the other artists who shared the ballot with me. 

The Hugo winners of 2013. Photo curtsy of Tor.com