Hey, Everybody!

My on-line class goes live soon, and to start things off I'm offering a free class, to be drawn at random from anybody who clicks on the image below and enters their email address.

The class will be available around the 27th of April, so for those of you who have been asking me to record a class, I think you'll dig it. I enjoyed my days in Denver recording it and I'm proud to finally be able to offer it to you.

The weather motivated me to dust off the bike and hit the road. I decided to revisit the site of a drawing I did five years ago and see what a new rendering of the same locale would yield. Here is the new sketch from in front of Fremont Coffee Company:

And here's the one I drew in 2010:

My main obsession is still the memoir comics. As a teacher, former filmmaker, stage actor, reader, musician and sketcher, the comics include aspects of all these interests: Staging, writing, blocking, camera angles, editing, story-telling. I think of each short comic like a song on a concept album- I want each to stand alone, somewhat, but still fit into the bigger narrative. And music plays a part in almost all of the shorter scenes. I'm thinking I might include an index at the end of the book, a discography of all the songs referenced in the pages, a soundtrack playlist one could listen to while reading the finished book. We'll see.

We had the first session of my current Gage Academy class on personal comics. Looks like a fun, dedicated, smart group who had a good time creating "daisy-chain" comics in class. (Each student drew the first panel, then passed their pages to the left so another could draw the next panel, etc., until we had several super-quick, silly comics.

And the Seattle Urban Sketchers recently met up at the Burke Natural History Museum where I drew these cool masks:

It's unseasonably warm here in Seattle, and I'm sunburnt from tooling around town on my bike.

But now, back to work.