Donna and I recently treated ourselves to breakfast at Vera's Diner in Ballard and stayed long enough to each do a sketch.

Here's mine:

Later, we hung out at Elliott Bay Bookstore and I drew these chaps:

Just in case you haven't heard (and I find that hard to believe because I won't shut up about it) my Craftsy class is up and running. I've watched it through a couple of times now and am impressed with the work Craftsy did in packaging the lessons. I'm proud of my part and am happy to be able to offer the class to those who can't come to my old-fashioned classroom courses at the Gage Academy. To check it out, click here:

I'm working on a couple of different comic memoir pages: one about the influence Fellini's film 8 1/2 has had on my work, and another about how I would spend my free time as a little kid, drawing, reading, writing and making things. Compared to my brother, who would be outside moving and shaking, I was a lazy slug, happy in my room. Sort of a "childhood shows the man" kind of thing:

I hope you'll consider my Craftsy class. Makes a good gift idea, too. (Mother's Day is coming up!)

Back to work,

Steve

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.