Alaska Robotics

… I’m imagining this one on a giant canvas with a resin coat.

We’ll have new prints on display at the Ruby Room this Friday for Gallery Walk. Hope you can make it!

Aaron and I will be at the Juneau Public Market this weekend with our comics, films, shirts, and a bunch of Sarah Asper-Smith’s work. You can find us at booth C-8, just to the left of the main entrance. Hope to see you there!

I used to read a book called “Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum,” it must have been an influence here.

• Comic – Autumn Installation

I penciled and inked this comic with actual pencil and ink and then colored it digitally. I don’t get quite as lost when I’m penciling with a pencil but I still haven’t found the overall tools or workflow that really suits me. I think I might want to learn to watercolor or try to save up for a Cintiq but it’s probably not the tools that slow me down. I just need to learn to draw better and faster. More sketching!

I’ve had a few holes in my comic update schedule but I’m going to try to get caught up so I can end the year with 52 comics. I feel like that was probably my New Year’s resolution last year. I don’t think I wrote it down anywhere which was a good idea, shackling resolutions with paper and ink is never as fulfilling as giving them the freedom to grow and evolve in the open fields of memory.

Dad turned sixty this week. He also cut out a bunch of my comics, glued them to sticks and made goofy cartoons out of them. I hope I’m still having as much fun when I’m his age.

This self portrait was drawn from my reflection in the window on the night train to Pasco. I want to become a better illustrator so I’ve been trying to do more drawing on this trip. I already posted a few of the more detailed sketches and here are the rest…

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I like drawing Halloween comics, I’ll try to do another tiny one before I head home from my fall roadtrip adventure.

• Comic – He Loves Me For My Mind

The body of the brainy woman in this comic was inspired by Merryweather, one of the frumpy fairies from Sleeping Beauty.

When Lee Post and I were in San Francisco there was a great Sleeping Beauty exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum and those characters have been bouncing around in my head for a while.

Lee also took me to see the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, a great collection of original work and interviews. The whole building was beautiful and I’d recommend a stop there to anyone passing through San Francisco.

The area near Grauman’s Chinese Theatre has a thick layer of commercial sludge but beneath the buses, costumed characters, and flyer flinging street hawks were wonderfully uneven bits of sidewalk where past generations of Hollywood stars left their marks in the cement.

The cracked pavement and uneven handwriting filled me with an unexpected wave of hope and adventure.

Paul Newman shared a spot with his love, JoAnne Woodward, and her orderly stiletto heel prints perfectly balance his playful and crooked bare feet.

Many people left hand prints, John Wayne pounded a single fist into the cement. It made me think of my dad.

After visiting Hollywood, I made my way out to Kazu and Amy’s place in Alhambra where I cooked up a bunch of salmon and halibut. It was a really nice evening with an incredible group of people, like being at home but with less explosives and beer.

The inner courtyard at Kazu’s place had a nice little forest of giant plant jars, it felt like walking through a giant’s garden.

Overall, Los Angeles has been surprisingly refreshing and the public transportation was even pretty good.

Here’s a sketch from the train station in Davis, California last week. I’ve got a nice little sketch book for this trip and I’ll share more as I go.

I spent last weekend with Lee Post at the Alternative Press Expo, it was simultaneously inspiring and intimidating to be surrounded by such a boiling sea of talented illustrators and storytellers.

• Comic – Drawing Hands

I’m into vacation mode now, hanging out with my old friend Jody MacKinnon and her boyfriend Bill Sneed in Los Angeles.

I’ve just met Bill and he’s an awesome dude going through a lot of the same struggles us Alaska Robotics kids are having with trying to balance commercial and personal projects. I love his work and he’s got some great examples of illustration and animation that are worth checking out.

• Bill Sneed

Hopefully he’ll be able to find a commercial break soon and work on some more of those personal projects.