Producing art for a living, even bad art, is a lot harder than most people think. Most of the kids in my high school art classes were loser jerk-offs from all walks of life that, admittedly, just wanted a blow off class during the day. This same mentality, I think, permeates the general thinking of most of society. I should note that not one of those people that were in my art classes looking for am easy “A” are in the art field today, that should say something in itself. But what does it say? It could say that these people didn’t really care enough, anyway, to go into the art field. That they got nothing from art class and never meant to. It could also say that, unknowingly, these people signed themselves up for something that they couldn’t handle or understand and it beat them and they quit.

I like to think it’s the latter. I like to think this because, most of the time, it’s true. The non-creative world, for the most part, looks on creative people as people living the dream. We’re people that, day in and day out, are living self indulgent lifestyles full of make-believe and fairy tales and euphoric images. And I think somewhere along the line we, as creatives, have started to think that too.

Which brings me back to my original sentence, producing art for a living is a lot harder than most people think. It’s one thing to create art for the shear pleasure and joy of it and a completely different thing to create art to put the nightly dinner on the table and to keep your kids from being a homeless statistic. Shit gets real at that point. Creativity is not a formula that can be followed in some sort of rigid form to ensure that the perfect widget is made, packaged and produced. Creativity is more akin to running a mental marathon, pacing yourself, reacting to changes in your body and those around you and focusing energy on the best performance that you can give and at the end of the day hoping it all works out.

We’re pushed harder and harder each year to produce more and more at lower cost and higher quality. We’re being pushed by economic changes and non-creative people that just don’t understand what it takes to do what we do, but we’re also being pushed harder by ourselves than anyone else. Creatives tend to be those proud people that don’t want to admit they can’t take the load. We want to grow, we want to please and help, and we’ll deny ourselves happiness in order to do this.

In nursing school nurses are routinely told to take care of patient number one first. Who is patient number one? Patient number one is themselves! It is in their nature to nurture. Nurses give so much of themselves to everyone around them that they often overlook their own health until they can no longer function normally. I think creatives do this as well. Though creatives don’t often find themselves in life or death situations creating art we do find ourselves more and more in high stress scenarios. We put so much pressure on ourselves to improve, to grow and to produce that it can’t be good for us in the long run.

We have to be kind to ourselves. Ze Frank (a highly creative genius) recently made a video where he was hoping he could extend the same generosities to himself as he extends to others around him. We spend so much time in our own heads that we don’t even realize that we are, more often than not, our own worst demon. We push to make that line better or that shape more shape-like or that one technique that we saw that other guy do a part of our own style. We push and we push and we push until we break and then we point at things to blame. My boss, my job, my co-workers, my family, the economy, the President, the client, the hack, the world in general. We can’t even see who’s really to blame, who’s really the demon because we’re too caught up in our own bad habits of beat ourselves up that we don’t even know how to let ourselves be happy and have fun.

Of course it’s not always like this. As creatives we all have our times of great triumph and victory and we smile and pat ourselves on the back and enjoy it. But those times tend to be fleeting and we don’t lock them away in our box of memories to reflect on as much as we do on our failures and disappointments. But this is just human nature, all humans do it. We can’t help ourselves, but maybe we can try.

I say we practice daily acts of kindness on ourselves (no euphemisms here). Sure, we need to continue to push ourselves. We need to keep growing and not letting ourselves off the hook and become lazy, but we need to be more understanding of ourselves to. We need to accept our personal limits as limits we have for now but limits we’ll push through in time. It’s ok to be happy with the work we are capable of doing and look forward to the work we know we are more capable of in the future. It’s ok to tell your boss or your client “no”. No, that’s not right for this project. No, I can’t create that kind of work in that kind of time frame. No, I will not push myself to the brink of death just to save you, the company or YOUR client face in the fact that you over promised or want to make a few extra dollars.

Procrastination is a product of frustration. Frustration is a product of misunderstanding and when we misunderstand what we ARE capable of and not what we WANT to be capable of it will only lead to frustration. I think most creative people live in a world of frustration and put off what we truly love to do. By putting off what you love you put off growth and it leads to more frustration and unhappiness. So, back off yourself. Be comfortable with your limitations, re-enforce you victories and identify your weaknesses to work on but don’t identify with those weaknesses. We all got into this because we have a need to create and to help those around us.

Take care of client number one first, and you will make the impossible happen.

Despite the fact that I as utterly exhausted for most of it, last Summer was pretty great! I got a lot of things worked out, stylistically, on Robot Friday, as I had done the Summer before when I did the Summer Sketchbook Sessions (which I will probably remove from the site and offer up as a free .pdf download – but we’ll get to that in a minute).

This Summer is shaping up to another pretty amazing one as well. The Spring has already delivered some pretty sweet things. I did my first ever panel at the Lubbock Comics Expo, response to the comic and other projects has been great and traffic to the site and my Twitter feed is increasing every day. This Summer is going to a really busy one for me, again, this year. For the rest of this month I plan to have strips through June written and half of June’s strips drawn as well. All-the-while keeping up with strips for May and creating print art for the Ama-Con in July. And that brings us to the Ama-Con, this convention will be the first ever that I have had a table in. I’m planning on decking it out and offering cool stuff for free and to buy. It’s a one day con on July 21st and I’ll be there all day drawing free sketches, selling stuff, promoting Robot Friday and just hanging out. So, if you’re in or near the Amarillo/West Texas area you should come out (hit their Facebook page for more info.)

As the Summer wraps up I want to get some free downloadable mini-comics on the site too. The first of these will be the Robot Friday origin story of how our favorite little robot came to be. Soon after that will be the entire Summer Sketchbook Sessions collected for anyone that wants to own them – for free. Once they are up as a pdf I’ll be removing them from the archives of the online comic because if you go through the archives from strip one, it’s kind of jarring when you run into the sketchbook stuff. As the Fall and Winter Holidays approach I plan to offer more free downloadable mini-comics collecting the Robot Friday gang’s holiday stories (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.).

So that kind of rounds out what’s gonna be happening for the majority of the Summer and rest of the year, of course I’ll also be getting married and going on a cruise in the middle of all this too, so there is that

At any rate, thank you guys for supporting the comic and spreading the word about everything that’s going on and keep it up

Some time ago I created an image for a 3D artist and writer by the name of Jeremy Kool. Jeremy is creating an interactive iPad app story book called The Paper Fox Project. He’s been very supportive of my work and efforts with Robot Friday in the past and I felt that I needed to show my appreciation to him in a way that was unique to me so I decided to create an illustration of his Paper Fox.

I really like the way it turned out, especially the color. I often start a project with a vague idea of how it will turn out in my mind and as it progresses I follow the down the path that it takes me. Luckily this project path ended very nicely.

I tried to stick to a color pallet that was close to what Jeremy uses in his work and the composition gave me some concern for a little bit as I tried to work out a cut paper look and feel and retain some of my style in the background as well. Overall I like it very much and so did he, so with Jeremy’s permission I am offering a wallpaper of the illustration up for free. Just click on the image below and download it today.

And don’t forget to check out The Paper Project and help support Jeremy and his work. Thanks

News broke on Friday afternoon that Mark Waid, long time mainstream comic book writer, will be launching a new webcomic venture called Thrillbent on May 1st. Scott Kurtz and D.J. Coffman both have very good write-ups about how they see this new venture that you should all go read (after you’re finished here, of course).

In short, I get the feeling that everyone is seeing the monolithic comic book companies and creators coming over the horizon, thundering toward webcomics with a heavy sense of change filling the air. In my opinion (and I could be completely wrong about this) I don’t think this will change anything. I’ll concede that it MIGHT change the opinions of webcomics for the general comic buying public. It MIGHT also change the general attitude about webcomics that most average people have, but I don’t think it will change much about the way comics are made or consumed – at least not in the short term anyway.

The internet is such a vast and diverse space with little to no strangle hold on it by government or large corporations that there is no real set rules of how things must be done, sold or bought. Sure, the big creators and companies may be coming into webcomics, they may be about to change the way webcomics are marketed on a mass market level, but those of us that have been doing webcomics in the past 10-15 years aren’t interested in mass marketing, we sell to niches. Niches are where we live. We live in the nooks and crannies of the market, we thrive in the valleys that consider us akin to celebrities or gods. We care nothing of mass markets because we can’t, and don’t want, to serve the mass market.

So. Yes, I am excited about large creators finally waking up to the fact that there may be something to this web publishing thing that we’ve been doing for almost two decades now, but I’m mostly excited for THEM. They’re going to finally start feeling the joy of making comics again for the audience and the people that really matter, YOU guys!

I don’t think that their presence will change much for us, the webcomic creators of now and the past, because we’ve got out niches. We’re doing our thing and loving our audience. But it’s gonna be a huge change for the new webcomic creators, so let’s all be nice

I originally approached Krishna to do a guest comic this week, but having a life as full as his (family, several comics, teaching, etc.) he was unable to do a full comic, but he graciously said he would provide me with some fan art instead. The same day he emailed me this piece and I couldn’t have been more pleased!

The thing that blew me away the most is that he used all the little things that I have worked so hard to hone in my characters to make them recognizable as them. As a cartoonist you always hope that your designs and all the parts that make them up work, but it really hits home when you see someone else use those same parts to make your characters come to life. It’s then that you know what you’re doing is actually working. Krishna also has a great eye for vehicles and I LOVE this one. I smell a new car purchase in Thomas and Karen’s life coming in the comic

I met Krishna on Twitter soon after I had launched Robot Friday and he has been nothing but kind and helpful. Krishna always has a word of encouragement for young and new artists and his work is brilliantly stunning to look at. Krishna’s work has a sort of Hanna-Barbera / Looney Tunes feel to it to me. So go check out his webcomic PCWeenies and follow him on Twitter to experience more of his tips and awesome work