click to visit larger image Frock Coat Progress From Grass Dog Studio

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

I will be going down to the Drop after work this afternoon, but I've got two errands to run before I get there.

If you need to alert me of anything, my gmail address will be fastest (or use the email form on my website, which ammounts to the same thing)

One of the reasons I don’t have so many drawings to show off lately (aside from an awesome new full time job) is that I’m sewing myself a coat:

click to visit larger image Frock Coat Progress From Grass Dog Studio

You can click on that image and see a larger version of it, and four images prior to it, but if you want to see all of my work on it to date, you should go here.

For those who haven’t heard through my LiveJournal or FaceBook accounts, it is a frock coat, very similar in design to the one that Malcolm Reynolds wears only baggier and not as long. Also, this one’s made out of medium weight heather gray Italian wool, and it will make me look like the Mayor of my own Wild West town (the kind of place where I’m also the Sheriff).

Right now, it’s a little further along than that last photo. It’s got two sleeves and they’re hemmed. I should take pictures of that. I’m now working on the sleeve headers and shoulder pads, and then I’ll tackle the lining. The lining is plaid (as you can see in the shots with the pockets) and also wool. This thing is going to be warm.

I’m thinking of making a second one for myself that will be more carefully tailored (and lighter weight). But I’ll be able to stuff sweaters and scarfs under this coat, and it looks like it might be done in time for my brother-in-law’s wedding.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

obovoid posted this, but I need to have it in my own journal:



Apparently, it's from www.writtenonthecity.com.

I've been taking pictures as I go, so I'll be able to show my process. But I haven't relocated my card reader, so it may be a day or two before I can post them.

But for now, I can describe where I'm at and how it's going.

I've got all the outer panels sewn together, including the sleeves, so it's very coat-like. In fact, if I wanted to, I could just wear it as is, though the raw edges would continue to fray and I'd look a tad silly. The arms came off (heh-heh) rather smashingly! I managed to sew them to the body with very little difficulty, and the seams look like those any one of my professionally done suit jackets.

I did make a goof here and there. One of the pleats on the back is off by almost a quarter of an inch. But most people won't notice these things, and they'll mostly be hidden by various well done parts of the coat. For instance, the top of the pleat will be under a large, shiny button.

But it does kind of make me want to get more wool fabric so that I can make another coat that's even better.

But first, I should finish this one. I still need to hem the right arm, and then I've got all the lining to do.

I just might get it finished in time for my brother-in-law's wedding...

click to visit larger image Rabit Dragon From Grass Dog Studio

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

I've started on my big sewing project of the year. Everything else will be small in comparison.

I've got a frock coat* pattern from Simplicity, and three and a half yards of medium weight heather grey Italian wool coating. And I've started to cut it out and sew it together. If I manage to do a decent job, I can already tell it's gonna be awesome. It'll be a sort of dress coat that I can wear as outer wear in the dead of winter. I'm lining it with more wool.

I'm thinking I'm also going to make a scarf for it out of the same fabric, just inside out, because the inner facing of the fabric is soft and fuzzy, and a lighter grey than the outside facing. Or maybe I'll make a hat out of the extra fabric. Or gloves. I might have enough extra fabric to make all three!

I really, really look forward to wearing this thing. I wore something similar for a play about eight years ago, and I've wanted one ever since.


* A frock coat is basically a long coat with extra pleats in the back, from what I can tell.

I have to pick a good monitor for my workstation at work.

Ultimately, I'd like a Cintiq. It's about the same price as mid to top of the line graphic design grade monitors, and would be handy. However, I suspect other monitors that don't have a Wacom tablet embedded in them may have better display qualities.

I've done a little shopping already.

Does anybody have any suggestions? (we use PCs at work)

click to visit larger image Mr. Supervisor couldn’t seem to remember where he’d placed his office. From Grass Dog Studio

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

My friends Phil and Cynthia just lent me Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need and I finished reading it today.

What’s fun is that I’ve already been following most of the advice in the book, which is why I am where I am today, I think.

What’s really good is that I think it just helped me to figure out how to keep this fantastic job I’ve landed.

That, and Dragonbreath by Ursula Vernon, which I also just finished on my lunch break. Same message, effectively, just from a different and far funnier angle.

I highly recommend both books. Now. Good read them.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

A comparison of world broadband usage, among other things, as posted by klitaka

My friend, cheapdialogue, found this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A43JOxLa5MM

I drew something today! I drew something today!

Actually, I just sketched out the script for a comic. Might even finish inking it at some point.

The thing is, so far, after a full day of graphic design I’m not really in the mood to create any visual art. I’m more interested in gaming or cuddling with my wife to watch our collection of Monty Python while refreshing Facebook.

However, it is my goal to not only keep up with the drawings, but to pursue the tagline of this blog, “Translating beauty with an array of complex machines.”

In the mean time, however, my three and a half yards of heather gray wool fabric just arrived, so I have a coat to sew!

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

My first week of full time week since 1996 is coming to a close. I finished three rush jobs and am closing in on a fourth. And despite that, the atmosphere at Superfeet seems very relaxed compared to other places I’ve worked. Not lazé fair by any stretch of the imagination. Poised, ready, focused, working. But not freaked out. There’s just enough time for a little friendly snarking.

A lot of my friends would feel quite at home there.

I haven’t had any time for my own artwork. Which is OK for this week, as I don’t feel the need to pursue it, emotionally speaking. But I do have a couple projects that need finishing, and I’m not sure how I’m going to squeeze them in with my new schedule. My weekends seem just as full as my weekday evenings.

However, I’m not going to fret about that until after a couple more weeks. Even when everything seems perfectly wonderful, it still takes at least three weeks, if not three months, for a new schedule to settle.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

I will not be checking my personal email or any of my personal social media accounts while at work. This means that webcomics will be read before or after work, too.

Also, my cellphone is set to vibrate during work hours. But I check it’s messages every hour or so.

So, if you need to inform me of something while I’m at work, a text message or phone call will work (you can find the number on my own business’ home page if you don’t already have it).

But I won’t answer.

If you want to get a hold of me directly, such as for a family emergency, call Superfeet and ask for me: www.SuperFeet.com

But I will return phone calls, emails and txts when I get off of work, so that is the preferred method of contact for most everything.

Thank you!

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

I wish I could better describe how my first full day of work went, but I’m still processing all of it. It was awesome, though.

I love my coworkers and my bosses, so far. The office dynamic feels really healthy right now, and continues to remind me of working at the Indy.

I’m working at an absent coworker’s station while they continue to set up mine. She has two monitors, which I hope very much I get to have, too. It really helps to keep the proofing process paperless!

And right after being briefed on my first two projects, a rush job fell into my lap pretty much first thing this morning! Which only served to make me feel right at home, like it’s production day at the paper (only with fewer obnoxious sales reps and a somewhat later deadline). More importantly, I was able to tackle it right away with professional diligence and disciplined procedure. Barring unforeseen circumstances, it’ll be done tomorrow.

And the Marketing Team (which I’m a member of) took me out to lunch at Oishii.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

I’m headed to my new job in about forty minutes. Gotta have coffee and breakfast and pack my lunch. Also probably a good idea to put my pants on.

I haven’t had a day job in a year and a half. This one is the first full time job I’ve had since before the dawn of the millennium. I don’t know how much time I’ll have for my own art. I don’t really feel the need for it these days, so I don’t expect it to be much of a shock. But I also suspect I’ll have more time and motivation for my own work than I expect.

I am working on one last Ten Dollar Dragon and a couple book covers, so you’ll see those eventually at least! Hopefully within the next couple weeks. But we’ll see.

As for comics, as I said, I’ve still got the itch to write them!

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

I didn’t do a terribly good job of staying away from the computer in the last couple of weeks, but I did get to a lot of the things I’d hoped to get done. So, in many ways, I’m in a better place today than I was two weeks ago.

One of the key things is that I start the new year with a job! I’m not going to be writing much about my job here, at least until I get a feel for the place. But I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’m now a full time, salaried graphic designer for SuperFeet Worldwide, Inc. So long as my drug test passes, that is (which I really see no reason it shouldn’t).

I’ve already filled out a lot of the paperwork, and on Monday I’m scheduled to take over two new projects which they say I get to “own.” I feel ready to tackle it all right now.

Ten years ago I had graduated from Whatcom Community College with a transfer degree and was living with my grandmother and providing general tech support and computer tutoring services to a number of her friends. When my primary client Joyce Pyle died of pneumonia I cast about for other work and ended up delivering pizza for three months at Moonlight Pizza, right next door to Trek Video. And then, when Moonlight Pizza went out of business, I walked over next door and started pushing videos. And that’s when Harmless Free Radicals started.

HFR has been such a huge part of my life for the past ten years that my new year is actually July 31st, the date I published the first comic.

Working on the comic lead to me being hired by Boundary Bay Brewery & Bistro to do their graphics. And there I did everything, including the beer labels you’ll see on the shelves today.

While I worked for Boundary I graduated from Western Washington University with a Bachelor’s degree in drawing. Shortly after that, I moved on from Boundary to pursue running my own business, Grass Dog Studio. That has been a terribly rocky road, almost completely unsuccessful, but almost completely worth it.

Somewhere in there I helped to start The Bellingham School of Comics.

Again, the comic (through the B.S.) eventually led me to be hired by another fine Bellingham establishment, The Whatcom Independent Newspaper, for whom I again designed everything, including a rework of the entire paper, and in which my comic was published. I won three awards from the Washington Press Association for my comics.

Unfortunately, the Indy closed their doors on June 12th, 2008, my brother’s birthday. And I’ve been self employed ever since. Until, officially, yesterday.

That’s ten years of my career. It’s really hard to avoid a lot of other crazy and awesome things cramming themselves in there as well.

I’m married, now, for instance, and a bit of a local celebrity in Bellingham (though not nearly as much as, say, Brent Cole of What’s Up!). I’ve made numerous great friends and actually finished some fine projects. I’ve bought people Christmas and birthday presents, which is new to me. I got my wife into a band, and now do the graphic design for them. I have nephews and a niece! Well, more than that if you count my cousin’s children. I’ve been in numerous plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Fear and Misery in the Third Reich (which was fucking intense). And I learned how to program in PHP and MySQL all by myself.

And I lost track of some of my best friends from my childhood. I don’t even know if they’re still alive or not. There is some reason to doubt with one of them.

And my grandmother died not long ago, the one whom I lived with for six years at the beginning of the decade.

Right about the time that my grandfather, her husband, died, I had a dream that my life would take a huge change around my 35th birthday. I hope it doesn’t. At least not in the wording that the dream put it. I don’t really believe in prophetic dreams, but that one was ominous and hard to ignore.

Part of my plan to roll with the blow, or to at least take some wisdom from the thought of that dream, was to drop Harmless Free Radicals on my 35th birthday. That’s the birthday coming up.

I am pretty much the same person I was ten years ago, with just a lot more things under my belt. I’m just as creative and driven as I once was, and just as flaky about pretty much the same things I was flaky about then. I’m working on the same kinds of things, too. But I have a better support network and now a better job. And I have someone to start building a family with.

I can’t really make any predictions about what I’ll do with my comics or what I’ll be driven to do, but I really don’t think I’m going to end up giving up my comic. It might be the healthy thing to do if I were pursuing a career in writing and cartooning. It would be good to work on other projects. But I seem to be happiest when working for other people, supporting other businesses, and keeping my story telling on the side.

And I do still feel this strong urge to bring the characters I’ve lived with for the past ten years further to life!

But I’m definitely ready for a big change. I’m hoping that this change will be the one I’m currently striving for. When it happens, you’ll know what it is.

At this point, readers of this journal and my comic know not to expect much of me. I’ve effectively been on hiatus for the past six months. And I think that’s going to continue. But at some point down the road, I bet I’ll feel the need to scribble out another comic, and you’ll see more work of that kind from me.

After all, I have stories to finish, and my brain hasn’t been able to leave them alone for more than a day since the Indy shut its doors.

But, for now, my new job gets my attention.

Happy New Year!

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!

I’ve developed a bunch of really bad habits with my computer usage. And I’ve been busy ingraining them into my neural pathways for the past countless years.

I can see pretty clearly this week that these habits are standing in the way of me being productive at anything.

I’m thinking that as of the rest of today, I’m going cold turkey until the end of the year. This means no Facebook, no twitter, no LiveJournal, no Teagan Goddard’s Political wire or FiveThirtyEight.com, no computer games, no computer artwork, no nothing on the computer if I can help it at all. Except maybe playing music, though I have alternatives for that as well. Yeah, no music. It’s time to use actual CDs for a while.

I will set up a couple email filters to send important messages to my cellphone, and only log in if those messages arrive during that time. Otherwise, you’re going to have to call or text me at (360) 223-2486 in order to let me know of anything happening.

This entry has been crossposted from Drawing Contraption. You may comment here or there, it\'s all the same!