Urr Nurr

Hello folks.

You may have noticed (yes, spammers, I’m talking to you) that I haven’t updated in a while. It’s fair to say that I haven’t been all that motivated. It’s something I’ve struggled with on and off for years, and every time I lose motivation I go quiet. Conversely, every time I have a wave of inspiration, I post some upbeat blog about how “everything is great, and I have big plans and yadda yadda”. Ultimately, it amounts to a couple of commissions and the odd ongoing comic book project, which, although I love the medium in a way, I can’t get majorly excited about for more than a couple of weeks at a time.

How’s this affect things? Well, with that kind of attitude, I’m never going to be a comic book artist, full-time. It’s time I faced up to this. The realisation that I’m not cut out for comic books I thought would be pretty depressing, but it’s liberating.

Here’s the thing: since the day I read that first issue of the Transformers comic, I’ve known what I wanted to do as a career. Whilst my schoolfriends and classmates scrabbled around to grasp something they might be suited for, I was happily drawing The Ultra-Bionic Wonder Sheep and handing out my own specialised versions of Top Trumps cards featuring the characters I’d created. I was set for life. This made me resistant to the more open-minded attitude I felt was being forced on me by my college tutors later on (Jim, the tutor I remember most for a) having a beard and a Greenpeace t-shirt, and b) supposedly refusing to accept that I wanted to be a mainstream comic artist — I really should track down and thank for at least trying to help me introduce some diversity to my work). As the years have rolled on, I’ve had a smattering of success. Marvel submissions were responded to personally and critiqued very well by Darren Auck (thanks, dude), my scripting work was accepted into an anthology which was never published (sad face), and the as yet unpublished Doxy Proxy tale I worked on in collaboration with Stephen Reedy might still have a home one day. Of course, there’s my Zuda entry My Daddy’s a Super-Villain! which is the brainchild of scribe supreme Scott O Brown. It’s a level of success that should be encouraging and would have any self-respecting comic artist dying to improve on.

I don’t feel that need.

While I’m committed to those two projects until completion (and make no mistake, I will complete them. I made a commitment and I won’t let anybody down), I won’t be taking on any comic book work from this day on. My last project is an upcoming Digital Webbing anthology book, for which my contribution will be the words and pictures of a short tale based on The Three Little Pigs. If you pick it up, you’ll get an idea of where my art is going after I’m done with comics.

But anyway, back to the ‘liberating’ part.

The immense weight off my shoulders went unnoticed until today. Literally today. At no point in the last three years have I been cheerier than I have been since I made the decision to leave the old dream behind. The prospect of not having to spend all of my evenings working in solitude is fantastic. That’s not to say I won’t be working at all, but the discipline that I’ve always struggled with won’t be as much of a factor. I say this now: no commercial or fine artist has to work as hard as the comic book artist. Key words: has to. It’s an existence which requires a dedication and a love for the industry that you either have or have not. I’m the latter, these days. My eleven-year-old self would kick me in the shins for saying that, but times change.

Think of all of the opportunities you miss when you have career tunnel-vision. The blinkers do nothing for an artist. I spent my twenties trying to become something I ultimately lost interest in. Lost faith? Maybe. But either way, it affects output. Since I decided to refocus, I’ve seen opportunities in everything. My initial desire was to illustrate posters for bands/concerts/venues. That’s certainly part of what I want to do, but why not t-shirts, wall art, flyers, logo design, book covers and all manner of applications? Hell, I want to design custom canvas trainers with marker pens.

What I haven’t thought about before, and I think artists as a whole should remember this: your art is the product. Don’t create art to fit into a hole. Of any shape. Create art that people want to put into their own holes (oo-er) and the result will be that your art is the star, rather than just another part of a medium or series.

I’m rambling a little here, but I need this to be understood. This is a great week. The best thing I ever did was give up my dream. And hey, there’s nothing stopping me from dipping my toes back in the ‘funnybook’ water from time to time (in fact, for quite a long time to come, this site will be one of the hosts of one of the aforementioned projects), but as a career: kaput.

So this blog will change. I say that as if there was actually a long history which gave this blog an identity, but still… there’s going to be a shift. I’ll post sketches and I’ll post art appreciation. I’ll update regarding how things are heading with regard to my new direction (thinking studio space, or coffee shop, or small indoor market stall may be in the immediate future). I hope this excitement shows through.

Speak soon.

Tags: art, comic books, dreams, happiness, posters, webcomics

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 9:31 pm and is filed under General, Ramblings/Musings/Rubbish, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.