Kelci D Crawford

Ho man have things been busy here!

COMICS!

Validation updated twice this week. And expect a new poster to come soon! (Design and sketches will be posted here and on the Tumblr).

Johnson & Sir are off-hiatus! See the newest strip over at the tumblr.
Also, Johnson & Sir will be moving over to their own website soon! Expect to see something new next Saturday. :D
“But wait! The tumblr! What about that? What will you do with it?”
It’ll become an ask blog for Johnson and Sir, where you can ask the characters anything you like.

And Mini-Comic Theater has concluded the first short story, “Shadow.” Check it out from the beginning! (I also took the time to redesign the site for it. Now it looks and works MUCH better). The next upcoming short story comic is “Strike”!

Bonus! Right now, The Legend of Jamie Roberts has clocked in at 391 pages! French the llama!

DEVIANTART!

New works this week include more warm-up sketches, a trade with my friend Casey of her character Haku, and a very wise old owl.

YOUTUBE!

Oh my gosh! I finally finished sharing my May Sketchbook in six parts! Golly that took too long

REDBUBBLE AND ETSY!

The very wise old owl from deviantART is now also a T-shirt or sticker!

And over at Etsy you can get another post-convention poster, The Queen of Crows, an original character of mine who also makes an appearance in the short story “Shadow” in Mini-Comic Theater! (Circularity: I am good at that).

TUMBLR!

I’ve been busy this week. Check out my social commentary piece, “If Feminism is Not Needed, Then…” And the Young Turks summed up my feelings on the Zimmerman case accurately.

And in less serious business, if you missed “Whose Line is it Anyway?” coming back on TV, I reblogged the first episode! Enjoy. :D

Also here’s an infographic on how to make the perfect story.

FRIENDS!

Check out Chloe’s short film! It’s cute and sweet and charming in its own way. She also shared some references on Tumblr for muscles and boots.

Scrollon, a comics-reading app that Christian helped to spearhead with Douglas Liefer, is making an appearance at San Diego Comic Con! And it’s now available for download at the iPad App store! It’s a really cool new way to read comics: instead of panel to panel, you read it like a scroll, with side to side swiping. Neat, huh?

Jeff shared a couple of cool comic pages you should look at, because they look AMAZING.

And Casey drew this really awesome Tron fanart! I am an absolute sucker for black shadows in art and just looking at it makes me go “ADVHDJASKNVLA.”

RECOMMENDED READING!

The books and comics I finished reading this week and enjoyed the most were:
The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell
Girls with Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto
Unnatural Creatures, stories selected by Neil Gaiman.

THAT’S ALL FOR NOW!

Thank you for your support, and Don’t Forget to Be Awesome!

I’m going to try doing this thing where here, on this blog, I share all the progress, projects, and comics made in the last week. I’m hoping this’ll be a fun way to keep all of you in the loop. :D

So let’s get right to it!

COMICS!

Validation is officially online and updates every Monday and Thursday. We’ve been getting some good feedback already from readers, including a feature on MTV Geek’s Top 5 Webcomics You Missed This Week in the #1 spot! You should hop on over and check out what all the buzz is about.

Johnson & Sir will be coming off of hiatus the next week, with a change to the schedule: formerly it updated on Tuesdays, but now it updates on Saturdays, along with another webcomic…

Mini-Comic Theater! It’s now officially on the web, and will showcase the mini-comics I made for other anthologies and for conventions. Right now it updates every Saturday, but bonus pages will be added every Wednesday, should any come along.

The Legend of Jamie Roberts is still being scripted, and now it’s up to 372 pages! It’s still slated as a webcomic release for November of this year. I posted some teaser sketches from the script on deviantART and Tumblr.

STORES!

I no longer have a Storenvy store. Sorry.

But I DO have an Etsy store and a RedBubble store, both launched this week. New pieces will be added over the next week, including some cool new T-shirt designs in the works. ;D

While you’re at it, if you’re a big fan of Legend of Zelda, go check out my friend Melanie’s RedBubble! She makes great tees, including this one that I bought recently.

DEVIANTART!

Three new art pieces were added to my deviantART page, including Dragonball Z Convention Stickers, the Validation Poster, and the aforementioned Jamie Roberts teaser sketches.

Still currently working on a trade with my friend Casey. It’s 90% finished!

If you would like to be featured in the deviantART news section of later Weekly Updates, just leave a comment here, on deviantART, or send an email. I would like to feature other artists in the future.

TUMBLR!

Aside from the teaser sketches, other notable posts include a reblog of wonderful reference photos of Bengal Tigers, a silly music video by a trans singer, and beekeeper news and how you can help with the alarming number of deaths of bees (please don’t disregard this: as silly as it sounds, bees are humans allies, and the fact that many are dying because of pesticides that we are using should warn us about the state of our crops).

On a lighter note, my friend Chloe shared this wonderful art tutorial on how to draw hands holding swords, and she said some kind and awesome things about Validation.

John Liver also has some awesome art up on his blog, which you should check out.

And Christian Beranek, my lovely writing partner, shared this fun and curse-filled tip sheet on writing awesome work.

THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK!

Next week will be more Validation, more Mini-Comic Theater, new Johnson & Sir, some cool new T-shirts, and hopefully more awesome things from my friends!

See you again this week, and Don’t Forget to Be Awesome.

Today is the official launch of the webcomic Validation!

Written by Christian Beranek (founder of The Webcomic Factory), the story follows Ally, a transgender girl trying to love a normal life with a little help from her friends.

I hope you dig!

I’ve been pondering this question for a while, mostly because I’m debating whether I want to start one of my own.

See, back in the olden days before blogs became non-eyesores and everything looked like basic HTML code and CSS was barely conceived of, newsletters seemed like a cool option for keeping interested persons in the loops, concerning the goings-on of whoever ran the newsletter.

Newsletters also became relatively quick and cheap tools for selling one’s stuff through. Often messages would say something to the tune of, “Hi! I’m that artist that does that thing at the Brick and Bot festival you went to months ago. I made a thing! You should get it!”

Some newsletters I see today still have that structure of “Hi I’m that person I made a new thing come and get it PLEASE come and get it.”

But I don’t want to be desperate.

Thankfully there are some newsletters out there (like Marie Forleo’s) that don’t have sales pitches every chance they get. They’re often just like blog entries or just have a video clip. Heck, Todd Carey sends newsletters where the only message is, “Thanks for your support because you’re totally awesome!”

But I also wonder who signs up for newsletters anymore?

Am I the only person who still signs up for those things when I come across an interesting person?

Because I would LIKE to MAYBE have a newsletter of my own. Nothing fancy. Have you seen the John and Hank Green newsletter that launched recently? That’s the epitome of “nothing fancy”, but it gets the point across.

I want to do something similar to THAT: a newsletter to let you know what’s going on on the interwebs with me and some cool peeps I know (like Chloe or Jeff), clue you in on things you maybe never knew you wanted, or just point you in the direction of how to decrease the amount of suck in the world.

I honestly like sharing that kind of stuff, with as many people as possible.

But I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter before I jump the gun, get onto MailChimp, and sign up for something phenomenally disastrous.

As I’m writing this, it’s the eve of July, which means you’ve probably been out of school for a while. But I know there are some students who aren’t finished until the Summer Semester or Fall Semester.

Hey, it’s college. You can graduate when it’s best for you and your degree.

For me, it’s been a full year since I graduated from college.

And within that year, for me, a lot has happened:

I’ve gained and lost jobs, I started paying back student loans, I got a boyfriend, I moved twice, and I started freelancing and got some good gigs.

But I realized: when you graduate from college, nobody really tells you what your life will be like within the first YEAR outside of school. They just give general, life-long advice, like do what you love, empathize with others, and all that other bull.

Instead of doing that, I want to share with you what I wish someone had told me when I graduated from school last year. I hope that this can help you with the first year after you graduate, because that year is the toughest.

1. Keep your college friends. With Skype and email, it’s much easier.
2. Keep calm, but it’s still ok to cry.
3. Don’t Forget to Be Awesome.
4. PLEASE don’t forget who you are. It’s really easy to get caught up in petty grievances in the “real world” (like, arguing with someone about your place in the ticket line, or fighting over the last biscuit). Those grievances don’t matter. But don’t forget where you stand on the things that matter to you.
5. About the subject of work and employment: CALM THE FUCK DOWN RIGHT NOW. You will figure it out as you go in life. Just because your current job sucks or even if your job is the best thing ever, it doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it for life. You WILL change jobs. And sometimes you will change jobs a lot.
6. Remember: we’re young. Most of us traditional students are in our twenties by the time we graduate. We have at least another 70 years to do shit. DON’T BE IN SUCH A RUSH.
7. Ignore the philosophy of YOLO, unless you’re actively avoiding dangerous events. i.e. “I think I won’t go skydiving, because YOLO.”
8. You’re not a grown-up until you decide it for yourself. Adulthood is not an achievement to unlock in a video game, and it’s not easily broken up into stages. Life has no hard edges. Life often blends in together. But it’s a wonderful, chaotic, beautiful blending.
9. The sudden realization that you and your parent belong to the same societal ranking of “legal adult” may take some getting used to, by all of you. And that’s ok. Take your time and respect each other’s boundaries.
10. If you have a problem, SAY SOMETHING.
11. Welcome the idea of getting lost.
12. Life is not what happens to you. Life is what you choose to do about it.
13. Always carry napkins with you.
14. For god’s sake, learn to cook something that’s NOT mac’n’cheese or Ramen. Your body will thank you.
15. Eat some goddamn fruits and veggies.
16. You know how school (both college and pre-college) instilled in us that we should do what we’re told and be good workers and push pencils and we’ll be rewarded for our efforts? That system doesn’t exist (unless you’re in the military). We have to learn an entirely new system of doing things, one that everyone else conveniently didn’t tell us. I think it involves doing things we’re not asked to do and not being dicks to people. But we have each other to help us figure out the rest.
17. Collaborate.
18. Communicate.
19. Read all those books that you said you would read while you were in school.
20. Do all the things you said you would do in your undergrad years.
21. If you don’t know how to do something, ask Google. If you don’t know how to do something but don’t want to read words, go to YouTube.
22. Please keep in touch with your old professors. They’re probably worried about you.
23. The traditional way of doing things (getting a job, getting a significant other, etc) are no longer relevant. Set your own rules, be a good person, and go into the world. If you need encouragement, I’m here.