Kelci D Crawford

Not gonna’ lie, I’m in the middle of a pickle. I have been for at least two months now.

See, I work as a caricature artist at an amusement park. It’s seasonal employment, so I would usually work until school started up again. For the last three years, I enjoyed my job. True, there were the occasional frustrating customers and rainy days that ruined business, but I loved what I did. I felt like I was bringing joy to people, and that meant something to me.

Then came this summer. My third year of doing this job. I’m graduated and out of school, so I could stick at this caricature job longer.

I’m starting to think it might have been a mistake.

Staying as long as I have this season made me really hate my job. I hated the customers after a certain point because they would complain about my drawing or say I drew their kids’ teeth weird or (this last one happens far more often than you think) start a line that would only end an hour after the park closes.

There are other reasons, too, but suffice to say, I was really starting to not like my job.

My friends and family keep saying, “But you’re being paid to draw! It’s what you love to do! And you’re making lots of money out of it!”

This is different.

For one thing, at this job, I’m drawing things that I don’t see myself drawing in one year, let alone five or ten. Caricatures is a skill, but once you develop a good sensibility of it, there’s not much else to learn from it. It’s a field that stalls after about two or three years because you know all the tricks, and the only way to get out of the funk is to break off of whatever company you work for and start your own business. But that’s a business growth, not really an artistic one. I feel that, at this point in my caricaturing career, I have learned everything I need to learn, and there’s nothing new, no matter what the veteran artists say.

For another thing, because I’m bored with caricatures, it’s obviously not what I love to do. What I genuinely love to do is make comics, telling stories through pictures. Comics never gets old for me, and even if I feel like I know everything, someone (this time around it’s my editor, Michael Marcus) will come over and remind me how much I still need to learn. That fires me up! I love not knowing everything in comics because I love to learn and I love to draw and keep drawing and achieving! I keep trying to do better in this field because that’s what I want to do. I want to make the best comic I can!

I don’t feel this way about caricatures. Especially at an amusement park, the mentality is more like, “Find customer. Draw them. Tell a few jokes. They pay. Move on to next customer. Do this in less than five minutes.” Lately, I had the good fortune to draw caricatures at an art festival, which felt different in some ways, but the set up only differed by a few degrees: “Customer approaches. Get them on waiting list. Draw them. Chat with customer to make them comfortable. Give them sketch. Move to next person on the list. Do this in less than five minutes.”

However, and I hope you let me indulge in a little aside here, drawing caricatures at an art festival is an entirely different game to drawing at an amusement park. In fact, I’m really tempted to leave my amusement park job and draw caricatures solely at art festivals. The crowds are different, for one thing: art festival folks tend to be more understanding of the artist and make less demands than amusement park crowds (“Can you draw copies of this sketch”ers and “can you draw a family of 9″ers, I’m looking at you). Plus, art festival crowds tolerate your personality quirks more. I sang a song about Nilla Wafer Top Hats for a 13-year-old girl at the art festival and people loved it! People at amusement parks tend to give the hairy eyeball more often than not.

That being said, caricatures still feels like a process, and it’s a process I’m not sure I want to do day-in-day-out for more than four months at a time. I could barely tolerate it after three. And it’s a process that doesn’t lend itself to improvement over time in any way.

For those of you readers who say I’m getting paid well to do this, you’re wrong. I’m being paid EXTRAVAGANTLY WELL to do this job. Trust me, I’m sitting on more money now after four months of working than I have ever earned in any job before this.

But here’s the thing, and my friend Casey made a good point of this last time we had lunch together: You can work a job that gets you lots of money, but what will you do with it? You can’t buy happiness. Trust me, you can’t. I might have all the anime I could ever want to watch and buy whatever food and clothes I want, but that just keeps me wanting more shit. I DON’T WANT MORE SHIT. I WANT TO ENJOY WHAT I DO. While I have made more time to make comics, I feel like now my job is preventing me from working on my comics! I miss being able to brainstorm story ideas while at my work place and getting paid for it!

Ultimately, that’s why I want to leave my caricature job and work somewhere new. I’ve worked in libraries, and I’ve worked as a janitor, and I am honestly comfortable with getting either of those jobs until I get my comics off the ground and in the hands of publishers or readers. Working as a librarian or janitor suits me well: I work independently and get my shit done, but I have the ability to think as I work and I get to think about my stories and my comics. Neither of those jobs pays very well compared to working as a caricature artist, but I know I’ll be happier. That’s what matters to me.

I said earlier in this blog post that I was in a pickle. Maybe I’m not in so much of one now, since I got these feelings off my chest, but it’s still a pickle: should I work a job I loved before and now barely tolerate to keep getting good money? Or should I leave for a lesser-paying but more satisfying job?

Especially with student loan bills coming in soon? I haven’t started getting them yet, but they’ll be starting around November. Those are an entirely separate panic attack.

I’m not too concerned about if my current employer find this blog post: I already made my concerns known to them. We’ve worked together to an extent to alleviate my boredom with the job, but my managers and I are both well-aware that this job as a caricature artist is only temporary. At most, I’ll be at this job until the end of October, and then I need to go somewhere new.

So….This blog post just turned into a giant emotion dump. Blurgh. Please forgive me.

No, comics on phones will not replace books.

There. I figured I should start this kind of post with the answer first, and then pull a Quentin Tarantino and tell about how I came to this conclusion.

It starts with a personal tale:

For my birthday last week, I upgraded my phone–At long last!–from a dumb-phone to a Motorola Razr. It’s fabulous.

As I was playing around with the apps, I discovered I could get Comixology on it, and better yet, I could download a preview issue of the fabulous “City in the Desert” by Moro Rogers, the newest comic from Archaia (nobody paid me to say this. Honest).

So I downloaded the first chapter of “City in the Desert” onto my phone.

At first, I was hesitant to because I’ve been rather adamant about keeping comics in physical form. I’m weary of webcomics more for technical reasons, and I’m personally biased to get actual books because I like their physicality: the weight, the new book smell, the page designs, the immediate reference for when you’re drawing and you want to see how the artist rendered this particular detail to use it in your work…

But I tried the comic on the smart phone.

And I liked it. That was what surprised me.

It’s a different experience: because phones are small, the comic can only be read one panel at a time, so it creates an almost slideshow effect. The panels transition well, plus it can zoom on particular details, and the speech balloons are actually readable. Thankfully, the art of “City in the Desert” is simple in style, and so it’s not cluttered on the screen at all.

It was fun to read the comic on the phone. It would certainly help pass the time when you’re stranded at a laundromat or something.

I think that’s the difference, though, between comics on phones and actual books.

The comic book can vary in numbers of pages and not have any severe consequences. Comics on phones, however, by nature, should be kept short: longer works take up more data space, take longer to download, and tend explore literature and art, where as comics on the Razr and such are usually there to help pass the time. A comic on a phone that tries to get into territory like “Maus” would have a hard time working on the phone, I think, because longer and/or more serious works require a little more emotional investment from the reader. It’s hard to emotionally invest in a comic that you can flip through effortlessly on a phone. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that it would be difficult.

Also, there’s the issue of page design.

On a phone, you can’t see the layout of a page because it’s displayed one panel at a time. If there is a larger panel or, rarely, a full-page spread, the phone has to take it in chunks. This is a problem for a comic that likes to have fun with page layouts, or construct page layouts into a particular pattern, like “The God Machine” by Chandra Free, or “Asterios Polyp” by David Mazzucchelli. The meaning of the page design can be lost if you only read it one panel at a time in these kinds of works.

I think, however, comics on smart phones are viable. It’s an area of the comics field that should be explored a little more. Maybe, with enough tinkering, I can be proved wrong about the assumption that phone comics can’t be taken seriously as art and/or literature.

I just don’t think that comics on phones are going to replace actual books anytime soon. As long as there are comics that want to be longer, larger, thicker, and have weightier themes, there will be comic books and graphic novels.

That’s just my opinion, anyway.

Why yes indeed! I started a facebook page for my art. You can like it here:

http://www.facebook.com/kelcicrawfordart

I’ll be sharing comics-in-progress, polls, and possibly even some discussions on art tools to use, if anybody is interested in that kind of thing. But I would like the Facebook page to be an open forum for me and my fans to connect and chat about things and share art.

The more I work with it, the more excited I get, and I hope you get excited about it too! So check it out. I already have a comic page in progress up on it, if you want to look.

Here’s the link again:

http://www.facebook.com/kelcicrawfordart

The Facebook page, like I said, is where I hope to get to chat with fans. I hope Twitter can be used for the same thing, but I like Twitter because it helps me talk to other comic artists easier, and also find other professionals and just chat. Tumblr is just fun to post sketches on, but I want to try and save that for mostly fanart and illustrations. I post all my art to deviantART and this blog. This blog here is where I hope to talk about my comics, other people’s comics, and share some in-depth posts about other miscellaneous dribble. After all, blogs can hold more words than social media posts. :D

That’s my plan, anyway, and it seems pretty legit to me.

But I hope you keep liking my stuff! Please feel free to share your stuff with me, and Don’t Forget to Be Awesome!

So I’ve been thinking of making a webcomic for a while.

I’m not sure what the story will be about yet. That’s why I’m brainstorming some schemes now and making a few sketches. Today I filled a sketchbook page with nothing but potential cast members of the new story (that’s the image above).

I’ve worked with the girl in the fedora and the girl with the braid on one side of her head before. They’re main characters in a mini-comic of mine, “The Messengers”, which I just finished the script for. The script was two years in the making, mostly because when I first started it the villain was of no interest to me, so I put it away for a while until I could approach it with new eyes. Now that I have it finished, I’m debating if I want to scrap the whole thing in favor of this new idea germinating in my head.

This idea, like I said, is still developing. Right now, there is a lot of thought concerning Muses, the Nine Art Forms as considered by the French, dreams, Egyptian and Greek mythology, and interconnected yet separate worlds a la Kingdom Hearts.

In other words, I have no idea what I’m doing yet.

So you know what I’m going to do?

Work on something else for a while.

I still need to finish the pencils for my submission to the IF-X anthology, and I’m making them extra nice because I intend to use them for a portfolio to send to some comic companies. So I think I’ll switch gears and work on them.

Usually, when I do that, ideas for other projects will whack me upside the head anyway. It’s funny when that happens: when you focus on one thing, your imagination goes off into the wilderness on its own and then finds an idea for you to use. It happens to me all the time.

If you have any suggestions or ideas of your own concerning the idea, please leave them in comments. I would love to hear from you.