Featured Artist Friday: Jeff Laclede

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQUXFFm1YWA

This is the revival of a segment that used to be called “Favorite Artist Friday,” but it’s now called Featured Artist Friday.

Once a week, on a (surprise!) Friday, I’ll be writing about another artist. It doesn’t matter what medium or subject matter they choose. Any artist may be featured.

This week, I would like to talk about one of the coolest artists I know, Jeff Laclede.

Jeff is a digital painter, comic artist, and character designer. He is also, I dare say, masterful with his use of colors.

Every time I see one of his pieces, I am impressed with how well he lights his work, and how that light affects his subjects. Lighting is NOT easy, but Jeff makes it look easy, which is the mark of an excellent artist.

Not only does he illustrate very well, he is also an excellent writer.

His current comics project is a webcomic called El-Indon. And it grabs you by the first page.

el indon webcomic page 1 by jeff laclede
El Indon, page 1.

And it gets better from there! His characters, aside from being well-designed and memorable, are hilarious.

el indon webcomic page 9 by jeff laclede
More El-Indon

He also a great world-builder. As you read his comics you can get sucked into the world he’s creating and the intrigue within it. And a lot of that is thanks to his attention to character, great page layout design, and thematic lighting and tones.

He even succeeds in all of this in his illustrative work!

jeff laclede digital art

jeff laclede digital art

If you haven’t read El-Indon yet, you should. While you’re at, go follow Jeff on Tumblr and Twitter. He’s loads of fun to follow.

Thank you for reading, and I will see you on Monday.

A 5-Part Update

This post is coming to you in 5 Parts, so let’s get right to it!

Part 1. If you did not see it yet, I finally posted something on the Women Warriors Project. You can check that out here.

Part 2. My awesome friend Chloe sent me volumes 1 and 2 of The Heroic Legend of Arslan and I am SUPER EXCITED, because we both mutually love Hiromu Arakawa and it’s great to see her work on other manga.

the heroic legend of arslan manga volumes 1 and 2 and jak and elsa fanart
Chloe also sent me some fanart a classmate of hers made, which also looks fabulous.

I’m going to write and post a review of volume 1 this upcoming Tuesday, reviving a feature I introduced last year, “Review Day Tuesday.”

Speaking of recurring segments on the blog, that brings me to,

Part 3. Favorite Artist Friday!

I’m going to rename this feature “Featured Artist Friday,” so it’s not just my favorite artists being featured.

Featured Artist Friday is going to feature lots of different types of artists. So expect to see comics artists, painters, mixed media artists, sculptors, or just people I find while I flip through my stack of business cards I’ve accumulated over the years from conventions.

Speaking of art, though,

Part 4. New Mini-Comics!

I made and finished a new mini-comic recently called “Duck for Dinner.” It’s a short little autobiographical story.

duck for dinner mini comic
Duck for Dinner… the mini-comic!

It’ll be up for sale on Storenvy soon.

If you would like a digital copy of the comic for, say, $0.99 (US Currency) please leave a note in the comments. I’ve been thinking of offering short 99 cent digital comics for sale through Gumroad, but let me know what you think?

Speaking of Storenvy, though, that leads me to,

Part 5: Crafting Stuff!

So I had a ton of excess paper and decide to bind some new books (because bookbinding is one of my new hobbies). I used a new technique I found the other day called the Slot-&-Tab method, which requires no thread or gluing.

bookbinding handmade books slot and tab method
Hand Made Books!

The thing is, I don’t have a use for these (although I’m keeping the grid paper book), so I’m thinking of selling them as filler notebooks or something on Storenvy. If you’re interested in getting one of these, drop a comment below.

And if you would like to see a tutorial, let me know about that, too, in the comments.

So what other things am I crafting?

Well, I have some T-shirts I don’t wear anymore…

t shirts
These shirts either don’t fit me or are just too bland.

I’m going to repurpose these into tote bags. Because tote bags are awesome, and you can totes (HA) use them in lieu of plastic bags when you shop, which is my favorite thing to do.

I’m not confident enough in my sewing skills to consider selling the finished totes, though, so it may be a while before I offer any for sale.

That’s all for today, but come back tomorrow, when I talk about a new artist for Feature Artist Friday!

Updates on Superhero Ladies and Women Warriors

jen cho nagatana superheroine original character art
Jen Cho, aka Nagatana (click to enlarge)

The Superhero Ladies project is coming along nicely! I have 17 ladies already drawn and the month of January isn’t even over yet. Hopefully I can keep up the good work and have lots of awesome superheroines by the end of the month.

There’s a few characters in the project that I’m thinking of branching off into their own stories, or maybe even comics. So who knows?

Another project I’m working on is one I’m reviving from hiatus.

The Women Warriors Project.

I put it on hiatus for a few reasons.

  1. At the time, there was a lot of freelance work going on and I couldn’t update it consistently.
  2. It was hitting an artistic wall, where I felt like every piece I made for the series was getting worse.
  3. I wanted to experiment more with tools like watercolors and acrylics, and I didn’t have the resources or time to do it at the time.

But I’m bringing it back! With a few changes.

Firstly, there will be a new finished painting every month. Acrylic, watercolor, doesn’t matter. It’ll be a painting.

As progress is made on the paintings, I’ll be posting them on the Women Warriors Project blog. The intention is to make a chronological series of posts, showing a painting from initial sketch to finished piece. Tonight I made a sketch to develop an idea for the first painting, so expect to see it on the blog soon!

Know any cool historical women warriors? Leave their names in the comments below!

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

10,000 Mistakes and Why You Should Make Them

teapot set at focus exhibition bowling green state university
A pot from the FOCUS Exhibition at Bowling Green State University in 2008…or 2009.

As I’m writing this blog post I can’t help but think of all the posts I have written that have been scrapped. I have written and scrapped well over 20 blog post since I started updating consistently. I also made a video blog today, and scrapped that.

And it makes me feel like a failure because I’ve made these things and none of them work.

But there are little ideas within those failures that I feel like I want to revisit and build upon.

Today I want to talk about failure.

Failure is something that not a lot of people like to talk about. Some people actively encourage failure but they don’t talk about how that feels, and I’m going to say yes, it does suck.

It makes you feel like everything that you make is terrible, and if this thing you made is terrible then maybe everything else that you have made is awful too. It’s a quick path to beating yourself up and thinking you’re not good enough.

But you gotta take that energy (or what little you have left of it) and keep moving forward.

I’m actually (this will sound banana pants crazy) grateful that I failed today. Because even though I did fail in writing blog posts, I got an idea out of it, out of the things that I failed to make, and hopefully that will lead to a successful blog post or video blog.

It reminds me of the adage that was coined in my time as a caricature artist at Cedar Point. It was based off of the 10,000 hour rule.

There is a rule coined in the book Outliers that said if you practice something for 10,000 hours then you’ll become a master of it.

The caricature department took this and said when you start drawing caricatures you will draw 10,000 terrible faces before you draw a good one.

So get those 10,000 faces out now as quickly and as creatively as you can. Learn from them. Keep making terrible faces. And after 10,000 times you’ll start to get good.

I’m still making comics. I’m still making blog post. I haven’t quite reached the 10,000 benchmark yet for either of them but I have noticed that the more often that I do something, the better I get at it.

So the more blog post that I write the better I get at writing them. The more comics that I make the better I get at making comics.

Not every comic or blog post has to work, but you have to get it out of your system. Because once you get the bad work out of the way you move on to the next thing. And maybe the next thing will be good.

This conundrum of failure, and making 10,000 of something before you can get good, reminds me of a scenario from the book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. The scenario took two sets of pottery students. The professor told the first set of students they had a whole semester to make one very good pot. Then they told the second set of students they had to make as many pots as possible. This was done to see who would make the better pots – the students who focus on one pot the whole semester or the students who made as many pots as they could.

teapot from FOCUS exhibition bowling green state university
From the FOCUS exhibition at Bowling Green State University in 2008…or 2009.

They found that when students focused on making the perfect pot, the pots actually turned out worse. Because the students spent all of their time agonizing over how to make the pot perfect, artistically and aesthetically, and didn’t actually make it until the very end.

However, when students were encouraged to make as many pots as possible, they found that the more pots students made, the more great pots they had at the end. Not every pot was a masterpiece, but they had more great pieces than the students who made only one pot after agonizing over how to make it perfect.

And if you take anything away from this, I hope it’s that: that torturing yourself over making something perfect is not worth it.

Because there’s another masterpiece waiting for you, within you, already.

So make as much work as you can. Make as many mistakes as you can. And keep creating.

Because with every mistake you make, you’ll also make something brilliant.

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Yes, There Are Cliques in Comics

“How do I break into comics?”

There’s lots of advice out there for breaking into the comics industry, but the most popular idiom is “Are you making comics? Then congratulations! You’re in the comic industry!”

But thanks to a Twitter conversation I was a part of recently, I’m starting to approach this question from another angle.

The tweet that started the conversation was…

That’s something a lot of comic artists will NOT tell you. Because yes, there are cliques in comics, and yes, it can seem like there’s a frat-boy mentality going on.

This is especially noticeable if you are, or identify as, a woman, because some cliques will treat you very differently and talk to you in different ways.

For example, I was part of a circle for a while, and in this circle was an editor (who will remain nameless, as he’s not really in the comics scene anymore). I was talking about how to attract more attention to your table in Artist Alley, when this editor suggested, “Just show off your boobs!”

I don’t talk to this guy anymore.

There’s tons of stories like this, some mild (like mine), some nightmare-ish.

However, not every comics group is like this.

From what I have observed from conventions and conversations online, it seems that there are at least 11 broad cliques in comics. Yes. 11 of them. They are…

Tired Comics Veterans – you can tell who these guys are because they tend to be over the age of 40, still drawing superheroes, decrying the presence of cosplayers.

Enthusiastic Comics Veterans – few and far between, as many comics veterans are quite jaded. Those who are not, though, are an…interesting bunch.

Children’s Comics Creators – While I haven’t met very many people in this clique, they tend to be female (though not always). They aren’t afraid to branch into unusual products to sell with their comics, like plushies. These people tend to be the nicest.

Webcomic Creators – perpetually broke but love the comics medium, and will talk about comics with anyone eager to chat with them. They are also eager to please, and are easily amused.

Webcomic Creators That Make Money – the rarest unicorn in real life and on the Internet. They discourage anyone else from making comics because they KNOW it is a slow, soul-torturing slog.

OEL-Manga Creators – are slowly dying out and phasing into other cliques. Those who stay within this clique are hardcore and know little of what’s going on outside of their circle.

Artists for the Big 4 – The Big 4, in this instance, are Marvel, DC, Image, and Dark Horse. Cannot be approached by mere Muggles. In fact, you’re not 100 percent certain they’re real, because you never see them and you only hear about them through podcasts and seeing their names on comic books. They might as well be Yetis.

Indie Comics Creators – the most nebulous bunch, as “Indie” is defined differently according to each person, and even each clique. The Indie crowd can be seen most often at small-press conventions and in Canada (why? No one knows, but there are many theories). Generally seen as standoffish and pretentious, and while many of them are, a few don’t mean to be.

Lonely Self-Publishers – think they are Artists for the Big 4, or even aspire to join that clique. Tend to gravitate towards places that Artists for the Big 4 hang out. Usually in desperate need of going to art school, but refuse to for a variety of reasons, none of which are excusable. Often do way more work than they should. They also hang out with…

Pin-Up Artists – draw all pin-ups and only pin-ups. Could not tell a story to save their life. Usually they have someone else do the talking for them, as they are too soul-crushingly awkward to talk themselves. But there’s a gem of a story within them that aches to come out, even if that story is a terrible one.

And finally…

Small-Press Zine Creators – a strange little group that branched off the Self-Publishers who don’t want to become an Artist for the Big 4, but tell stories too strange, personal, or downright awful to be considered an Indie Comic Creator. Small Press Creators tend to be hobbyists, and many of their works are passive-aggressive jabs at their day job, or autobiographical works.

Of course there are cliques within cliques. That’s what happens when people of like minds gravitate towards each other. There will also be groups of people who are just assholes. With this new-found knowledge, you must remember:

You cannot be friends with everyone, and you should not be expected to. You are the master of your choices, and you choose the people you hang out with. So choose wisely and thoughtfully.

So when I hear somebody say “I want to break into the comics industry,” do you mean actually making comics, or finding a clique that’s right for you?

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.