One of the disadvantages of being very busy is that it’s difficult to do the work and still promote yourself.
Now honestly, I’d prefer not to have to do the “self promotion” thing at all. Sitting in my studio, working away on my little drawings and having someone else to do the horn blowing has always been my vision. Of course there are a few problems with that view already. First, there’s a level of self inflation in me wanting someone ELSE to do my promotion; as if even that were beneath me. Secondly, I’d have to convince someone else to have faith in my ability as an artist that I often lack myself. Third, who knows my work better than me? (Besides GOD, but he’s not likely to be writing a blog about my work.)
So, if I want to be truly humble, I pretty much have to do this myself: revealing my self doubt when the time is right, and speaking of the faith I have in my own abilities when that’s appropriate.
But I was speaking of the difficulty in being both busy and self promoting. I’ve been very busy lately. I’m inking an issue of Drastik for Robert Rowe, a self published writer from California. I’m also working steadily away at “Adam Among the Gods” for Aazurn Publishing, run by my webmaster over at ComicArtistsDirect.com. I’ve also got another PLUS™ story that I’m supposed to be working on for Joe Pruett at Desperado Publishing (although that’s a verbal agreement, and no deadline’s been set). So pretty busy, right?
There’s a problem with all of this. I either can’t, or don’t want to post work from those books here to promote myself. They’re all good pages in their own ways. I’m not saying that they don’t deserve public view; but they are each part of a greater work, and I don’t want to post them out of that context. Furthermore, Drastik and Adam are properties that I’m working on for other folks, who hope to sell them to the public at some point. I don’t want to spoil anything for them. (It should probably be noted that Robert and Gary are both such nice guys that they’d probably both say, “Oh no! Go ahead and post those pages if you want to!”)
But I still maintain that out of their proper contexts they should not be posted here. There are some fine points that I won’t go into relative to posting of those pages, but for now I don’t intend to post them.
Another difficulty that arises from being busy is that sometimes you get paid to do a job and then the money runs out before the work does. Many times it’s a half down, half on completion situation. So what do you do for rent when the money does run out?
I think I may have arrived at a solution. Not that it’s original with me or anything, I’ve seen other guys doing it, I’ve just never really applied the idea practically to my own needs.
What I’ve got in mind (and we’ll see how it plays out in days to come) is that I’ll work on the comics assignments during the week. Giving them as much time as I can in a day, and then on Saturday crank out some commission type work for art fans. I attempted to do so this past Saturday, and the result should be posted here somewhere.
I chose the WW subject again, simply because I had a third rough left over from the last time I was doing WW art. I did one for a commission, another for a friend’s Christmas present, and the third just languished in my notebook for the past couple of months. So I had an easy time pulling it out and inking it up this past Saturday. The colors…well, I fudged a little of my schedule to do those. Did those yesterday after I finished up inking a page of Adam.
You may note that the coloring technique is completely different from the one used on the last WW piece I posted. I just wanted to see if I could do something more traditional, and this is the result. I’m proud of both approaches, and since neither is for an actual WW book, nor are they intended to be displayed side by side (although that’s not a bad idea, when I think about it) I figure why not?
Anyway, hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll be able to turn out more work like this. I’ve got a long list of suggested characters from some brainstorming my agent and I did last year. I’ve got to get past the Batgirl and WW figures and on to some other subjects, just for the sake of variety.
If you see me at a show I may have some of these for sale. Or they may go up on eBay. Don’t know yet. Haven’t heard back from my agent. In the meantime enjoy.
Wonder Woman is ©DC Comics, Inc. Artwork by James E. Lyle
