Devious Journal Entry
I will be posting a longer blurb about this tomorrow, but I am thrilled to finally be able to share the news that I have been nominated for an Aurora Award by the Canadian Science Fiction & Fantasy Association for my live art-blogging done during my read-through of Chadwick Ginther's fantastic Thunder Road trilogy. For those unfamiliar with the Auroras, they are, essentially, the Canadian equivalent of the America Hugos, which makes this an incredible honor. You can read all about the awards, and the CSFFA here: www.prixaurorawards.ca/aurora-… and you can find the first two books of Chad's gripping tale of prairie Pulp fantasy at fine book sellers everywhere. #yearofdrawing #auroraawards #csffa #thunderroad #thunderroadtrip #chadwickginther #auroraprix
Happy Trails to You
Happy Trails To You
Howdy all, happy Friday, and welcome to the final entry of my weekly comics and art blog!
Roughly one year ago, as part of my second Year of Drawing exercise, I decided to try writing a weekly blog in addition to my daily drawing, to give me an outlet to write about comics and the creation thereof.
With this entry, that blog component of my second Year of Drawing comes to a successful close, and I thought it appropriate to take a look back at the past year and see how the work done in 2014 compares to what I had planned, back in January, 2014.
So That Was 2014?
In January this year, I set the goal of drawing at least an hour a day (as I did in 2013), completing a comic strip or page per week, and writing a weekly blog entry of roughly 1000 words.
As of this writing, I have completed 358 days of drawing and I think I can safely say that I will manage to find an hour to draw on each of the days remaining in 2014.
To date, I have completed 191 separate drawings in 2014 (up from roughly 130 last year), of which 59 are completed strips or pages. That makes for an average of slightly over one completed piece per week, which is actually more than I thought (I fell behind on the weekly strips in March or so. I did not think that I managed to catch up).
With those numbers in mind, I believe I can declare the drawing aspect of my 2014 Year of Drawing a success.
Turning to the writing component, I am happy to report that, with this entry, the blog component of my Year of Drawing has come to a successful close. In the past 52 week, I have written over 52,000 words (or roughly 210 pages) on a variety of topics including inking and colouring in comics, Pulp heroes, horror comics, and the experience of doing work for hire.
As such, I am proud to say that I achieved all the goals I set for myself at the beginning of 2014, and I can declare my Year of Drawing for 2014 a resounding success.
The Lessons of 2014 and the Goals for 2015
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I will not be continuing to maintain the weekly written component of this blog in 2015. While I am proud to have maintained a weekly writing schedule, it has proven to be more of a chore than I thought it would be.
Further, more often than thought, I had a hell of time trying to think of something to write about each week and often ended up writing about whatever I was working on at the time. There is nothing wrong with that kind of journal-style blog, but it was not what I had intended my weekly blogging to be.
For 2015, I will be continuing my daily hour of drawing, but I will not be keeping track of my completed comic pages or strips. Instead, I plan to focus on improving my fundamental skills and worry less about my overall output.
To that end, I plan to devote each month to a different artistic focus, like perspective drawing, depicting anatomy, graphic design, and landscape work (with painting being the first focus, for January).
I will also be working with some friends from my local Drink and Draw group to complete an anthology comic set in the world of my Justitia Divum strip. I am looking forward to seeing those talented guys draw my words as pictures and will be looking for other writing opportunities in 2015.
On a related note, 2015 will be the first year I will be attending comic conventions as an exhibitor. I currently have a table booked for the Winnipeg-based Central Canada Comic Con, and I am on the wait list for Calgary’s Comic & Entertainment Expo (and will be on Edmonton’s Comic & Entertainment Expo wait list, come January, 2015). I will be selling prints of my work at these conventions and hope to have the Justitia Divum anthology I mentioned above completed and available for sale by the time of the Winnipeg con, in October.
Finally, in terms of my writing, in addition to the work I will be doing on comics projects, I will be launching a weekly blog where I will be writing about another interest of mine, tabletop roleplaying games.
To be clear, I will still be posting my daily drawing on Instagram, Tumblr, Deviantart, Facebook, and Twitter, it is only the written component of this year’s Year of Drawing that I will be putting to bed.
My new blog will be entitled “Dungeon Musings” and will be found at dungeonmusings.wordpress.com/ or followed on Twitter as @dungeonmusings.
Unlike the past year’s weekly blog, I will not be setting a minimum word length or restricting myself to a set range of topics for this blog (other than the fact that they will all relate to tabletop RPGs), nor will I be restricting myself to a weekly entry (if I have content to share, it’ll be posted to the blog). These blog entries will include thoughts on tabletop gaming, articles with original content for use by other players and/or dungeonmasters/gamemasters, and updates from my own home campaigns (including links to recordings of my group’s biweekly sessions). I already have a bunch of content ready to post on that blog, so I hope to hit the ground running on that project, once it goes “live” on January 1, 2015.
Until We Meet Again
That is how things have been for the past twelve months and how they look for next twelve. This past Year of Drawing has been a terrific experience and I believe it has helped me improve both the quality and quantity of my artistic output, and I look forward to challenges and experiences that 2015 will bring.
Finally, for those who have been readers of this blog throughout 2014 (whether sporadic or regular readers), I thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts, and I hope to you enjoy what I will have to offer in the coming year.
And so, that brings this Year of Drawing to a close. I hope the holidays have been good to you and I wish you all the best in the New Year.
As for me, I have some drawing to do.
Yours very truly,
Kevin B. Madison
#yearofdrawing #comics #comicstrip #writers #writing #blog #bloggers #blogging
The Line it is Drawn Try-Outs
Howdy All!
Voting is now open for the artists trying out for Comic Book Resources' weekly The Line it is Drawn column.
Since I am one of the artists trying out in this contest, I would greatly appreciate it if you could take a moment to click through to cast a vote (you can vote for as many or as few of the participants as you'd like and the voting is all anonymous).
You can find my two pieces on page six and you can cast your vote on page nine (you can navigate through the pages at the bottom of the page).
My apologies for the FB spam, but I appreciate any votes that may be cast my way.
Thanks all and I hope the holidays are treating you well!
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This week finds me in kind of a panic, as I am out of town for work for one night/day, and I have been scrambling to be ready in time to fly for the holidays on the 19th (in fact, I will likely be midair, en route to my hometown when this posts).
To make matters worse, thanks to me being an idiot, I am actually flying home a day earlier than I thought I was, which I only discovered this week.
With that many things going on, and bearing in mind that I will be saving my 2014 retrospective for next week’s entry, I find myself without much time to devote to this blog entry and, in any event, without much to comment on anyway.
I suppose one interesting thing that happened over the last week was that I submitted the first of two pieces I will be offering as part of a “try-out” for the weekly art blog that Comic Book Resources hosts, called The Line it is Drawn.
You can read about the try-out here: goodcomics.comicbookresources.… and you can see the first week’s submissions here (there are a ton of great artists trying out): goodcomics.comicbookresources.…
The last time that blog had try-outs, three years ago, I ended up dropping out of the contest after the first week, due to the fact that it did not look like I would be able to find the time needed to draw for the blog each week.
Fast forward three years, and I find myself nearly done a second year where I have found an hour each day to create art. With those years (nearly) behind me, the challenge of creating a weekly drawing now seems a lot less daunting than it did three years ago.
I hope the holidays are good to you all and that I will see you back in seven days for the final installment of the 2014 art blog!
Until then, I have some drawing to do.
Yours very truly,
Kevin B. Madison
#yearofdrawing #comics #comicstrip #writers #writing #blog #bloggers #blogging #batman #walterwhite #breakingbad #breakingbat #iamtheonewhoknocks #imbatman #iambatman #tomstrong #thelineitisdrawn
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Howdy All and Happy Friday!
With three blog entries left until the end of 2014, I thought I would spend this week writing a bit about what I have learned from this year’s blogging exercise (I will save a retrospective look at 2014’s Year of Drawing exercise for the year’s final entry) and talk a bit about what I have planned for the coming year.
The Joy in Writing is Having Written
The goal that I set at the start of the year was to write one blog entry, every week of the year, with an average minimum length of 1000 words per entry. I have managed to achieve that goal, but, for more weeks than I care to admit, this has proven to be more of a chore than I thought it would be, for a number of reasons.
For one, I seemed to always manage to wait until the last second to get these blog entries written, which meant that my Thursday nights were always spent writing my weekly entry. These took an average of three hours to write, meaning that I had four hours of creative work to get done, every Thursday night (including my hour of drawing). This made it tough to make any plans for those evenings (except for the rare occasions when I write the blog beforehand) and often made for late nights on Thursday which, in turn, led to rough mornings on Friday.
In addition, while I was able to touch on a few comic or art related topics in the early part of the year, the blog ended up becoming more of a weekly update on “here’s what I am doing and here’s what I plan to do.” I suppose there is nothing wrong with that sort of blog, but I would have felt more satisfaction with this exercise, if I had completed more topical blog entries, where I wrote about some specific issue related to comics or comic strips, rather than the “slice of life” entries that I often referred to, disparagingly, as “navel gazing” on my part.
To be clear, I do not mean to cast aspersions on any other blogger who posts those kinds of entries (to each his or her own), I just hoped to have more to say in this blog than to describe the lessons I was learning, personally, in the course of doing my second year of drawing.
That said, one of the reasons this blog felt like so much of a chore most weeks is because it is damned hard to come up with new comic or art related topics to write about each week (or, more accurately, it was hard to come up with something interesting to write about concerning those topics each week).
I managed to find a few topics that interested me at the beginning of the year (colouring in comics, horror as a genre in comics, and inking, to name a few), but I felt like that well ran dry fairly quickly and I ended up scrambling each week to figure out what I was going to write about.
With that in mind, I can confidently say that one of the lessons I will draw from this experience (and there I go about lessons again…), is to recognize just how much work goes in to maintaining a weekly blog. My hat is off to those folks who are able to maintain that pace of creative output. However, with the end of this year’s blogging exercise coming to a close, I believe that I can safely say that I am not one of those folks, and I will not continue my weekly art blog in 2015.
Setting a New Course for Writing
While I will not be maintaining my weekly written art blog in 2015, I fully intend to continue my daily hour of drawing, and will be kicking off my third “Year of Drawing” exercise on January 1, 2015. I will talk more about those plans in two weeks, in the last entry for 2014, but I can say now that I will be continuing to post my daily drawings on the various sites I have been, over the past two years, including Tumblr and DeviantArt.
In addition, I am going to start up a new weekly written blog, but it will not have anything directly to do with comics, my art, or my Year of Drawing. I will be posting more about those plans in the coming weeks, but one thing I can say is that I will not be setting myself a minimum word count on those entries, nor will I be restricting my areas of discussion in that blog, in the same way that I did for this past year’s blog entries.
Finally, I plan to use part of the free time that I am gaining, by putting my weekly blog entry to bed, to do more creative writing. I have some projects in the works right now where I will be supplying the scripts that someone else will be drawing, but, in order to move those projects forward, I need to have the time to write (and edit) those scripts to get them in the hands of those artists.
With all of that in mind, while I will not be continuing on with this sort of written weekly blog entry, I plan to continue the rate of my written output and just change the nature of that output.
When all is said and done this year, I will have managed to write roughly 52,000 words for this blog, which represents just over 200 pages of writing (more than both my Honours’ and Master’s theses combined). Since writing is not my only creative outlet (I spend far more time drawing in a given week than I do writing, at least in my private life), I feel that that is a respectable achievement, and certainly more than I have written in any given year, in the past. If I can manage to maintain that output in 2015, but shift it into some of the projects I have mentioned above, this time next year I will be able to look back on a lot more completed works that offer more than regularly scheduled “navel gazing.”
Or at least, that is the plan.
I hope to see you back in seven days for the penultimate entry on this blog, and then again in two weeks for its final adieu.
Until then, I have some drawing to do.
Yours very truly,
Kevin B. Madison
#yearofdrawing #comics #comicstrip #writers #writing #blog #bloggers #blogging