Weekend Wrap-Up

Today was our monthly local artist meet-up; not a huge turn out, but quite a few people had other understandably pressing matters that kept them away. Still, we all produced some art, discussed some new projects we had started working on, and squared away our plans for Free Comic Book Day.

For any who are going to be in Spokane on May 2nd – a few of us will be at Merlyn’s from 11-3 (the store opens at 10 am) doing free sketches for any kids 10 and under. Even if you’re not a kid, please swing by and pick up some free comics and check out everything else the shop has to offer.

Also, the 3rd annual Spokane Comic-Con is rapidly approaching. This year it will be at the Spokane Falls Community College on May 30th from 10-5. Jenny was actually able to get the time requested off from work, and we’ll both be there, but only as fans, hanging out and having geeky fun. I’m planning on getting a table next year, as I’ll (hopefully) have something to showcase. Guess we’ll just see what I can get done between now and then…

Otherwise, the weekend was good, and mostly relaxing. We were supposed to hang out with our friend Jamie on Friday, but it was his mom’s birthday. So maybe we’ll see him later this week. We ended up going over to CdA to take the car in for an oil change, and ended up going out to lunch with Jenny’s parents, so everything worked out OK anyway.

I’ve been sketching some, but mostly just doing research and some writing for a new project, and I really need to get some actual artwork done this week. I got knocked out of the AFL competition over on deviantArt, but I haven’t actually finished my last entry. I need to do that, and I also wanted to do some fan-art for a few characters that I didn’t get to face. The un-ending hunt for a day-job continues as well.

Also, I wanted to wish “Happy Birthday!” to our good friends Alex (on the 19th) and Shannon (on the 20th)!

Hey Kids, Comics!

Every year, Spokane hosts the Get Lit! literature festival, which usually includes lots of writing workshops and speakings by authors. This year they also branched out into graphic novels, with a panel on comics and comic creation. Manny Trembley and Eric Anderson, the two local creators of Panda Xpress and Sam Noir, both published by Image Comics, hosted an hour long discussion about the comic industry.

I was pleasantly surprised by the fairly large turn out and, considering comic books’ reputation for having a predominantly young adult male readership, it was encouraging to see that more than half of those that showed up for the panel were female, of all ages. There were a few teachers present as well, who were interested in using comics in their classrooms, which was also nice to see.

The discussion was really interesting, and I learned quite a bit, especially about the publishing aspect. It was also great to meet and talk with Manny and Eric after the panel.

The monthly Spokane Comic Artists Meet-Up (S.C.A.M. ? Hm, maybe not the best acronym… ) is tomorrow at local comic & game shop Merlyns at 3 pm. It’s not anything especially organized, mostly just an excuse for artists and writers to get out of the house and get together and chat about comics or whatever, but it’s been a great opportunity to meet some fellow local creators and comic fans.

One thing we do have planned is for the upcoming annual Free Comic Book Day. FCBD is a great opportunity to introduce comics to new readers, and especially to get kids interested, so a few of us will be hanging out at Merlyns and drawing sketches for kids 10 and under for free. Should be fun.

Connected, continued….

I got my Twitter feed set up to post to all of my various other pages, so that should (maybe) be more convenient. MySpace, deviantArt and WordPress all have built in widgets for Twitter, and the entries should show up on Blogger and Livejournal as a single bulk post once a day.

And lastly, we’re planning on cleaning out our Flickr account pretty soon here. We initially set it up as a Pro account and uploaded ALL of our wedding pictures for anyone to see and/or save, but it’s been a year and a half or so since then and we figure anyone who wanted pictures probably already has them. Also, we let our Pro account expire, so it only shows the last 200 pictures anyway.

So we’ll be taking down the vast majority of the wedding pictures and probably editing the remainder of them. Then we’ll hopefully start actually posting other photos, as well as art.

Gotta Get Yourself Connected…

Some of Jenny’s family have signed up for Facebook, so she signed up, and I went ahead and reactivated my account as well. Much of the problems I had with it initially were actually fixed during their most recent update (which, of course, happened just after I left), so I should be sticking around this time…

I also signed up on LinkedIn – my friend Levi sent me an invite, and I figured it certainly couldn’t hurt my chances of finding some work and networking. I haven’t done much with it yet, beyond just setting up my profile.

And finally, I went ahead and signed up for Twitter. It was mainly because there were several feeds (mostly pro artists and writers) that I wanted to keep track of anyway, I figured I’d might as well sign up and “follow” them. I also realized that while I keep intending to blog on more of a regular basis, I usually don’t want to post an entry if it’s just one little blurb – so I wait, and then either don’t post at all or post one gigantic entry. Sooo, that’s just what Twitter’s for, right?

I’m still kicking the tires on Twitter, as well as putting my Facebook page back in order, but here’s all the new links:

Welcome!

This is, in some ways, not a new blog. My wife and I have kept a communal blog for ourselves (Two Starving Artists) for the past four years and I’ve had a Livejournal even longer. However I did want a place where I could not only continue blogging, but also use as something of a personal website, which I thought WordPress was perfect for.

In time, I’ll be updating this site with more artwork, as well as regular blog entries. For those interested in catching up with what I’ve been up to previously, I’d recommend checking out the aforementioned blog, or any of the pages linked to on the left.

Thanks for stopping by.