The latest book for Strategic Coach is out the door — on time! And, in addition to our team learning how to work even better together, I had a breakthrough in the process about sticking to a limited colour palette to distinguish each chapter. (Exciting! What, no?)
Since finishing that project, I’ve been using my extra energy to blast through side projects, both at work and in my spare time.
One big “Wahey!” is finishing the first interactive story for my website. It’s called: wait for it: “How I Spent My Summer Vacation“. (I’m still chasing the bugs out of it, so if you play it and get stuck, let me know where it happened. And sorry in advance!)
My goal with these is to create little “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type stories that the user can play through in five minutes or less. It’s a much more fun way to show my work, I figure, than posting a bunch of out-of-context illustrations. (And I can’t really show a lot of my work for Strategic Coach, ’cause it’s full of their ideas and intellectual property.)
I also wanted to lower the bar to entry by illustrating this first one with simple, raw pencil drawings — ’cause “done” is much more valuable to me here than “finessed forever and never seen”. It’s one thing to have whole work-days to pencil, scan, lay out, ink, letter, and colour my cartoons for the books; it’s quite another to do that in the evening or at the weekend, when I’m also trying to be a husband, friend, and, y’know, general person.
Along that theme: Yesterday I got stuck full of needles. The Children’s Aid Society basically requires its adoption applicants to get all their vaccinations again. I know some people go bugnuts about these shots, but a) I had them once, and was fine (and didn’t get any preventable, horrible diseases, which I see as a plus), and b) I appreciate that CAS doesn’t want to place vulnerable children with anyone who could harm them in any way.
So now I’ve got a sore arm and a bit of tuberculosis living under my skin. Yick!
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Tomorrow at lunch I’m teaching a bookbinding workshop to two of my colleagues. They’re good friends, and excited about learning this skill, so that’s going to be fun. And I haven’t taught in a long time. It’ll be good to get back to that.
I also submitted an application to volunteer at TCAF this year, and pitched the idea of teaching a class on using the comics software package Clip Studio Paint — which I use just about every day. Howevermuch they decide to use me, it’s exciting to think about being involved in this event.
In my absence, Toronto has become one of the brightest spots in the comics universe. The one year I happened to be here when TCAF was on, I ran up and down the aisles, saw a bunch of my heroes, and sheepishly left again without speaking to anyone. Not this year! I need to develop relationships with other comics professionals.