I read my first anti-anti-technology piece on Wired this morning (tl;dr “I switched to a flip-phone and hated it”). It had nothing enlightening to say, feeling like it was written by a young person whose friends all wanted him to do digital things so he abandoned the exercise for them.

That’s always the trend, though: one looks inspired when saying something contrary. Now that there’s a movement toward questioning the prevalence of technology in our lives and suggesting we increase our analogue-time, of course the smarter-than-though naysayer line will be “Meh, technology is fun and useful.”

Sure, it is. But if we pay attention, we all feel this other thing in our gut, this heaviness, a malignant brain-food hangover, and that’s not going away.

I want to invest in my analogue life this year. I was doing really well there for a while, listening to music and jamming out in my head, drawing for myself when I had spare time, but over the holidays I fell back sometimes — not always — into a pattern of escaping into the digital, of not knowing what to do with free time.

It’s most difficult when I don’t have a lot of spare time, when a small space of time opens up in-between other commitments, and changing gears quickly would be a challenge. The solution may be to figure out beforehand what else I could do (both work and play), so I’m not entering an empty space and trying to find direction at the same time.

I am the hero of my universe right now! I finished my comic for the Comics Club publication we’re planning to put out next year. Actually, I may be the only person who’s done anything yet — but I’ve been yearning to produce something of my own for years, and I needed this specific focus, deadline, and accountability structure to make it to happen.

Comics Club has not only given me an instant cadre of friends, very talented peers, and constant laughs every Thursday night, it’s also helped me deliver the work I’ve been wanting to get started on ever since I got back into cartooning. The characters and world of this little comic feel like pieces I could move about in infinite combinations.

It doesn’t feel like time to share the comic yet — it’s still forming in my mind and vulnerable to being scuppered by the wrong thing said. But I have one four-page bit completed, and I’m very happy about that right now.

Ya gotta love square food.

I’m trying to figure out how to do a better job of drawing people sitting on chairs.

Work asked me to resize a cartoon yesterday for use on social media (because bloody Faecesbook’s preferred size is the utterly awkward 1200 by 627 pixels). The social media team chose an old image (why always the old ones?!), and I couldn’t find the original.

I did this one a while ago, and while the message is clear, I feel like the background is garbage and the characters are drawn too quickly. (Like, WTF is happening with that woman’s hand?)

I figured I’d redraw it and do a fancier job this time — because newer is always better, right? So I foolishly decided to emulate a Van Gogh painting. How hard could that be to do in a hurry?

His:

Mine:

It does the job, but the two figures don’t feel like they’re from the same world. And I hate the awkward way they’re sat in their chairs (which I’d pictured as proper Parisian chairs Craig always wanted, and now we have four unfinished ones of in our garage).

So today I have to draw a bunch of people around a boardroom table, and I’m trying to figure out a way to do it better. So far that’s involved trying to get 3D models in Clip Studio paint — which then promptly forgot all my saved custom materials along with the previously downloaded 3D content.

So while all that gets restored from cloud backup, I decided to find a SketchUp 3D model…

That works, but the problem remains of posing figures in the scene, and SketchUp models aren’t editable (well, not by me).

So I got out my little ModiBot figures to create some real-world shapes I can follow:

Now I have to bring all this stuff together somehow… and actually draw something!

This is how I spend my days. I may sound frustrated, but who am I kidding? This is playing.

On the side over the past few months, I’ve produced a couple of little pocket-zines, one on the subject of money, one on time.

I want to have more work of my own to show, and I figure that waiting to produce some magnum opus is a recipe for never creating anything, so instead I’m trying to lower the bar and just produce everything.

These zines came from a good piece of advice I heard in a podcast: “Take all your stuff and turn it into things.” I’ve thought a lot about these two topics — time and money — and while I’m nowhere near an expert, I’ve figured out a few things that I figured I’d share.

You can download the zines and supplemental materials from the following page. (If you’d like a printed copy, just let me know and I’ll get you one somehow.)

http://hame.land/downloads/

Mister Chicken got too threadbare to revive, so he went down to my workshop to be reincarnated.

He donated some organs to the cause (stuffing, squeaker, and legs).

Behold, a bird reborn! Meet… The Blackbird!!

Doug, like all dogs, has neophilia: He loves new things. He loves them so much that he wants to devour them.