HI I love my copy of Junkworld btw!! Thank you!!
Idk I might have asked you this before or someone else may have but I was wondering if you would talk some about your art practice like. Routine and the like? I think I remember you doing Lynda Barry exercises?
Well either way thank you!!!!
Oliver!!! Yes!!! I'm so glad!
I have to preface this by saying that I don't even work on art every day, much less comics. Last October I picked up knitting on a whim and spent all my free time making hats while listening to an audiobook of Moby-Dick. I made a lino print for the first time while sending out JW #1, fell in love with it, and have spent the last month or so carving and printing and experimenting. I go on painting jags, collage jags, writing jags, and I have two (2) guitars that are sitting in the corner patiently waiting for asteroid Kiana to circle back to them. I've been this way my whole life, and I am trying to work with it and not against it. HOWEVER. There is a hardcore Type A perfectionist inside me that wants nothing but consistency. This part of me abhors the flightiness, the mutations, the bouts of melancholy -- if there must be a Quest, it cries, let it be towards a singular Goal!!!!
For recovering perfectionists there really is no better teacher than Lynda Barry. She has a list of materials, she has dozens of exercises, she has you set time limits. According to her books she is quite a strict teacher in-class, demanding a lot of time, effort, care, and attention. All of this is wonderful. She boxes you in and sets you free.
"Making Comics" is the essential text. My favorite exercise is Monster Jam.
Here are a few of mine, all done left-handed to minimize the influence of the Type A chatter who lives in my brain. I have dozens and dozens of pages of these monsters. Barry recommends this specific process a lot: lay down the lines under pressure before your brain can catch up, then add color/patterns/details, under no pressure at all, while watching/listening to something you like.
There are several iterations after this - you draw their parents, an older sibling, a lover. Then you go back to the beginning and draw, in 6 panels, the story of their life. It somehow always presents itself.
As valuable as they are, I don't use these exercises to actually make comics nowadays. I use them to loosen up and activate that aforementioned feeling. Most of my comics come from doodles or notes scribbled down in a tiny notebook I carry everywhere. The process of making a longform comic is something I have bashed my head against for YEARS, and now involves divination, random image generation, a deck of Nancy cards, a lightbox, and a ton of panels chopped up and spread out on the floor so I can move them around. This is why I still only work in grids!
