concerning citizens!

CONCERNINGCITIZENS.COM has the longer, heavier-effort (and hopefully better) full stories. this is where the doodles are.

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got hastier as the mosquitoes attacked my shins (at Gowanus, Brooklyn)

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A couple months into my new job, three of us started swapping music recommendations every Monday. It began basically by accident - at that point I actually hardly knew either person (no longer true, of course). But it was a fun weekly tradition: e rotated the responsibility and eventually had sixteen songs/artists, most of which I’d never heard of before. We collected them in a little memorial zine which is HERE, including a Spotify playlist. From this experience I have one admonition (exhortation? I had to read a lot of the Bible in my former life as a Christian kid but I don’t actually know the difference):

Find your interesting acquaintances (they’re all around you, just a step outside your circle of close friends) and ask them for their recommendations!

We kept it super low pressure: one person would add a single song to a three-person email chain once a week, with some scant commentary - often including a disclaimer about how none of us were professional music writers and therefore kept using the same adjectives to describe our artists.

I majorly underestimated how insulated I am. I had the vague impression that between a) regularly scanning a few music websites a week and a handful of end-of-year lists b) waiting for my friends to post about artists they liked and c) trusting Spotify and Pandora’s mythical algorithms, I was staying at least loosely abreast of modern artists I’d like - nope. There are too many incredibly talented people out there and too many interesting people trying to find their art. Don’t start by asking your closest friends - start by asking your interesting acquaintances.. Keep a record.

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my #leftovers eulogy from last week is here. GOD will i miss that show.

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each year i try and finish #Eurovision way ahead of time, and each year i fail, but here, if you're having a slower Friday night, is my interactive Eurovision murder mystery from 2015. distressingly my line work has barely improved.

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#006/007: Rapidash - Monika Zagrobelna’s indispensable animal drawing tutorials can be found here: https://design.tutsplus.com/series/how-to-draw-animals–vector-21311

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warming up today by sketching one of nature's most majestic juuuuuust kidding drew a pokemon

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#004: Monferno - I need to work on my Photoshop coloring techniques and this was a good chance to try some of the awesome techniques in @zenpencils recent guide to coloring comics (specifically Actions and Color Burn layers) @ http://zenpencils.com/blog/cartooning/colouring/

My Monferno is named Mello Mike.

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rolling napkin bookmarks

I love that Kindles let you highlight favorite passages in a book and then later on review your highlights in a separate standalone section that’s like a nicely condensed What I Love Most About This Book.

It’s tougher to do with graphic novels and I don’t want to mark them up. So after finishing @sarahglidden‘s amazing Rolling Blackouts, I skimmed through it again to mark the pages, but I was eating lunch at the time and all I had were napkins.

Two favorites:

“...Because I want to believe that with information we can have more nuanced opinions that can keep us from making those kinds of huge fucking mistakes again? 

Everything that I do in journalism is based on the idea that if people are exposed to more ideas and information, they'll allow themselves to question things that they assumed were right."

“...If someone was to ask me what the most common misconceptions about my job are...it's that journalists don't care about what they're doing. They just go in and look for the scoop and want it cheap and dirty.

And the reality is that I have not met a single journalist in the five years I've been doing this that doesn't deeply, deeply care about the topics they're reporting. But they're part of a bigger system and they realize that part of caring about what they do is making sure it gets paid attention to."

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#003: Bidoof. I always feel like my brush-test scratch pads are wastes of paper, so I used this Bidoof outline as a scratch pad to test inks while I filled in some work illustrations.

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jumping around. #005: Mismagius, who really wrecked my team in Hearthome. Colored pencils on regular pencils

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It’s time for me to cash in on the rich vein of #cookbook #comic money. This story is true! and those artichoke recipes are probably delicious. 

http://www.concerningcitizens.com/03iara

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#002: Burmy, in a trash cloak, in charcoal on printer paper. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ty4KCPZiCw <– Joshua Hendry’s great 2 minute freehand lines and circles tutorial. excellent if you find yourself doodling a lot of buildings away from a ruler.

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Started Pokemon Platinum because I intend to play through all the Pokemon generations I’ve missed, but as a time-suck safety-brake, for every hour I log in the game I’ll draw something from my Pokedex using an unfamiliar medium or technique. 

#001: Shellos, in crayon and Micron on bristol board. This Pokemon is the worst, and I’m sorry I leveled him up.

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#wip pieces of the end of my Halloween story, which I just posted at the link in bio.

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way too awesome time at #hallowzine - congrats & thanks to @shoestringstudiony @jworbeast @floodfish and everyone else who got what seemed like the entire borough to stop by. year 1 of many.

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#hallowzine starts in one hour in prospect heights and it is FREE! come kick off Halloween by watching me try and trap strangers using awkward eye contact

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just added the final version of this & 3 other pages of my #hallowzine comic to the same link in bio. bikes continue to be a #freaking #nightmare to draw.