On Saturday, we wrapped up the 1st International Urban Sketchers Symposium. This event drew together artists from around the world to celebrate this particular joy we have, of sketching the living city around us.

Sounds fun, right? And it was. It was lots of fun. Also lots of hard work! But the surprising part was how much our energy became amplified, when we all got together in that room. We got swept away into this lifestyle, so much so that just three days seems like it may have triggered some major transformations – not just of our art skills and styles, but of practice, attitude, diligence, receptiveness.

But I’m gushing. With my next post, I’ll start discussing the specific lessons I learned, and directions for the future.

During May 2010, I committed to making a comic (ostensibly a “journal comic”) for each day of the month.  Some fabulous comics-making friends joined in. The month was a success – lots of great work got done, and Mike and I both made it to the end!

How I managed to keep going:

• Being part of a group was half the job.  I got excited about seeing new work come up in the flickr pool, and felt like keeping that going was important enough to bust through the dry spells.  Support from friends was also sometimes enough to reverse my mood right when it needed it.
• My partner participated, so on nights when I was lazy,  seeing him working on his comic made me grudgingly pick up the pen as well.
• We kept our social calendar fairly sparse for the month.   Whenever we did go out after work, it was quite challenging to get the comic done, so we didn’t do it often.  This project was a top priority!  Hopefully our friends still like us a little.

What I learned about comics-making and my own creative habits:

• That dull, depleted  feeling I get by the end of the work day is hard to resist, and if I don’t fight it, the rest of the evening will consist of snacking and watching X-Files reruns.  However, it only takes a little bit of fight to reverse the tide – just a first step towards trying to stay active makes all the difference.  The results might not be great every time, but it’ll always be better than mindless nothingness.  After fighting back my dullness each night just long enough to get a comic done, I never woke up the next morning and thought “if only I didn’t make that comic last night.” Even when the results were not good, nothing was lost for it, and the occasional payoffs made the gamble feel worthwhile. I still managed to watch plenty of X-Files.
• Artmaking has a payoff percentage.  For me, it’s maybe at around 30% – it takes 7 embarrassing drawings for me to generate 3 that feel somewhat rewarding.  So the crappy 70%? Totally necessary.  This fact feels much more tangible and manageable now, after The Month in Comics.
• The content of your life is what you make it.  Both Mike and I occasionally wished we’d done something more remarkable during the day, to spice up our comics.   Occasionally it was actually the deciding factor when we couldn’t decide between laziness and action.  I found myself following trails of interestingness in my own head very purposefully, looking for the juicy middle in days that often were dominated by a beige work cubicle, the gym, and the need to get the dishes done before the jungle of dirty dishes made approach to the kitchen sink impossible. Turns out even though my walk to work is a relatively small portion of the day, if I kept my eyes open, something would always be there to be found & drawn.
• When you look for beauty, you find it.  When you can’t even get yourself to look for beauty, well, there’s the struggle, and that’s worth something too.

The image above links to a flickr set of my 31 comics.  These will be published as a zine which will be for sale at the upcoming PDX Zine Symposium in late August.

Man, am I glad to have done that, and am I glad to be done!

The Month in Comic #24

Originally uploaded by geminica

For the last 20 years I’ve been interested in Mayan glyphs and wanted to find some angle for playing with them, but all I’d done so far was to occasionally copy a few shapes to try to get used to the forms.

Mayan glyphs are solid blocks comprised of 1-5 separate words, so my initial idea was that each block would have a main scene but also a few qualifiers – for instance, the coffee mugs in the first panel, indicating that I was in fact drinking coffee as I fixed bugs at work. But these are daily comics, and I had to go fast. Next time!

The Month in Comics #22

Originally uploaded by geminica

The Month in Comics #21

Originally uploaded by geminica

Been getting to my comics-making late at night, and running out of steam. Never really filled this page, cheated by throwing in some cyrillic

The Month in Comics #20

Originally uploaded by geminica

If it”s not clear, the ribbons at the end are made of tin foil, presumably to scare the birds away. And in real life, the space between the events and panels 1 and 2 was just a single work day – I noticed the metal patch on my way home that same day.

The Month in Comics #19

Originally uploaded by geminica

The Month in Comics #18

Originally uploaded by geminica

Seriously, I’m hitting a block right now & it’s been very hard to get myself to sit down and draw.

The Month in Comics #17

Originally uploaded by geminica

The Month in Comics #16

Originally uploaded by geminica

Mike’s sick. I may be fighting it off? Anyway, I hope this conveys the feeling.