Alec Longstreth's Blog, page 13

March Madness 2015

Well, the dust has settled on yet another March. For the sixth(?) time, Greg Means and I emailed each other every day in March to give a progress update on what we accomplished. "Acountabilibuddies" is the term, I believe.

I had a very productive March:

I drew six pages of Isle of Elsi, as well as all of the assets for the website.
I penciling the remaining thirty compositions for my 100 Watercolors challenge.
I inked enough pages of Phase 7 #021 to cross the 33% line on my progress bar.
I updated the Basewood Kickstarter page using their new "Spotlight" feature and overhauled the Basewood page on this site.
I made some slight changes to my illustration site, which still needs some work.

Greg also had a productive March, putting the final touches on Runner Runner #4 which just got back from the printer a few days ago. That will be available at better comic shops all over the place on Free Comic Book Day. He also did a lot of drawing and worked on a top secret graphic novel script that we'll all hopefully get to read someday.

It's hard to believe 2015 is already a quarter over. Let's hope I can be as productive as I was in March for the rest of this year... I've still got a lot of projects left on my to-do list!

New Year's Resolutions: March Update

Well, three months after my last post about my New Year's Resolutions they are still going strong! The idea of alternating between two activities is still working really well for me. I missed about a week of both activities when I was sick in February, but otherwise I have kept up with my running and music making, even on my trip to Wisconsin!

I just ran on a treadmill for the first time! It was pretty boring, but it did the trick. I only fell off once at the end!

— Alec Longstreth (@AlecLongstreth) February 14, 2015

On the music side of things, I successfully played through the entire Bb Real Book (about 500 pages of standards) and ended up with 200 tunes that are within (or just beyond) my ability to play. I also got all 12 keys of the major scale under my fingers.

Once that was done, I wasn't quite sure how to progress, so I called up my old pal Andy (of Songs From the Basewood fame) and asked him a bunch of music theory questions. We ended up Skyping for an hour, during which he dropped a lot of knowledge on me. This put me back on the path, though I gotta say, it was pretty mind-bending switching to seventh and minor seventh scales.

Trying to learn how to play jazz feels like trying to learn twelve different languages all at the same time #trumpet

— Alec Longstreth (@AlecLongstreth) March 13, 2015

I still have a lot to learn! I'm able to play for a full hour though, and as my embouchure gets stronger, it's more and more fun to play.

Running, on the other hand, remains pretty not-fun. I think the smartest part of my new-year's plan was to make it so that I only listen to Weezer when I am running. For the past 20 years I have listened to at least one Weezer album a day, if not many albums a day... if not ALL of their albums in a day. So listening to only one Weezer album every 48 hours is definitely an extra boost of motivation when I don't feel like running! Initially I thought I would swap out my music after a while, but now it is an integral part of the process. I have a lot of focus when I'm running so it's great to go deep on these albums that I have heard so many times and to discover new things about them. And man... when Everything Will Be Alright In The End comes on - that really gets me going!

The only other anecdotes I have to report about my running both stem from podcasts. The first was a long interview with Matt Mullenweg that my friend Charlotte sent me (because, about 23 minutes in, he name-drops DVzine.org!). During the interview he also talks about his running practices and an idea that was taught to him of "slowing down to go farther."

I was getting frustrated, because I would always be wiped out after 30 minutes of running (and some of those Weezer albums go for like 45 minutes!). So I tried this method and it works great! I focus more on getting lots of little strides in, which gets my heart rate up, but I don't get burned out so fast. I'm able to run for 45 minutes and it feels like I'm getting a much better workout, plus I'm not as sore the next day.

The other thing I was struggling with is that running is not fun. I don't get excited about running the same way I do when it's time to play my trumpet. I have been listening to the Adam and Dr. Drew podcast in an attempt to recapture the feeling of listening to Loveline with them fifteen years ago (with mixed results...) and one of the things they seem to talk about a lot is the idea of satisfaction.

It's true that running is not fun. Lots of things in life that are good for you are not fun. But it's satisfying to go running. When I made this connection, it made me realize that ever since I started running I have had fewer headaches, I'm sleeping better, my back and drawing arm are almost never sore, it gets me to leave the apartment at regular intervals, I'm in better shape, I'll probably live longer, etc. etc. etc. So now, when it's time to go for a run, I try not to focus on the act of running, or how it's going to make me feel while I'm doing it, but how I will feel after it's done. The feeling of satisfaction that comes from having completed something that's good for me is just as good as having fun!

Anyway, I'm going to see how long I can keep this stuff going, so I'll report back in a few months with any new findings!

Diversity in Isle of Elsi

I've been drawing comics now for about fifteen years. In that time, the comics community has become a lot more diverse, thanks mostly, I would say, to webcomics. These days pretty much anyone can draw a comic and put it online. If it's good, it has the possibility of finding a gigantic, worldwide audience. It's no longer up to gatekeepers like editors and publishers to decide what gets read by the public. This is a good thing.

Even just in the last seven years of teaching at The Center for Cartoon Studies, I have seen the ratio of students shift from a male to a female majority. And through teaching at CCS and CCA I have seen students create work about their experiences with LGBT and gender issues, disability, sexism, racism, and wide variety of other diverse topics.

Lately, articles such as Unpacking White Privilege and How to Write Women of Colour and Men of Colour If You Are White have been making the rounds within the comics community. Reading these articles and others like them really got me thinking about diversity (or the lack thereof!) in my own comics.

When I think about the 1,500 pages of comics that I have drawn thus far, the lack of diversity is pretty depressing; no main characters are people of color. Also, I haven't actually gone back and checked, but I'm pretty sure there is not a single issue of Phase 7 that passes the Bechdel Test. That really bums me out. You could argue that the vast majority of my work is autobiographical, and thus you'd be hard-pressed to find a single panel of Phase 7 that I am not in, and since I'm a straight, cisgender, white guy, that could skew the results. But even to me, that sounds like a lame excuse...

I can't do much about the past, but I can learn from my mistakes and make improvements moving forward!

Next year, I will be launching my second comics project, a fantasy webcomic for kids (aka "All Ages") called Isle of Elsi, which I am very excited about. I have been working on it in relative secrecy for years, though I let my students at CCS read an early draft of it a few years back, to give me some feedback. This only seemed fair, as it was my job to constantly critique their work.

I received feedback from one of my students, that I could make the village in the story much more diverse. At first, I was reluctant to this idea, not because I was against diversity, but because I wanted diversity to be introduced gradually as the story developed.

The main character of the story is a stand-in for me, and I wanted his life experiences to mirror my own. I grew up in an extremely homogeneous, mostly white, environment in the suburbs of Seattle. I left home at eighteen to attend Oberlin College, which has a student body that is roughly 35% LGBT - I had never met an openly gay person in my life at that point. Within two years of leaving Oberlin I moved to Los Angeles, then Sydney, Austalia and eventually to New York City. With each new city I was exposed to a more and more diverse range of people, from a wide variety of different socioeconomic, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. It really opened my eyes to the wonderful diversity that exists in the world, and I thought it would be cool for my main character, and thus the reader, to have this same experience.

Over time however, as the size of the project came into focus (I hope to be working on Isle of Elsi for many, many years) this seemed like a really bad idea. The first Isle of Elsi story is about 100 pages and if I post one or two pages a week, it could take a year or two for readers to get through it. That feels like way too much time for my readers to spend in a homogenous environment. As time passed and I thought about this more, I hated the thought that kids from different backgrounds would have a harder time associating with the characters, or might get turned off from the project as a whole.

So, I decided to do a 180 and take Donna's excellent advice. I recently began coloring the first batch of IOE pages and I've been trying to figure out the color palette that I am going to use. I wanted to create a custom palette for this project so that it would look different from my other work, and so that it feels bright and colorful for my intended audience.

I did some searching online for a good Photoshop palette that had a wide variety of skin tones, but I was not really satisfied with anything I found, so I decided to build my own. During my research, I came across the amazing Humanae Tumblr. For this Tumblr, the Brazillian photographer Angélica Dass takes a portrait of someone and then tries to determine the exact Pantone color of their skin tone. She then sets that as a background to the portrait. There are thousands of them on her website, and the cumulative effect is pretty incredible! Here is a small sampling:

The only downside is that, as a cartoonist, I have only used Pantone colors once or twice in the last fifteen years, on the occasional rare project that involves a spot color (usually on T-Shirts, screenprints or posters). The other 99.99% of my color work is done using CMYK process colors. So using the Humanae Tumblr as my source material, I imported about 250 skin tones and manually converted them to CMYK (with no values in the K channel), and then quickly arranged them so I could identify and delete duplicates. I ended up with 68 skin tones over a very wide range. It looks approximately like the .jpg posted below (which is in the RGB color space - do not use it to import these hues!)

You can download this palette for free. That link takes you to a Dropbox page where you can grab a .zip file which expands into two files: 1) a Photoshop .aco file which you can add to your swatches and 2) a flattened CMYK .tif file with all the hues, so that you can grab them with your color picker. I hope this helps other cartoonists to diversify their comics as well!

Using these skin tones on the wide range of characters in Isle of Elsi has already improved the comic immensely, and I think I will still be able to have my character experience a greater sense of diversity in other ways as he begins to explore more of the world around him, so it's win-win.

The other big improvement came when I was writing the second long Isle of Elsi story. I was having a hard time getting the plot to settle in, until I realized that a little girl who I previously thought of as a side-character was actually the main character of this story. Once I made that decision everything fell into place. That story passes the Bechdel Test on page one! Having two main characters for the series - a boy and a girl - will hopefully make the comic more enjoyable for all of my potential readers.

It still might take a while to get Isle of Elsi where I really want it to be in terms of diversity, but at least I feel like I’m now pointed in the right direction.

300 Panels

Earlier this week I returned home from my trip to the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee where I drew my fifteenth 24-Hour Comic along with members from the UWM Bam! Pow! Comic Book Club.

We started on February 14th at 1:00pm and originally my idea was to draw a blank comic in which each page has the same number of panels as its page number. Also, each page's panels are equal in size.

As you can see above, this sets up all kinds of interesting relationships and patterns between the numbers of panels, and tiers and columns. It took me about five hours to do all layout work and the associated math to draw these panels.

While I was working however, I was talking with the organizer, Guy Thomas, who mentioned that Bam! Pow! would also be putting together a printed anthology of the comics drawn during this event. I kept trying to picture my blank panels in there, and it made me feel like a jerk ("We flew this cartoonist out to Milwaukee, and he didn't draw anything!").

So after I was done with the blank panels, I decided to fill them in with a story. As if this wasn't already a foolish decision, I also decided to try shading the comic with pencil lead, in the style of Bill Peet's great autobiography. It looked cool but was very time-consuming. It ended up taking me until 10:00am the next day to finish the story. It is now up in the comics section of my website, if you would like to read it. The story ended up being pretty weird, but very meaningful to me.

Anyway, I'm still excited about the idea of this panel layout, so I decided to make a PDF of it that others can print out and use to tell their own story in the same 300 panels. If you would like to give it a try, you can download it for free (or with a small donation if you'd like!) over on Gumroad.com

I had a great trip to Wisconsin and it was a lot of fun visiting old friends on my last day. Thanks to Guy for organizing everything and thanks to everyone else who drew comics with me or came to one of my lectures!

Wisconsin, Here I Come!

On Friday I'm flying out to Milwaukee to give a few lectures and to help run a 24-Hour Comic event with Bam! Pow! the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee's comic book club.

I'm not sure if these events are open to the public, but if you are currently a student or faculty member at UWM, swing on by! I'll be giving a brief introduction to the 24-Hour Comic challenge and doling out some pro tips on Saturday the 14th, starting at Noon in the UWM Student Union Fireside Lounge. Then whoever wants to can join me in drawing a 24-Hour Comic until Noon on Sunday!

Then, on Monday the 16th, from 1-3pm, I'll be giving my self-publishing lecture, Your Comics Will Love You Back! I'm not sure where that one is happening, but if you're on campus, ask around, or hopefully there are some flyers up!

On Monday night I'm going to zip over to Madison to see some old college friends, which is going to be a lot of fun. This is one of only a handful of trips away from home this year so I'm looking forward to it. It'll be my only taste of "real" winter this season!

Calendar Reversing

I currently have five email accounts (have I ever mentioned that email is the bane of my existence?). I use Gmail for all of them, which means I also have access to five sets of Google's suite of web applications, including the built-in calendar. Up until this year, I have only ever used one of these calendars, with my personal email account, to keep track of my various deadlines and appointments. This year however, as a productivity experiment, I started using a second calendar, with my Phase 7 account.

With my personal calendar, all of the events I enter will happen in the future, obviously. Let's say I have a meeting with a student next week on Tuesday - I'll enter this event on that date, using the "Teaching" subcalendar. And I have subcalendars for various different things I need to remember: Comics Events, Travel, Visitors, Birthdays, etc. With my new calendar though, I created subcalendars for each of the projects I am working on, and I reversed the structure by only entering events from the past.

For example, I wake up in the morning and script a page of a future issue of Phase 7. When I am done, I'll enter an event under the subcalendar "Phase 7" called: "scripted 1 page." Then, if I go ink a page of the current issue of Phase 7, when I'm done I'll enter another event using the same subcalendar called "P7 #021 inked page 10." Next let's say I have a meeting with a student. When the meeting is over, I'll enter "Met with Joe" under the "Teaching" subcalendar.

Now, this is not a revolutionary idea or anything. I'm basically just keeping a log of the tasks I accomplish each day. But I have found that the way Google Calendar is structured, it makes this very easy and enjoyable to do. As you can see above, each day can hold about six entries, which currently seems to be about the number of projects I am able to work on each day. So even right there I get a nice gauge on how my day is going: "Hmmm, it's noon and I only have two items entered. What else am I working on today?" It gives me a deep sense of contentment at the end of the day to see six items in there and to have the little box all full up.

Also, with a few simple clicks you can turn off all the subcalendars except one to see how much you have been working on a project. As an example, here is the same calendar shown above, but only with the Phase 7 option turned on:

This allows you to see the last time you worked on something, or how many hours you put in on a project, or lets you see if any patterns are emerging from your working habits for a particular project.

Anyway, in 2015 I'm trying to finish off a wide variety of old projects, and I'm finding this a very efficient, satisfying way to keep track of my progress. I share it here with the hopes that this technique might be useful to others!

Alternating

This year I had two new year's resolutions: 1) to go running more and 2) to play my trumpet more. And by "more" I pretty much mean "at all" because I don't think I got any exercise at all last year (other than walking to my P.O. box or running errands around Alameda on my bike) and I definitely didn't play my trumpet even once.

I have tried resolutions like these in the past, and, like most people, I usually keep it up for a week or two, before giving up on them. I'm happy to report that I've been having better luck so far this year, by using a new system of alternating.

Just before the new year I had a visit from my old pal Andy (of Songs From the Basewood fame!) who mentioned that he had been using his lunch breaks at work to go for short, thirty-minute runs. This seemed like an amount of time that I could commit to running, without it messing up the rest of my day too much, so I decided to give it a try.

On January 1st, I put all the Weezer albums on my iPod Nano and instituted a new rule: no Weezer, except when running! Now, usually I listen to at least one Weezer album every day (if not more) so this definitely provided an additional boost of inspiration to get me out there. Most of their albums are in the thirty-minute neighborhood, give or take a track, so I usually run out during the A side and then run back home during the B side. Surprisingly, my favorite album to run to so far is Pinkerton.

On January 2nd I was sore from running, and so I decided to play my trumpet instead. I consider it a great gift that I was taught how to play the trumpet. There have been times when playing my trumpet was the most important thing in my life, and it often bums me out that I don't play it much any more. When I do play it, I find that it greatly improves my mood and helps me to appreciate music (especially jazz) much more when I listen to it.

A few years back I bought a Bb "real book" which has about 400 pages full of jazz standards. I then got this amazing program iReal Pro which basically sets up a virtual rhythm section on my iPad. I can then run that through the little mixing board that came with the Silent Brass mute that I've had since high school, and I can play along with the tunes. It's the most fun I've had playing my trumpet in a long time.

Collectively I have been calling this my "mental health hour." It usually occurs around 3pm (typically my lowest point of productivity/energy during the day) and I have been alternating activities every other day. I go for a run, then the next day I play my trumpet, then I go running on the next day, and then it's back to the trumpet, etc. etc. etc. It's amazing how this simple alternation has kept both activities lively and fun for me. The minute I'm done running I think "Ooh! I get to play my trumpet tomorrow!" and vice versa, instead of getting burned out trying to do one activity every day. Anyway, I've kept it up for the last 21 days, and I hope it'll continue for a long time yet!

I've also taken this idea and applied it to some of the many projects I'm trying to complete this year. I've kind of "paired off" similar projects into little groups and then I alternate working on each side back and forth. I'm getting a lot of work done!

I have another productivity idea I've been experimenting with this year, but I guess I'll save that for another blog post, as this one is getting a bit long! Maybe this idea will be helpful to someone out there.

Phase 7 #021 Preview!

If anyone would like to check out a preview of Phase 7 #021, I've posted the first eight pages over in the comics section of this site.

This is the "beard issue" which examines the thought process behind The Basewood Beard, during which I did not cut my hair or beard for three and a half years. It also goes into great depth about how society treated me very differently when I had long hair and a massive beard.

I'm trying something new with this issue... I've cut penciling out of my cartooning process entirely! I now jump straight from my rough script to inks. It is a little nerve-wracking, but I'm having fun with it and I hope that the results look a bit more loose and energetic instead of my usual stiff, overworked drawing style. I'll do a proper write-up about my new process at a later date, but for now you can check out the results and see how they compare to previous issues of Phase 7.

Obviously the biggest advantage of this new process is increased speed! You can keep an eye on my progress for this issue on my homepage. I'm hoping I'll have this issue sent out to the Phase Seven Subscribers this summer!

My Fourteenth 24-Hour Comic

Yesterday I drew my fourteenth 24-Hour Comic. I bent the rules a bit this year, drawing an 8-page minicomic called, "Hey, Where's Alec?" and a 16-page "Isle of Elsi Activity Book." If anyone would like to disqualify these efforts as a 24-Hour Comic, I'm okay with that. After drawing one 24-Hour Comic a year since 2001, I don't feel like I have anything left to prove for this challenge. I have 24 pieces of paper with comics, drawings and writing all over them; I'm going to call it a 24-Hour Comic. It took me from 8:30am on December 30th 'till 1:17am on December 31st to draw everything.

I'm not going to post these pages online because I plan on printing up both of these projects as minicomics next year. Hey, Where's Alec? will be mailed out to all the Phase Seven Subscribers and I'm hoping Greg will be willing to carry some at the Tugboat Press table at various conventions next year. The comic explains why I am not attending any comic conventions in 2015.

My big goal for 2015 is to get Isle of Elsi ready to launch. The real website is slowly coming together, I've started drawing and coloring buffer pages, and I have over 200 pages of stories scripted and ready to draw. The Isle of Elsi Activity Book will be a free giveaway at conventions in 2016 to let kids know about the webcomic. It is very similar in scope to the Dragons! book that Tugboat Press published for Free Comic Book Day back in 2011. It's got comics, games, puzzles, activities, etc. For the final version of the book, I will actually redraw everything from this 24-Hour Comic version, but it was still time well spent. In one creative burst I was able to immerse myself in this project. I'm very happy with the results.

I was occasionally checking my Twitter as I worked on this year's 24-Hour Comic, and I fielded a request for any "protips" from one of my current CCS students, Reilly Hadden. I thought I'd repost and expand upon some of that advice here, for anyone thinking about drawing a 24-Hour Comic of their own...

For my first two 24-Hour Comics I tried to use the same bristol board and dip-ink nibs that I use for my "regular" comics. This really made the challenge extremely difficult. Because of the large page size (11" x 14") I used a 2x3 grid of panels, which, at an hour a page, means you only have 10 minutes for each panel, which is just brutal. It also doesn't allow for any breaks, ever! I'm glad I got this out of my system in my early twenties. I honestly don't think I could draw a 24-Hour Comic like this again.

One breakthrough I had on my fourth 24-Hour Comic, Scars, was to just use a ballpoint pen on copy paper. Not only was it faster, it removed any desire to pencil, and somehow tapped into that feeling of "kid" drawing. And by that, I mean the feeling of just drawing one panel after another, and having fun with it. Leaving mistakes as they are and moving on, which is exactly the kind of spirit you need in a 24-Hour Comic. Of course, I decided to draw those pages with four tiers, so it still almost killed me.

The next big breakthrough was on my eighth 24-Hour Comic, The 2008 Phase Seven Summer Supplement, when I shrunk the page-size way down (8.5" x 11" with some hefty margins) and dropped the panel layout to two tiers. There is still some part of my brain that feels like this is cheating, but nowhere in the official rules does it say how many panels you need to have on each page. In fact, for The Online Variation, which may not have "pages" per se, Scott McCloud suggests drawing 100 panels in 24 hours, which would break down to about four panels per page. The combination of drawing small and with fewer panels per page really made this process much more enjoyable for me. Instead of staying awake for the entire 24 hours and being stressed out the whole time, it brought it down to about 16 hours. That is still a lot of drawing, but it mellows it out to the point where I can now draw a 24-Hour Comic without bursting into tears and having a nervous breakdown at the 18-hour mark. I did not have the maturity or confidence to scale down this project in my early twenties, when I felt like I was trying to prove something with each comic that I drew. I'm glad I'm out of that headspace now.

Lastly, I think there are a variety of ways to approach the content of a 24-Hour Comic. Some of my favorites have been experimenting with a new art technique as I did in Colors, which used a variety of mixed media or Super Dream which let me play around with an ink spattering technique. 24-Hour Comics can also be an amazing opportunity to collaborate with another cartoonist or artist. I had an absolute blast, and learned so much by drawing on the same pages with Aaron Renier, Max de Radiguès and Claire Sanders. 24-Hour Comics are also a great way to meditate on some aspect of your life for 24 consecutive hours. Drawing comics is cheap therapy, and I have used 24-Hour Comics to work through breakups (in Daydream #0007, which is not online), changing relationships and my wife's cancer treatment. Or, as I did this year, you can just use a 24-Hour Comic to kill off a project from your to-do list.

Each year I seem to forget how hard it is to draw a 24-Hour Comic. Especially the last few years... I think, "At this point I've done it so many times, it must not be that bad!" But make no mistake, it is a punishing process. Even getting it down to 16 hours or so, that's still more drawing than I am used to doing in one stretch! Luckily, I think the positives far outweigh the negatives and each year I am excited to try it again. I still want to do an Online Variation someday, and I'm itching to draw something weird and abstract that will never be printed anywhere and is just for me - something I create just for the pleasure of creating it. I can't afford to spend my time doing that kind of stuff on a day-to-day basis, but at least I set aside one day a year to try something new!

2014 Holiday Megapost

I have fallen a bit behind on my blogging duties because of the end of the semester and the holidays. In an effort to catch up, I'm going to do one megapost with links to a bunch of different things... here goes!

After a few years of disorganization, I finally got the eBook versions of Phase 7 and Transition back online, using Gumroad. I also added the eBook for Basewood which is the first time it has been publicly available outside of the Basewood Kickstarter campaign. These are all high-quality DRM-free PDF files, so if you are into eBooks, go nuts! It's on my to-do list to set up some more eBooks in the new year, so keep an eye here for more news about that.
In a similar vein, Basewood is now available through Comixology. As most of you probably know, I'm very proud of the physical hardback version of Basewood but in these changing times, I'm trying to remain open-minded about all the different ways that readers are currently enjoying comics. If the Comixology App is your cup of tea, then you can now check out Basewood on there.
A few weeks ago I did an interview with Andrea and Aaron over at the Comics Therapy podcast. They asked me some of the smartest, most well-researched interview questions I've ever heard, which was great. We talked not only about Basewood, but also about my upcoming webcomic Isle of Elsi, and about my jobs teaching at both The Center for Cartoon Studies and the California College of Arts. I come on at about the 51-minute mark, if you'd like to give it a listen!
Since Claire and I work from home, and since we're staying put this holiday season, we decided to get out of town for a few days, so that we would both actually take a break. Our first stop was Rancho Obi-Wan, which is the single largest collection of Star Wars stuff on the planet. We were treated to a four-hour tour by the man responsible for the collection, Star Wars fan #1, Steve Sansweet. I uploaded a bunch of photos from the tour to a Flickr album, and so did Claire. It was an incredible experience!
The next day we continued up Route 101 to the Redwood National Forest (AKA The Forest Moon of Endor) which was literally a breath of fresh air. It felt good to get up into the woods and to finally see these massive trees!

Phew! Okay, I think that's it... I'll post at least once more on here before the end of the year, as I'm planning on drawing my 24-Hour comic for this year in one of the remaining five days of 2014. Then it's on to 2015!