Cartooning

My interest in cartooning developed out of a desire to draw and create stories, along with an interest in animation. Comics are a compelling versitle medium for both art and communication.

Beginning

For as long as I can remember I've always been interested in drawing, especially drawing characters who I was mentally creating stories around. Although I took art courses in highschool I wasn't interested in fine art until much later, perfering animation and comic type drawing becasue of the narrative possibilites. I had drawn the first couple pages of a number of comics but had never completed any until 2009 when I drew my first complete twelve page mini-comic, a silly story about a person being zapped by a gravity-defying beam and being carried away by a balloon. After finishing that first comic I realized it was something I wanted to do more of and have been working on multiple comics projects ever since.

Journal Comics

Learning about the daily diary comics of James Kochalka had an enormous influence on my interest in comics. I had been interested in comics before, but the idea that a great comic could come from the smallest events of everyday life was very inspiring to me. Starting doing a daily journal helped tremendously to develop both my comics writing and visual communication skills. You can learn more about these comics by clicking here.

Comics Passions

My favorite thing about comics is how many diverse things the medium is capable of, I think it's possible to create a compelling comic about almost anything. I tend to start with a small idea, usually taken from something I've been thinking about or seen and want to draw, along with rough notions of the characters involved and jump right into creating the comic, it's interesting to me how quickly the characters develop personalities and take on lives of their own and begin to drive the narrative.

comics approach

I hesitate to set forth any grand statements about what comics are; I agree with people like Scott McCloud, that comics are only limited by that they must be a deliberate sequence of images, beyond that it's open to just about anything. I personally tend to take small things from my own life or a particular scene I want to draw and expand from there letting the characters explore the world. I'm very interested in moving characters through outdoor spaces because of the opportunites to draw various imagined environments.

Aspirations

Although I'm currently enjoying everything I'm doing, there's a lot more I'd like to get to in the future.

Design

I'm very interested in publication design and would like to be working on creating typographic and illustrative work for articles and short stories for both print and digital magazines. My dream project would be to be part of organizing a large format print literary magazine that featured both short prose fiction with dynamic layouts and comics by authors and cartoonists I admire.

Comics

I'd like to continue making daily journal comics for at least another four years and reach the ten year mark of creating a daily strip, and probably continue on. I'm also hoping to finish the three 200+ page comics I've written and drawn but need to decide how to publish and distribute. Eventually I'd like to make a long form fictional comic that could run indeffinetely and feature a wide cast of recurring characters.

Personal

My current non design and art interests are focused on learning French so I can read the many comics and novels that haven't been translated that I've been interested in. I'm also intersted in learning how to make different types of bread, the smell of baking bread is probably my favorite scent in the world. I'm also hoping to eventually read all of Finnegann's Wake even if all I understand is a few of the puns, the parts I've read are incredibly compelling.