"Lures"

   This panel took more work than usual to get done, and a lot of false starts, reboots, and plain old slogging through the process. Things like this make me think about teaching, and relating to how frustrating it can be to stare down a sheet of paper and/or computer monitor all covered with dead ends, and knowing that there's just gotta be an end result to the mental tail-chasing, when the mentally nebulous starts to coagulate into ink.

   That's one of the very best things to love (and conversely what drives one crazy when it doesn't) about seeing a drawing a through after seeing it in your mind. The sense of fruition coupled with completion in having the concept be realized, when a crazy idea comes to life on a page, and when it transforms from a doodle, evolves in sketch, and through draft and revision, to a finished panel. It's the innate satisfaction that you participated in the act of creation - made something that otherwise wouldn't exist.

   And speaking of teaching, as of late I've been fortunate to be in contact with a number of former students who have really taken the art-ball and and run with it: more than a few are ironically inspiring me now... which is perhaps the absolute best reward anyone could ever hope for. Aside from getting another drawing done.