"Turdwatching"

Been a while and yet I still find myself missing the Bird-Dog every so often. I had originally sketched this idea out way back when she was still around, and since then hadn't much heart to spend any time on it beyond the initial doodles. Then after a bit it just got sentenced to artistic limbo, languishing in the mental compost-heap along with every other "someday I gotta get around to that."

That changed when prepping for some material to do as demos for students, specifically the process on working up concepts into scripts, and from there into thumbnails, then onto penciled pages, then finally inks and color. Some folks do it differently, or variations on the theme, but for me I mostly shuttle back-and-forth between simultaneously plotting out the pages along with breaking down the text ie figuring out the pacing and the editing with the words in conjunction with the images.

I found myself showing up to the campus in the art department a few hours early every day for a week, ideally in hopes of getting everything else done early enough so that I could spend an hour here and there plugging away on this particular piece. Which meant folks usually caught me working away in the drawing studio right before and in-between classes, which is always a bonus opportunity to interact and illustrate certain aspects of the process. And, after all, it's hardly fair to ask students to endeavor on a similar assigned undertaking without meanwhile showing how it's done.

The daily discipline was also an excuse to set the stage for expanding into some even longer works, for example a four-page piece that I'll be showcasing here sooner than later. And from that to springboard my way into the compost-heap of back-burner projects, especially now that I've finally built up enough of a buffer-zone of material with the Nuggets feature that I have more than a few months of extra space + time to sustain another pass at bigger, longer pieces.

That and I've as of late been really aesthetically turned on by reading some mainstream comic books, in particular the inventive ways contemporary artists compose and arrange their panels within the pages. This in turn inspired me to just experiment a little and simply have some fun with a narrative that isn't particularly funny or all that serious either - more like a short story of sorts. Every so often I like to stray outside the boundary of the usual single-panel, or - rarer still - the strip format. And also it's sometimes enough just to do something for no other damn reason than you simply want to spend the time doing it because it's what you like to do.
Click on image to embiggen & enjoy (note: this and other works uploaded to the Picasa web-portfolio here). Hopefully a full-sized print will be up on display in the gallery for this fall semester's Fine Arts department faculty show up at UAF (Thursday, Sept. 3rd, opening TBA).