Fifteen Years of Ink & Snow

Tomorrow will mark fifteen years of posting punny pics + accompanying cartoon commentary. Thought I'd take a moment to say thank you to the regular readers, I always appreciate the eyeballs.

Made way back in 2016 during a Visual Art Academy course, this one-pager piece was done as a demo for the Cartoon & Comic Arts class. It was initially conceived on the spot as an emergency last-minute backup to the in-class exercise for our week-long “collaborative page” unit. This is when I orchestrate a section of the course for getting a taste of a more traditional team approach to creating comics: one student does a script for a one-page, 3-5 panel comic, then a second randomly selected student will in turn pencil the page out, followed by a third and fourth student respectively inking then coloring what turns into a really neat amalgamation of talent and skill. This particular demo page laid around the office a number of years before scanning it last year, and then it again randomly resurfaced on a search of my desktop for an unrelated image. I just used it to warm up for some other coloring work, and so can now show it in the studio classroom to illustrate the full process. A note that the selected excerpt is sampled from a particularly appropriate piece by poet Tom Hubbard, and the other two stages sketched/inked by a couple of amazing former students Tara and Amanda, both incredible artists in their own right these days. 

On another side-note soon I'll hopefully have some exceptional news to share with folks about a long-held dream coming true. It follows on a recent ascension in the academic ranks to the degree that one of my official duties is creating not just artwork, or art majors, but curriculum development as well. The posted pics are snapshots from the studio classroom when we move from experimenting with comics poetry into the sequential art/comics portion of the semester: the buffet of sample comics on the main display table in the center of the studio, and the ever-growing pile of sample student comics from previous semesters. 

Relatedly, here's another example of the particular effectiveness in this medium with of one of the many in-class exercises I frequently use in the studio to demonstrate how to guide a viewer/reader through a sequence of images that transport us on a journey through time and space itself. "Behold the power of comics!"