I’ve had a creatively exhausting week, the kind where your brain has been buzzing with ideas for so long that it just starts to feel like mushy noise. Glad to have a day off tomorrow.
And speaking of awesome days, my nephew Tristan’s birthday is tomorrow. He’s a huge Iron Man fan and he’s seeing the movie on his birthday. So I made this poster for him. I hope he likes it.
To give credit where credit is due, the background is “War Torn” by DeltaFreelancer on Deviant Art, and I found the awesome tutorial on how to make Iron Man-like titles at David Occhino Design.
(You can click the image to see it big.)
Last weekend, I attended a small workshop hosted by Adam Thurman, who is the marketing director at Chicago’s Court Theatre. It was the best money I’ve spent on a workshop so far in my career. Why? Two main reasons.
The Problem
You’ll recall that not too long ago, I put together a snazzy portfolio booklet, full of examples of my work and endorsement quotes from my clients. It included a long list of marketing collateral and branding services that I could supply. I sent these out to about 40 different theatre companies of various sizes whom my research had shown could likely afford to hire an outside designer when needed. To date, I’ve received only one reply to that mailing. It was Adam Thurman, and I was already attending his workshop. What went wrong?
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You might have noticed a few subtle changes taking place around these parts. You might have stumbled through here and thought “Wait a minute, where are all the comic strips?” They’re gone!
For a long time, I had been struggling with properly archiving the almost 1500 (and growing!) Dumbstruck strips I’ve got laying around. And this blog just wasn’t cutting it anymore. For too long, this place has been a catch-all blog for whatever I need it to be, and trying to integrate the functionality to make it all things to all of my content was becoming a bigger and bigger headache. So I’ve reorganized!
A Place To Call Home
Dumbstruck can now be found on it’s own brand-new website: DumbstruckComic.com. This bright, shiny new home has it’s own unique archiving system, which I designed and coded specifically for the strip and will allow visitors both new and old to more conveniently browse the whole collection. I’m done with those insanely long lists of dates and titles that you find on other webcomic sites! Dumbstruck is a story, and now you’ll be able to browse it more like you would a book: with chapters and summaries.
As promised, over the next year I’ll be rebuilding the archives starting at the beginning with an all-new prologue. I’ll be adding strips to fill in gaps in continuity and restoring strips that I never had time to complete. It’s going to be a fantastically fun time, and I hope you’ll join me for it.
A New Purpose
As for this blog, it’s getting a new focus. A recent workshop, which I’ll tell y’all about very soon, helped me gain clarity on how to most effectively put it to use. So from now on, what you’ll find here will be mainly behind-the-scenes explorations of my freelance work, be it design, illustration, or consulting. It will be much more strongly connected to my business and my portfolio site.
Thanks for dropping in! We’re just getting started…
What a delight it was to discover that my friend Layne and I share a common birthday, and not only that, but also that we are big Star Trek nerds. Thus, we are throwing a joint birthday celebration a little early so we can see Star Trek Into Darkness opening night with our friends. Birthdays are awesome, especially when you can share them!
This is the show image for the final show in Remy Bumppo‘s 2012/2013 season, Creditors. This image was particularly challenging to arrive at, even though you look at it now and it seems so simple. Below, I’ve posted some of my sketchbook pages as I tried to find the right image to summed up this show. It’s a story about three people: a woman, her husband, and her former lover. Themes of darkness, marriage, sexual anxiety, and manipulation surrounded the work. The fact that one man is a writer and the other a sculpture influenced me to try to find a solution involving these professions. Ultimately, though, it all came back to the idea of relationships, anxiety, and being watched.
When Artistic Director Nick Sandys suggested something with someone looking through the slats of blinds in a window, the image really started to come together. I eventually distilled it down to just an eye looking through a single opening, which could be a door or a window, and the clasped hands showing intimacy and relationship. The specifics of who is who in this scenario are unnecessary (these relationships change throughout the show).
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