May11

Southwest Book Fiesta (Friday)

by jenn on May 11th, 2013 at 09:35
Posted In: Conventions

So far I’ve met lots of neat people, including Sam B.  (who does not have a zombie army) but who does write historical thrillers set in a Post World War 2 environment. He and his wife are super nice, which is always nice when you’re at a convention where your husband basically just slowed the car down before shoving you out of the car and into the convention center.* Sam B. and Linda also seem to know everyone at the convention, which is pretty neat, sort of like getting to sit next to the popular (and nice) kids in class!

We’re also sitting a few booths down from Nightstalker Press, which is funny because I kept looking at them, thinking, “Where do I know them from?!” until finally they took mercy on me and said, “We were in the steampunk cowboy outfits last con,” and it all clicked for me.

Mild prosopagnosia means that I tend to greet everyone as if I’ve never met them before, with the absolute conviction that I should know exactly who they are. Sure it’s awkward at first, but after a while it’s sort of funny.**

And on that note, it is now time for a list!

Things I Have Learned About Conventions***

  1. Authors (and literary types) get the “Typo’d Mary” joke.
  2. Always smuggle a snack and/or a pack lunch in.
  3. Make friends with someone near you (a booth buddy) so you can have bathroom breaks
    1. The Albuquerque Convention Center is a large building, with a slightly smaller building that they call the “bathrooms.” I recommend taking twine or dropping breadcrumbs – you may not find your way back out of there again, and I can’t guarantee that there are neither witches nor Minotaurs in there. It’s a big complex of bathroom stalls.
  4. Don’t expect (if you’re me, anyways) to make any of your booth money back. This is a chance to put your face with your book’s name. Be prepared to hand out lots of little freebies and cards.
  5. There is a cash bar at this convention. At a convention of authors. I don’t know if this is stereotyping, or if it’s marketing genius. I imagine if any of us had any sales they would go directly to paying for our tabs.  Mind you, if any of us had sales, we wouldn’t *need* to go start a tab in the first place, I guess.
  6. That said, there are strange underlying alliances, feuds, and politics that seem to pit  some of the bookstores with/against other bookstores. So maybe in retrospect, maybe a cash bar is probably not a good thing to have.

 

*Not true fact. He bought me breakfast and a fancy barista-made tea before helping me unpack our gear. I did have to do the first part of the convention on my own, but as I’m starting to learn, the first day of a three day convention is usually pretty quiet and pretty much just authors and a few die-hard readers.

** And then it gets a little sad, but then it gets funny again, because what can you do? Life is just sort of like that.

*** Being that I’m an expert because I’ve been to… like… three of these types of conventions? Four? Whatever, still far less than an expert has. But I still like lists, (and footnotes) so whatever.

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May06

This is what I’ve been doing

by jenn on May 6th, 2013 at 14:38
Posted In: comics, Era of Great Wonders

Where the real estate is cheap, but the insurance is outrageous!

John and I are working on a new comic called Era of Great Wonders. He tends to describe it as “Ken Burns presents: Giant Monsters,” but I tend to describe it as “how hard is it to draw simplistic buildings – wtf?! I’m so tired and why is this taking so long?!”

His description is what we use when we talk to bookstores and comic fans, but I think mine is a little more accurate. I’ve finished the first few pages, but still want to get a little more ready before I start posting them online.

Combined with our other two projects, All the Growing Things and Vagus Street (Vagus which is almost completely collected, and both of which I’m also starting new storylines on), I’ve been sort of crazypants. We’re also getting into convention season, which means that I’m going to be spending time, in public, where there are people.

I’ve also been gardening, but  I’m going to wait until things fill in a little better though before I start posting any photos of that stuff – right now while my yard doesn’t look like a moonscape, it also doesn’t look like anything I want to take photos of either. Maybe I just need to be better about cropping my photos then?

Ah well, back to the arting around.

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Mar31

WTF March?!

by jenn on March 31st, 2013 at 20:54
Posted In: comics, Vagus Street

I have only a little over three hours left before March is officially over. Four if we count our missing hour from Daylight Savings time (how we barely knew ye.)

I have been frantically trying to finish up the last story for the Vagus Street Rehabilitation Project, and there is a good chance that while I will have most of it penciled by the time the clock flickers midnight, I won’t have it inked. We’re trying to get the eight short stories put together into one bound trade in time to have it ready for the summer convention season, and there is a good chance it will be my fault that it is not -quite- ready as soon as we need it to be.

In my defense, I was a bit distracted by John’s new script that came in: 20 pages of text for a new giant monster comic that we’ve been working on for the past few month. So far the script looks like it’s going to be around 40 or 50 pages when I’m done laying it out. (I’ve drawn up the first five script pages, which seems to translate to ten drawn pages when it’s all said and done.)

John says that this first installment of script is only about a sixth of what is planned for the first of six books, so that’s pretty exciting! I’m really keen on the idea of doing some big fat graphic novels! Something we can all sink our teeth into!

Above is a sample of the first spalsh page, but as you can see, it’s not much to show for something that seems to be taking me as long as it it. I hope that it will be something that will be well worth the wait however, as I’ve a strong feeling that this may just be the best work that I or John (or both of us combined) have done together.

Or separately. Or something like that. You know, without any of the pressure that such a statement implies.

Mostly this post is just a way of saying that I’m still working on webcomics, and that I’ve not given up on All the Growing Things or Vagus Street – only that I am (as usual) behind in my self imposed schedules.

I’m a pretty lax boss to work for, to be honest.

(Also, it turns out I’m a little OCD about school, which is a weird thing to discover about one’s self this deep into adulthood. Where was this dedication when I was in high school?)

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Mar14

Gallery Show

by jenn on March 14th, 2013 at 23:29
Posted In: Art Making, comics, Honors Thesis

I went ahead and put up a bunch of photos of the gallery show, if anyone is interested in seeing how that massive Namio Tristique project I was working on was coming along!

I’ve been on spring break this week, and I’ve been trying like crazy to get back to all the things I’ve stopped working on. For a while it sort of felt like I’d stepped out of my life and that I was watching everything race past me. It’s hard to pick back up when you feel so out of sorts and left behind. I still occasionally have a weird deja vu sort of feeling where (and maybe “deja vu” isn’t the right phrase) I’m not sure if I’m awake and everything is real, or if I’m still panicking in my studio, and my brain has finally snapped and I still have weeks of solitude and painting to go.

Things I’ve been trying to get back into: Aikido (I’ve been three times this week, and my body is so very sore. It turns out that falling down and getting back up is kind of painful on your back and knees.)

My comics have been neglected for so long! I’ve been trying to get the word out about the print version of All the Growing Things, but truth is: I’m terrible at advertising. I just don’t really want to bug or bother anyone. Although, I will say that having strangers review it and tell me how much they like it has really made my day! (It’s also nice when friend say they like it too!) So I also need to get started on the next storyline as well, where we’ll all learn what’s up with Texy and the cats.

I’ve also been working on the next six pages of Vagus, and we’re going to start putting together a 50+ page collection of all the Vagus stories that will be ready for the summer conventions. I’m also privately working on a spin-off of a Vagus story called Heartless that I’m pretty excited about. It’ll deal a little more with the mysterious “Jerry” that John introduced in the Children’s Story.

John and I are also working on a third comic that I’m pretty excited about. I don’t have anything to show for it really, other than an instagram photo, but it’s going to be a comic about giant monsters, and the stories of people who had to deal with living in a world where that sort of stuff is going on. (Wow, can a summary about giant monsters be any more boring?) I think it’s going to play to both John and my strengths though, so I’m pretty excited!

I’m also working on a cover for an amazing friend (I’ll have to get permission to see if I can post it here when I’m done), as well as trying to catch up on all the ceramics homework I’ve sort of let slide while working on other stuff. Did you know that throwing a cylinder is hard work? Pottery in general is frigging difficult.

And sometimes it blows up on you too. Which is a huge bummer.

I still have to write a paper for my professors for the Namio Show, and I also need to figure out what I’m going to talk about at the presentation as well. Yikes. I guess I should get back to work then?

 

 

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Mar01

Giveaway Winners, Shipping, and Other Craziness

by jenn on March 1st, 2013 at 09:00
Posted In: All The Growing Things, comics

I just got the list of winners from Goodreads. Man, they (the Goodreads people) are REALLY on the ball when it comes to their stuff! I can’t believe how nice they are to talk to (I had to have extra help because I don’t have an ISBN yet, and they helped me fake one until the giveaway was over.) They pretty much walked me step-by-step on how to do things, and then when I still sort of just flailed around, they were able to go in and fix things for me. Seriously, they are awesome!

I’m going to ship out the books today, after my shift at the soup kitchen.

Okay, and speaking of shipping: I try to keep detailed notes on who I’ve shipped to (especially after those tragic three weeks where I ran out of books) but if you haven’t received a book from me, and you were supposed to, LET ME KNOW! I ship things media mail because I’m a poor college student (and an artist to boot) but the post office people told me that there’s tracking included in the media mail, but then another post office person told me that while the numbers were there, they weren’t necessarily tracked, so… I don’t know what any of that means. But the fact remains: LET ME KNOW if you don’t get something, and I’ll make it right, alright?

(I like saying, “right, alright.” I should probably stop that.)

Other Craziness: after filling out the labels to ship these (I hand write them), I sort of forgot halfway through what my address was, and how to write it correctly. It’s sort of like when you write one word, and you keep staring at it to the point where it becomes a nonsensical mishmash of shapes and lines. So if you receive a package in the mail and it looks  like I forgot my address… it’s because I did.

I have one week (and two days) before I have to hang my BFA show. I’m sort of going crazy right now (because I have about 9 paintings that still need fixing), so please bear with me. I will be sane again after the 10th of March. I hope.

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Feb20

500 Words

by jenn on February 20th, 2013 at 23:53
Posted In: Art Making, Honors Thesis

There’s been a stomach flu going around, slowly taking out the people at school, one at a time. It even wiped out the soup kitchen earlier this year, which was pretty intense trying to feed all those people so short handed!

I had managed to avoid it until today.

Or yesterday.

Or whatever; time has no meaning when you’re trying to figure out if your guts are going to rupture out of you, one way or another (or god help you, both ways at once.)

There was a moral to that story, I think. I guess, it’s a long way to say that we all have good days and bad days, and I while I was curled up in a little ball of pain – wondering why both blankets and sunlight hurt – I started thinking about how I went to a book signing on Saturday, where Steven Gould and Daniel Abraham talked about the creative process.

Their premise is that if you write 500 words a day, and say you have a bad day, later when you go back and read your story, you’ll not be able to pick those “bad” 500 words out of the rest of the stream.

One of my friends, trying to cheer me up, told me that she bet painting was a lot like that… and that if you have a bad day painting, you probably can’t even tell after the painting is done. I’m not entirely sure she’s wrong, but on the other hand, when you’re a writer, you can go into your story and delete the words that don’t work – that’s the beauty of writing in drafts.

It’s also the beauty of painting in “passes.” You put your first layers down, maybe a colored ground, and then sketch in where your lights and darks will be, and then you paint paint paint. Somewhere near the end of the process, you can go in and start glazing… subtlety shifting colors until you get the details and tones you really want. (The glazing part is my favorite part, I think)

But one of the problems is that if you’re having a bad day painting, and you mix your paint wrong, or your medium isn’t working, or you just aren’t paying attention, you can leave “artifacts” in your painting: brush hairs, gobs of paint, weird shiny spots, and heavy brush strokes that look out of place when everything else is smooth. To that end, I thought I would share some of those “bad” painting things that are all over my latest painting – page 21 of the namio series.

I don’t quite know how to explain it, but the paint in those two bad paintings are shiny and lumpy. It’s really irritating. They only way (that I can think of how to get rid of the shininess is to add a varnish, which I won’t be able to do until way at the end, when the painting is done. And I’m never sure when things are done, I tend to tinker with them forever.

You can also try to fix things by going in and adding in details (which is what I started doing, and which seems to be working.) If you add enough details, sometimes you can distract from weak painting.

On the other hand, sometimes you can get a really nice first pass, like in the one above. Sometimes the shadows and lights just work out perfectly, and then you’re faced with the terrifying thought of messing it up if you touch it.

I don’t know, I sort of lost the thread of where I was going with this. But, bad days happen with painting, and dang, there are a few that have some bad medium mistakes on them.

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Feb08

Some (blurry) photos

by jenn on February 8th, 2013 at 10:27
Posted In: Uncategorized

So the sketch thing* is pretty awesome, but like everything else I am very behind on my page count. I’ve been using posemaniacs to practice some of the forms, so that’s why the people below don’t have any genitalia. Just… so you know.

Sketchbook!

Also, I’ve a blurry photo that shows that we’ve got more books in stock! I’m a little worried because of various pre-sales and because of the Goodreads dealy which is ten books that are earmarked for an anonymous group of lucky winners. (Also, I kind of want to do a special Goodreads doodle on the frontispieces, but I don’t know quite what to do.)

Super Blurry! But in stock!

We’re thinking that after this batch, and a smaller batch that takes us up to an even 100 books, we’ll go in and correct the typos and slap an ISBN on there, and call it a second edition. Also, maybe then we can get into some “official” stores, like Amazon. Although their rules are some sort of crazy labyrinth of chaos and confusion when I try to read them. (So maybe I’ll make John do it, instead.)

Ceramics actually don't suck!

And last, but not least (although, in a funny way, it is least) I took a photo of my little dogū figurine I’ve been making in class. This little guy is about 10″ or so, and is the prototype of  a bigger (unphotographed) figure who ended up at 20 inches. She’s so big and fragile (and I’m terrified of ceramics) that I’ve only carved the front part of her. The little dogū has butt cheeks, but the big dogū is terrifyingly heavy and only carved on the front. If she survives the kiln, I’ll take another photo of her, when I’m certain that the photo-electro-magico rays that are emitted from the camera won’t cause her to burst into tiny shards.

Alright, so after soup kitchen work today, I’m going to paint & draw my thesis heart out. And maybe cry a little, because, what’s a thesis without a little tears? (Seriously)

 

* Fill out a sketchbook in a month. I calculated it that I need to do 3.9 pages a day to stay on track. I am not on track.

 

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Feb04

Ceramics aren’t as bad as you’d think

by jenn on February 4th, 2013 at 23:14
Posted In: Uncategorized

I’ve been going from the school’s ceramic studio to my home painting studio, and back and forth, these past two weeks. I have only today sat down and started working on the next Vagus storyline art, and I came to the realization that I have forgotten how to draw.

I also had to shamefully deny a classmate when he suggested that I did not belong in Intro to Ceramics. In my defense: I put an excessive amount of time into my projects (I was at the open studio everyday), and I plan heavily, and I construct things in a very methodical sort of way. Also, one of the key foundations of my artistic belief is that if you try something really, incredibly, unreasonably difficult and fail at it, people have to cut you slack because it was way out of your skill zone anyways. So I tend to overshoot, just so I can sort of still get somewhere.*

Occasionally things work out spectacularly well for me, and other times, well, they work out less well.

I will take photos tomorrow.

 

* I didn’t know where to go with that metaphor. Analogy? Comparison? Thingy. Whatever. It is late, and I am very, very, tired.

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Feb01

Giveaway? Giveaway!

by jenn on February 1st, 2013 at 01:00
Posted In: Uncategorized

I’m trying out this Goodreads giveaway thingy! If you haven’t bought a copy of the All the Growing Things Trade, it totally won’t hurt my feelings if you try to get it free from Goodreads. Honestly, I’m a little worried* that no one will want it, but it’s EXACTLY this line of thinking that lead me to being all surprised when we sold out of copies.**

Goodreads Giveaway:

 

Goodreads Book Giveaway

All the Growing things by Jenn Myers

All the Growing things

by Jenn Myers

Giveaway ends March 01, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

 

In other news:

I am still working on this thesis. Everything is on hold until this is done. I have one month left to go, and apparently I’m going to cram every single emotion that it is possible to have into these short four weeks. After that, there will be more comics to be had*** and things will go back to normal. Also, I’m taking a ceramics class, and did you know, ceramics are kind of fun? Sure, you can’t make comics with them (or can you?) but they’re not the bane of my existence that I was worried about.

Okay, later gators!

 

* Because I’m a worrier, and worry is what I do.

** We have checked the printer, and they say they are ready to ship them to us, which means that at some point I will get them and doodle the heck out of them, and then send them to everyone that’s been so patient with us!

*** Possibly some heavy drinking and serious crying jags as well. It’s been, seriously, it’s been tough lately. Emotionally I mean.

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Jan16

2013 Comicon Loot

by jenn on January 16th, 2013 at 15:41
Posted In: Uncategorized

So last weekend was the Albuquerque Comic Con. It was pretty dang fun, and I found a lot of really cool stuff that I just had to have! This is a small sampling of what I came away with – some t-shirts, stickers, comics, and some original pieces of art:

Sweet, sweet loot!

For those of you that can’t tell what all this stuff is from my amazing photograph skills alone, I have made a guide!

Sweet sweet guide!

1. Fallout Vault Boy sticker. I have no idea where my husband found this, but it’s awesome. So awesome that I don’t know where to put it. I don’t think I own anything worthy of such a sticker

2. Metal the Brand sticker!

3. Metal the Brand t-shirt. I saw that he also had anatomy t-shirts, but I hadn’t seen those until later in the con, and I’d already gotten the maggots shirt. If you get a chance, you should check out this guy’s old kickstarter from last year, it’s pretty crazy! Also, he had a mustache!

4. Original art from Josh McCoy of Rhinestone Ronin fame! Josh did a really great pin-up for the All the Growing Things Trade book, and when I saw him at the con, he showed me his “rejected” drawing that he’d done. I think he was going to throw it away or something crazy, but I begged him, and he gave me this piece! I totally owe him two drawings now! I’m terribly indebt to everyone I know.

5. T-shirt from Robo Tarot! I’d wanted this particular shirt since I’d first seen it last fall, but I ended up getting the sand colored “Fool” instead. Which is a good shirt, no doubt, but it’s no blue Emperor shirt!

6. The first Rhinestone Ronin comic, as well as the preview for the second book. I’m just going to throw this out there: the second book has a chainsaw-wielding teddy bear. CHAINSAW. TEDDY BEAR. It’s good.

7. Holy moly, how do I even explain this one? I tend to dread cons in the worst way. There’s something about working your heart out on a comic book and then being ignored by everyone at the con that is just focused on Batman comics. And then… next to our table were two amazing women! The giggled and laughed and had such a great time that they FORCED everyone around them to also have a great time! It was awesome! The created their first book, Sisterhood of the Blood: Origins in something like two weeks. How crazy is that?!

8. Mary Link (artist on Sisterhood of the Blood) makes these badass dada books!  I wish I could show it to you, but it’s a trip! It’s all collaged and hovers on the edge of making complete and total sense!

9. Stephen McCraine writes kids books! Or kid graphic novels! With a kid who’s an inventor, and his dog buddy that he hangs out with all the time! It’s super fun to read, and at the con, all the kids swarmed his booth! He also has a blog that is… far more extensive than I had previously realised!

10. Mary Link (again) Also did these drawings when she’d get bored – she did one of John, and it’s just frigging awesome! (Ben Neb Girven took the photo!)

11 – 13. Speaking of Ben Girven, he and Neil published a Stomping Grounds Ashcan, A sketchbook (I’m so going to copy that idea) and we replaced the Field Guide that I’d previously given to my student!

All in all, it was a good weekend, and I made off with lots of good stuff!

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