Creativity without the time or energy...........

..........is pretty much the equivalent of buying a girl 5 drinks at a bar when you're flat broke only to get wasted, puke, and even piss yourself when she finally says "want to come to my place?" That may be too strong an analogy, but I can assure you that being inspired by something when you've just worked a 4 day week that feels like a 7 day week, is a complete waste.

Long week. Very long short week. Jeeez. Work alone has been a nightmare. If anyone out there does some kind of account management with very demanding, yet high-end, clients, I'm sure you know the feeling when you're body pretty much refuses to continue. On top of that, my god damn right eye has started to twitch. That hasn't happen to me since I was working full time in college. Even my contacts burn.

So now that I'm through bitching, on to my purpose for being here - ART! Well, I have posted since the beginning of May, and I wish I could say it's because I've been wrapped up in lining out a great comic book, but it's been more my job than anything else. Or as we say in PR, allocating our resources into additional, more profitable ventures. 

Over the past few weeks, I've actually been concentrating on writing - after all, what good is a comic book if it has no story to follow? On top of that, I finally got a return on one of my MANY investments - painting. For some time now, I have been really interested in canvas work, so at the beginning of the year, I bought a load of paint markers and a few canvases. The first one I tried REALLY sucked, but I progressed. So much so, I've become addicted to mini canvases. 10 so far, I think I'll try to make 50 so I can scatter them all over the world, and some day tell my grandchildren that there are bank account codes on the back of each piece in the series. That could be like my last gag.

Aside from that, I haven't accomplished much more. 

But in other news, I got a haircut - it was time - but in memory of that, I messed around with my characters.

And one of my mug before and after........Other than that - Memorial Day weekend was great - beached it up at West Palm Beach with friends. Saw a pretty good show at the Miami Science Museum featuring Miami's own Spam All-Stars......and that's it.

I'll have pics of the mini canvases in the next posting - trying to come up with a name for them right now - another side effect of working in communications is that you become a 'branding whore' - meaning, you can't even suggest or do anything without patenting the idea wanted to trademark it with a peppy name.

- Marin - 

the process of creation......

Something that happens to me A LOT is when I finish drawing something, and then someone else sees what I did, and the first critique is something along the lines of "man, that's crazy" or "that's good, but weird". I got used to this a long time ago. I admit it - I don't draw landscapes, or flowers, or family portraits - I draw whatever I see in my head, which well removed from anything I've ever seen with my eyes. I don't see it as a bad thing, but I can't help it either. 

With that, I often wonder what triggered the urge to draw something? It's not always like that - sometimes, at work for example, I'll just start to sketch around on a paper during a boring ass conference call and 2% of the time something decent comes out. But when I look at other artists' works, I wonder if MY method of getting the juices flowing is anything like theirs. 

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I don't really have any artist friends, so I'm rather isolated in terms of observing other artists methods. Honestly though, I can't really stand artsy folk - they're either complete flakes who have this pretentious outlook on life, or they're complete dorks, introverted and all with no social skills whatsoever. 

To give the impression that this is leading somewhere, I've been asking myself a question for a specific project for SOME time now: how do you make a comic book?

The initial answer I've come to is "with persistence and patience" - I'm only persistent when it comes to being an asshole, and I have no patience whatsoever unless it'll get me somewhere. 

I've had ideas ON ideas about what would make a good comic book - or at least something entertaining if only for the first 5 pages - but i haven't sat down long enough to ever follow through. That is, until now. 

I've been SLOWLY writing a script for a comic book. I've been going back to it for sometime now, but the majority of the story is in my head. It's a short story that's been primarily inspired by things going on in my life write now. What's funny is that the original idea started out as an art piece idea that consisted of 10 lines that were accompanied by illustrations. Well it's come much further since then. Overall, it's just a wacky "autobiography" of what I went through during a coma. I've never actually been in a coma - and you don't actually dream in a coma, so this story wouldn't be suited for anything other than a comic book.

The title, Assumed Civility: the Mad Land Chronicles, is a story based on absurdity, with the central character being the only rational-minded individual in a world of nut jobs - kind of like Alice in Wonderland, but a bit more violent and personal. For my next post, I want to visually portray just how I'm drawing everything, and I hope to be able to track the whole process. But again, that takes persistence and patience.