Friends

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/11/h­b-fun.html

http://www.dummcomics.com/index?sid=100

Kimbo Smokes - by Ricky Garduno

These came from paka.

1. I pretty much think of your art as being synonymous with Illustrator especially, so I'm curious if you've worked much with traditional media for colors - and if so, which you really enjoyed, preferred, or found interfaced best with your computer work.

I have not, really. Until I came to Illustrator I really kinda avoided color a lot; most of my old color work was done in Deluxe Paint. I guess I am just a digital artist at heart.

Media I've tried in the past with some modicum of success - or at least I thought so at the time - are watercolor, colored pencil, gouache, acrylic, and cel-vinyl on acetate. The last was the closest I ever came to the flat colors I love without going digital; most of my influences are from people working at the early intersections of art and printing technology, who'd just lay down a flat chunk of rubylith or something to call for a swath of color on the blue plate or whatever. I keep thinking I want to get around to getting a new set of colored pencils; I miss them just enough for quick color comps, and the prospect of picking out details over gouache.

But mostly I am a digital artist. When I work with physical medium I get very different results, a little crude and unskilled from lack of practice, deliberately full of the marks of the tools. Nothing's really quite gelled into a look for me the way AI has.

2. Who're your favorite artists these days?

I don't think they've changed lately; nobody's really come into my world who can override what running into people like Winsor McCay, Walt Kelly, Phil Foglio, Matt Howarth, and Carol Lay at earlier points of my life did.

3. Is there anything in your personality, or worldview, that you think is very specifically New Orleans - stuff you wouldn't have if you were from a different part of the world, or even a different part of the south?

Mm. I've always felt like I'm a bit more laid-back than a lot of people I know. Relax, it's not worth fretting over, we'll work it out sometime. Later, it's hot, let me have a nap first. Sure, there are "type A" personalities around New Orleans, but it's just not a tense, high-speed city. And I took that attitude to LA, and to Boston; I didn't let these more high-speed cities change my ideas of how urgent things are. I don't know if that's a Southern thing or a New Orleans thing; I've never really spent much time in the rest of the South.

I also feel like my attitude towards politicians is shaped by growing up in Louisiana: there, we expect them to be using their position for personal gain to a certain extent. "He's a crook but he's our crook", with a certain sense of obligation and a sense of what's going to far - sure, steal a little off the top and enrich your cronies, but spread the wealth around and do some good for the poorest parts of your constituency, too. Most American politics of the past years gets it the other way around, with a lot of stuff off the top for the wealthy and next to nothing for the people at the bottom.

I suspect being open to weirdness may also be partially due to growing up in a cosmopolitan, crazy, decadent city like New Orleans.

4. What were your favorite books and TV programs as a kid?

...This one draws a blank, at first. I watched an awful lot of awful 1970s Saturday morning cartoons. My parents regularly watched M.A.S.H. I vaguely, vaguely recall loving Captain Kangaroo though not much of it, and I dimly recall tuning in early every Saturday for a version of Mighty Mouse that was a continuing cliff-hanger set in space. Books? Well, the one I learnt to read with was The Little Red Caboose - my mother tells me I made her read that one over and over, and one day she found me with it on the sofa, reading it out loud; she thought I'd memorized it but it turned out I was simply reading it, once she tried getting me to read other things. Favorites, it's hard to pick now that my library is gone; I'd be able to look at it and say "oh, this, and this, and this". There was a lot of Larry Niven on my shelves, later on - my library quickly became mostly fantasy and SF, with a bias more towards the latter than the former.

Mostly what I watched was cartoons. Tiny Toons, the Bakshi Mighty Mouse, stuff like that. 'Star Blazers' intrigued me a little but it was on at a weird hour I could never catch; if I'd seen it regularly my style might have taken a different direction. Or not; I watched 'Speed Racer' regularly too and mostly just found it delightfully weird. Especially its insane end credit sequence. And, damn, I thought of some live-action show for a moment, but now it's gone. Oh! Yes. Of course, Doctor Who on the local PBS station, usually followed by the intense weird of Monty Python. Which is less weird now that I've learnt a bit more about the culture it was in, but...

Also, we had an encyclopedia, and I'd devour chunks of that like any proto-geek. And browse the dictionary looking for Interesting Words.

And I had "The Smithsonian Book Of Newspaper Comics", which was just... amazing. So many beautiful things to look at.

5. Why do you think your relationship with your mother is that healthy and supportive?

She's told me stories about her relationship with her mother, and it boils down to this: Grandma M. was not a very good mother, and rather than carry the misery along, she made an explicit choice to use her as a bad example. I have a feeling that in many cases, she said to herself "How would Madge react to this?" and then made sure that whatever she did, it wasn't that.

The sky here is overcast, there is a lot of mist in the air. Not quite fog, but it feels like a cloud is hugging the ground.

On the drive back to my house we saw a red glow on the horizon, above the treeline. It looked surreal and unnatural. We soon realized the glow was caused by brake lights, the sheer amount of vehicles turning the sky red. Vehicles waiting for tomorrow.

In five hours I head to work and there is nothing about tomorrow I am looking forward to, except perhaps leaving. Because as added insult, I also work the Saturday nightmare. But enough bitching. For those of you also having to work in retail, stay strong.

http://darkplacescomic.com/?p=711

In the interest of exploring the mysterious world of selling-stuff-what-I-have-drawn, I’ve taken the liberty of opening a store on one of these print-on-demand websites, where I can make available garments, drinking vessels and suchlike sundries emblazoned with aforementioned stuff-what-I-have-drawn. As an introductory effort I’ve cleaned up a design that’s drawn some positive comments in the past – Sleepytime Cthulhu.

You can get stuff with this little chap on it by visiting my Zazzle store. Some people have already received their t-shirts and the feedback I’ve had has been very positive – this is quality apparel, ladies and gentlemen, and would make an excellent Christmas gift. Just sayin’.

This is a case of testing the waters – if it’s successful you can expect to see Dark Places-related designs in there in the not-too-distant future.

It was incredibly, weirdly romantic. Other people watch love stories about people; we watch love stories about cities.

Also, lost my old msn account. It should link to the new one, though, if you have any quesstions!

Nice to be doing these again. The new Galactica game is great. :)

It was pretty nice. I can even finally see why people like "fall"; so far I've mostly hated it because it's just been a short precursor to the half of the year I spend huddled under the blankets, but it's been lingering a lot this year and it's rather nice. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if Kin had been around as well, but he's off in Seattle having fun with other friends.

Then we came home. I'm going to make some pizza in a little bit, and I finally got around to downloading the source to Adium - I'm giving serious thought to using it as the base for making a Mac muck client that has features like "nice typography", since it already has infrastructure for tabbed windows and HTML views with user-selectable styles. Savitar is stuck in OS9 land, and Atlantis is nice but is really... clearly not designed by a visual person.

( basic muck client features... )

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/11/h­appy-thanksgiving.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/11/m­ore-kaspar-translations-to-layout-from.h­tml

On the other hand, a good third of my Greyhound trip out here was on buses with outlets and wifi, which is pretty awesome, so I'll probably be easier to find on the trip home... Have a great holiday!