Career Damage

Two notes this week:

1) At the top of the email, there is now a big honking “ Subscribe Here” button. If you received a message as an email forward and you want to get more, please hit the button to sign up. Remember, anyone can read the email or the blog, but only people who sign up are eligible to win original art. (And please mention the person who forwarded you the email when you sign up, because that person gets an extra contest entry.)

2) Here's the best story I've heard about this book since I started this project: I was at a birthday party last week, attended by no less than Rob Brown, model for Part-Time Dog and actor extrordinaire (www.dysfunctionaltheatre.org).

I told him that he should be proud. The mailing list was up to about 1,400 people, and I was getting new members every week. He told me that he had been forwarding it to friends, colleagues, everybody, and everybody was enjoying it – except his mother. “Your mother?” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “She kind it looked it over, read it through a couple of times, and then turned around and asked me, 'Rob, explain to me again how this is helping your career.'”

Mrs. Brown: I got nothing. But I will at least publicize that Rob's troupe, the Dysfunctional Theatre Company, is having a fall Fundraiser at Deacon Brodie's on 370 West 46th Street on Thursday, October 1st and that everybody who loves new theater in New York should come. It is apparently the very, very least I can do.

More soon, promise. In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com.

Open publication

And we're off!

Here's an interesting story about this page. Well, interesting to me anyway. You may find it totally uninteresting, in which case you should mention it in the comments, or just send me a personal note ruining my day. 

My initial plans for this book were to draw and ink everything by hand, scan it all in, and add the color on the computer. That's how I did the cover, and that's how I do a lot of my illustration work. I even bought a beautiful little device called a Cintiq to help me do this. A Cintiq is basically a 21-inch monitor that is also a graphics tablet, so I can use a stylus to draw directly onto the screen. I recommend it to anyone who in the field who is questing for an enormous tax-deductible expense. 

But I actually decided to finish the page as a watercolor. Why? Well, here's the thing. I had a lousy scanner. When I would scan in a drawing - and I had to scan it in in pieces -  it would distort the damn thing, and the pieces wouldn't line up, so I'd have to spend an hour tinkering in PhotoShop just to get the drawing to look like the drawing. After only three, maybe five, years of complaining about this, I finally bought a really good scanner. It's an Epson Expression 10000XL, and I recommend to anyone who still has any money left over after paying for the Cintiq. And if you do, call me. Maybe we can go out to dinner sometime. 

Back to the point: Now that I could do fast, accurate scans, it occurred to me that I might as well paint the thing by hand and then scan it in. Believe it or not, I find it actually faster to paint by hand. I realize that this admission has just ruined my chances of every becoming a spokesman for Cintiq, but such is life. I like the chaos of a hand-drawn painting. Hope you feel the same. 

Incidentally, the lettering is all being done on the computer. I like it, but if anyone thinks it's too hard to read, this would be a good time to tell me.