Hello again. As many of you may know, I have the luxury of having a pretty awesome career in design. It wasn’t always this way. It certainly was not my original intent, but as they say “wanna make God laugh, make a plan!” If you’ve been following this blog, you have read my thoughts regarding my 1 st 10 years in this business, my evolution into a design leader for major consumer product brands, and my recent revelation that some of my fan art had been used 20 years ago in the 2 nd Spider-Man movie. I’m not going to re-hash that topic again. I deleted my posts, and I’m done talking about it. I said I’m glad I could shrug that experience off, and I’m officially closing the topic. That said, I always had a complicated relationship with comics. I have been a fan since I was a child, and I always wanted to draw comics for a living. As I got much older, I realized that “making a living in comics” and “paying my bills and being a grown up” were two very incompatible states of exist...
At our 3rd Quarter Meeting last week, our Chief Creative Officer asked all of us at LPK to figure out individually "Why we do what we do". I didn't take long to figure out my reason: I do what I do because I'm intensely curious and I love a challenge. I never planned to get into what I do for a living; life just kinda' took me in that direction. However, in many ways, I've been doing the same thing since I was 12 years old. The only difference between now and then is that I've added skills and have gotten better at what I do along the way. And my client list has grown along the way too. So far in my pro career I've done a combination of all of these jobs: • Comic Book Artist • Comic Book Publisher • Photographer's Assistant/Darkroom Tech • Graphic Designer • Storyboard Artist • Commercial Illustrator • Photo Retouching • Consumer Product Concepts • Consumer Product Designer • Motion Graphics • Instructor • Who the hell knows next… I love waking up...
"Well You Say I'm Twenty Something And Should Be Slacking But I'm Working Harder Than Ever And You Could Call It Macking" Sure Shot – The Beastie Boys
That lyric meant a lot to me way back in the late '90's when that Beastie Boys album came out. I remember hearing it and thinking; "Yeah, I work hard as hell!" I was 26. I just graduated college, I got married, and I was working full-time at kinko's while I self-published my comic books. Everyone I knew was getting married, working hard full-time jobs, finishing college and/or going to grad school, having kids and turning into responsible adults; all while pursuing their own dreams… one of my buddies is a filmmaker, one performs in a punk band, another was a store manager by the time he turned 25. I never knew a lot of "slackers" and I found the term insulting. My generation (Generation X) were very mislabeled as a bunch of do-nothings; when in fact the opposite was true; we...
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