It’s going to be a busy 2012.

March 9-10: Chicago Zinefest. I’ll be doing a workshop on running a successful Kickstarter campaign!

April 14-15: C2E2. I won’t have a booth at this one, but I’ll be doing a signing on Saturday at the Chicago Comics table.

April 28-29: MoCCA.

May 5-6: TCAF.

June 16-17: CAKE.

July 12-15: SDCC!

August 9-12: Wizard World Chicago Comicon. Tentative, but highly likely.

September 15-16: SPX. This one’s tentative, and might be contingent on whether or not my brother is still living in D.C.

That’s it for now! Pretty much a convention every month, because I am a masochist.

It’s Hourly Comics Day again! (Here’s last year’s.)

A commissioned watercolor painting I did for some friends for Christmas.

Now that the holidays are over, I can post the little presents I made for people! Bath melts and lotions, and a Sarah gone a little crazy with some markers.

The Kickstarter is funded!! I’m so excited!

It suddenly feels very, very real to me – this is actually going to happen, I really get to make this book! I’ve been putting together a to-do list that’s a little overwhelming… The design for the print is done, so that’s good, but I have tons of layouts to do – I’ve finished layout out Vea and started the first few pages of the Liar – I need to design the cover, I need to draw the book’s epilogue, I need to design a promo postcard and the poster for the retailers, I need to contact the $500 level pledges and ask them about content for their exclusive minicomics. I have a lot of time to do all of these things, but it’s still going to be a lot of work!

I want to thank everyone who’s pledged, you guys are the best ever! I’m going to work my tail off to make this the best book it can possibly, possibly be.

A watercolor painting which I’m offering as an 11×15″ print as an exclusive reward to contributors to my Kickstarter project.

39% funded!

I wrote a longer version of this on the Kickstarter page, but I have never been happy with how I depicted the sky in Vea. It’s supposed to convey a swirling ocean, a never-ending tangle of ever-present clouds, and I lazily fell back on the shorthand of a few swirly pen strokes, and a smoky photoshop standard brush texture.

Those clouds have always felt a little subpar for me, so I’ve been reworking the cloud texture. Here’s page 3, a quick before and after shot. I think the new texture fits in better with the rest of the artwork, and conveys more of a sense of depth and dimension. It still needs a little tweaking, but I definitely feel like I’m on the right path.

I painted a few pictures over the weekend of outfits that make me feel very happy.

So the Kickstarter’s been up for a little over a week now, and I’m about a third of the way there! Fabulous!

I’m really excited about this project, and I can’t wait to get it going. I’ve been working on tightening up the final artwork for some of the original pages. I’ve managed to convince myself not to redraw every page, but I do think I’m going to redo the shading on every page, and possibly fix some of the lettering.

I made the first minicomic, Vea, in 2005 – I joke a lot that my art has a shelf life of about five years before I want to burn and disown it, so the instinct to redraw Vea especially is pretty strong. I’ve talked myself out of that, but I will most likely be tweaking things here and there, so the new book feels more consistent across all of the stories.

I’ve also spent a lot of this weekend thinking about the exclusive-to-Kickstarter-contributors print that I’m offering. I made a very loose, very preliminary sketch of the print. What do you think?

So! I have a Kickstarter now. Kickstarters are cool.

Basically, now that the last story in Shuteye is finished, I’m ready to compile them into a tasty little graphic novel. Months ago, as I was getting ready to start pencilling issue #6, I was complaining to a friend that I didn’t know how to finish off the series. That it felt like I used to have an idea for a brilliant way to tie everything together, but it was lost in the fog of my brain. Later that very same afternoon, I opened up an old issue of Readymade magazine I had lying around, and a piece of paper fell out of it. A piece of paper with notes on it for how I wanted to finish off the series! Fortuitous! And even more fortuitous, the ideas in the notes did not suck!

So the finished book is going to be lovely – it’s going to be 6×9, in brown inks, hopefully with a soft felted and debossed cover like the Ouija Interviews. It’s going to have several pages of epilogue that ties the end of the sixth story back into the first one. There’ll be special prints, pen & ink drawings, and watercolors available for anyone that wants to contribute at different levels. I’m really excited about this project, and I’m going to be posting updates to the process here and on Twitter, Facebook, and probably even Google +. Check it out, and feel free to ask me any questions!