UPDATE: I was up super late working on today’s strip because, it seems, my work ethic has been shot as of late. I equate it to stress. A lot of things are coming up faster than expected and it’s making me freak out a little bit. I plan on starting up Gary’s story line on Monday, but just needed to throw in some gag strips for the rest of the week so that I could just enjoy the work rather than worry about continuity and stuff.

Where Croquet came from I couldn’t tell you. I mean, me coming up with the idea to have them playing the game., not where the actual game came from. I’m sure Wikipedia has all the stuff you wanna know about Croquet in that regard.

At any rate, I think things are going well with the comic. Doing a lot of rewrites and stuff, but overall it’s good. I have some really exciting news to share soon, but I’m still hammering down details for now. So keep checking the Twitter feed and spread the word

The comic for Friday is going to be a one off gag as is today’s comic. I’m just not ready to start Gary’s story line yet. I still have some things to iron out on the story and the look, but we’ll get into that, most likely, on Monday.

Today’s gag came to me as I was letting my mind wander. I’m sure it had a lot to do with the fact that I was doodling Thor last week. I’m also playing with my style a bit trying to make things a little easier to work with as well as push myself in terms of motion and acting. I like coloring A LOT in Photoshop now. I think I have my process down and it makes doing things like the lightening much easier and faster. All in all, I dig this strip. I hope you do to, and spread the word if you dig it

Today will mark the end of the Michele’s story line – for now. We’ll see a lot more of her and Art Guy later on in the comic though. I have big plans to work everyone into regular appearances in the comic without it feeling forced that I am excited about, but all that will probably come together in the Fall.

I’m pretty happy with the background color on this one. I’m still coloring in Photoshop and it’s taking longer than expected as I work through just how I feel comfortable doing it, but it’s a lot easier in terms of not having to draw every shape a million times for each comic. All this means is that I will be able to do more with the background and other visual aspects of the comic over time, so keep spreading the word and sticking around

I like to think it’s the latter. I like to think this because, most of the time, it’s true. The non-creative world, for the most part, looks on creative people as people living the dream. We’re people that, day in and day out, are living self indulgent lifestyles full of make-believe and fairy tales and euphoric images. And I think somewhere along the line we, as creatives, have started to think that too.

Which brings me back to my original sentence, producing art for a living is a lot harder than most people think. It’s one thing to create art for the shear pleasure and joy of it and a completely different thing to create art to put the nightly dinner on the table and to keep your kids from being a homeless statistic. Shit gets real at that point. Creativity is not a formula that can be followed in some sort of rigid form to ensure that the perfect widget is made, packaged and produced. Creativity is more akin to running a mental marathon, pacing yourself, reacting to changes in your body and those around you and focusing energy on the best performance that you can give and at the end of the day hoping it all works out.

We’re pushed harder and harder each year to produce more and more at lower cost and higher quality. We’re being pushed by economic changes and non-creative people that just don’t understand what it takes to do what we do, but we’re also being pushed harder by ourselves than anyone else. Creatives tend to be those proud people that don’t want to admit they can’t take the load. We want to grow, we want to please and help, and we’ll deny ourselves happiness in order to do this.

In nursing school nurses are routinely told to take care of patient number one first. Who is patient number one? Patient number one is themselves! It is in their nature to nurture. Nurses give so much of themselves to everyone around them that they often overlook their own health until they can no longer function normally. I think creatives do this as well. Though creatives don’t often find themselves in life or death situations creating art we do find ourselves more and more in high stress scenarios. We put so much pressure on ourselves to improve, to grow and to produce that it can’t be good for us in the long run.

We have to be kind to ourselves. Ze Frank (a highly creative genius) recently made a video where he was hoping he could extend the same generosities to himself as he extends to others around him. We spend so much time in our own heads that we don’t even realize that we are, more often than not, our own worst demon. We push to make that line better or that shape more shape-like or that one technique that we saw that other guy do a part of our own style. We push and we push and we push until we break and then we point at things to blame. My boss, my job, my co-workers, my family, the economy, the President, the client, the hack, the world in general. We can’t even see who’s really to blame, who’s really the demon because we’re too caught up in our own bad habits of beat ourselves up that we don’t even know how to let ourselves be happy and have fun.

Of course it’s not always like this. As creatives we all have our times of great triumph and victory and we smile and pat ourselves on the back and enjoy it. But those times tend to be fleeting and we don’t lock them away in our box of memories to reflect on as much as we do on our failures and disappointments. But this is just human nature, all humans do it. We can’t help ourselves, but maybe we can try.

I say we practice daily acts of kindness on ourselves (no euphemisms here). Sure, we need to continue to push ourselves. We need to keep growing and not letting ourselves off the hook and become lazy, but we need to be more understanding of ourselves to. We need to accept our personal limits as limits we have for now but limits we’ll push through in time. It’s ok to be happy with the work we are capable of doing and look forward to the work we know we are more capable of in the future. It’s ok to tell your boss or your client “no”. No, that’s not right for this project. No, I can’t create that kind of work in that kind of time frame. No, I will not push myself to the brink of death just to save you, the company or YOUR client face in the fact that you over promised or want to make a few extra dollars.

Procrastination is a product of frustration. Frustration is a product of misunderstanding and when we misunderstand what we ARE capable of and not what we WANT to be capable of it will only lead to frustration. I think most creative people live in a world of frustration and put off what we truly love to do. By putting off what you love you put off growth and it leads to more frustration and unhappiness. So, back off yourself. Be comfortable with your limitations, re-enforce you victories and identify your weaknesses to work on but don’t identify with those weaknesses. We all got into this because we have a need to create and to help those around us.

Take care of client number one first, and you will make the impossible happen.

I’m still trying to perfect a system by which to color in Adobe Photoshop. I switched from coloring in Adobe Illustrator to Photoshop probably a week ago. I sill draw in Sketchbook Mobile on my iPod Touch, ink and letter in Adobe Illustrator and then import that into Photoshop to color it. The coloring has been sped up IMMENSELY. I’ve probably trimmed at least an hour off the production of each comic now. When I finally get an ironclad process down I should be able to trim even more time of that. All this means I’ll have more time to DRAW. Right now I feel like I scribble stuff out and then refine it in inks too much, I mean, that is a way to do it and a lot of people do that, but I like to have it as tight as possible in the pencils stage if I can. I just like drawing more that way.

At any rate, I recorded a small portion of my coloring last night on Ustream. I’ll try to broadcast live more often so get on my Twitter feed if you’re not already for all the skinny

Still playing with my coloring in Photoshop. The coloring job on this one took a bit longer than yesterday’s strip. I’m trying to figure out my process with it so it’s a bit of trial and error right now and that’s holding me up a bit, but once that’s all figured out coloring will be a snap!

So far Michele’s story line has done very well for me in learning to not only draw women and her better, but also it’s pushed me to get a little more loose with facial expressions and some body language (though I still have a lot to learn, but it’s FUN).

I promise you that everyone of these story lines that I’ve created over the last couple of months will have a larger purpose later on down the Robot Friday road, so keep reading and telling your friends about us because the fun is just getting started this Summer.

One last thing, to get a little heads up on what the Summer brings, scroll down a bit for the lastest blog post entry

This Summer is shaping up to another pretty amazing one as well. The Spring has already delivered some pretty sweet things. I did my first ever panel at the Lubbock Comics Expo, response to the comic and other projects has been great and traffic to the site and my Twitter feed is increasing every day. This Summer is going to a really busy one for me, again, this year. For the rest of this month I plan to have strips through June written and half of June’s strips drawn as well. All-the-while keeping up with strips for May and creating print art for the Ama-Con in July. And that brings us to the Ama-Con, this convention will be the first ever that I have had a table in. I’m planning on decking it out and offering cool stuff for free and to buy. It’s a one day con on July 21st and I’ll be there all day drawing free sketches, selling stuff, promoting Robot Friday and just hanging out. So, if you’re in or near the Amarillo/West Texas area you should come out (hit their Facebook page for more info.)

As the Summer wraps up I want to get some free downloadable mini-comics on the site too. The first of these will be the Robot Friday origin story of how our favorite little robot came to be. Soon after that will be the entire Summer Sketchbook Sessions collected for anyone that wants to own them – for free. Once they are up as a pdf I’ll be removing them from the archives of the online comic because if you go through the archives from strip one, it’s kind of jarring when you run into the sketchbook stuff. As the Fall and Winter Holidays approach I plan to offer more free downloadable mini-comics collecting the Robot Friday gang’s holiday stories (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.).

So that kind of rounds out what’s gonna be happening for the majority of the Summer and rest of the year, of course I’ll also be getting married and going on a cruise in the middle of all this too, so there is that

At any rate, thank you guys for supporting the comic and spreading the word about everything that’s going on and keep it up

I’ve said it earlier this week, but I’ll say it again. This week I have had a blast working on these comics. I’ve officially made Michele my funny face girl. I’ve been experimenting with pushing my expressions further and I’ve learned a lot so far. I feel like I have a long way to go, but it’s been fun. I also feel like I am getting a better understanding of my characters. It’s been a wonderful exercise for me to draw story lines involving the female characters of Robot Friday. I’ve improved drawing women and I’ve gotten a structure system down with the girls as I have with the guys which makes things easier (and faster) to draw. Because I’m getting all of these things worked out I don’t feel as frustrated with the comic like I have in the past and it doesn’t feel like such work any more. Of course I do have a lot of improvements to make, but at least with a lot of the basics behind me now, maybe improving will be a lot more fun

Again, guys, thank you all for reading and spreading the word about the comic and all of the support. You guys are great, have an awesome weekend

I’ll talk more about this on the Art Zen Podcast this weekend, but Sunday night, as I worked on Monday’s comic I came to the realization that this is my comic and I can do what ever I want with it. Not to stuff it in anyone’s face, mind you, but I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to get things just right or to get overly complicated with something when I could convey the same meaning in a simpler way and I get less frustrated with it. I blame all the client work I’ve done in the past. I’ve had (most) clients where I was essentially reading their minds and just hoping things were coming off the way they wanted – and mostly they did.

But in work I do for myself (i.e. Robot Friday) I tend to keep that frame of mind A LOT and I’m in the process of breaking out of that, for everyone’s sake. I also realized that – as Will Terrell has said many times – drawing is a language. All art is communication, we’re trying to express ourselves. Remembering this, I am trying to get myself comfortable with the way I speak this language. I may not be as eloquent as others at it’s dialect, but as long as I get the message across in a pleasing way, I’m happy and I’ll keep working on my visual vocabulary and perfecting my dialect as well.

Coming to these realizations has made the comics I’ve done this week some of the most enjoyable that I’ve created. I’m still trying to streamline my process, but it’s fun again for me. Of course I still get frustrated, but when I do I take a step back and see if I can say what I want in a less complicated way and it often works out.

The next few months of the Summer are gonna really test me. First off, I’ll be getting married at the beginning of June. Then in July I’ll have a table (my first) at the Ama-Con. During all of this I need to created a buffer for when I am on my honeymoon of two weeks worth of comics. Write at least 2-3 months worth of comics and create a handful of items for the con. Plus I have a full time day job. So, I need to streamline my process and stop being such a dick to myself.

I thank every one of you for reading the comic and spreading it around. Also if you’re so inclined you can buy print and digital collections too. Thank you, guys, you make doing this awesome