I've been really pushing myself to do more art lately. I used to draw a LOT when I was kid. Mostly in my high school notebooks—I've done the occasional mural or big art piece, but I haven't done anything like that in a long time.

I avoided art in college because it wasn't something that I thought I could make a living doing. Also, if you major in something like English or Political Science, then fine art or illustration electives aren't very practical, because it's hard to figure those classes into a degree. I was very much all about min-maxing so I could take the fewest classes possible, have no student loan debt, and pay for it all out of pocket or using what little grant money I was eligible for.

This is a story that I've told quite a few times over the years. While I was still a senior in high school I was accepted to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco (now the Academy of Art University). But I had a serious decision to make, because my parents didn't have the money to pay for college, so it was assured that I was going to have to take out loans and continue to work to get through the schooling. I was already working before I graduated high school, and had been in the workforce all through high school even. Whether it was in the mail room of a newspaper stuffing advertisements and bundling packages by zip code to go out for the Sunday edition, or shampooing carpets in the summer to help my Dad out. I even did an internship program one year, and that's the business that ended up hiring me when I graduated high school.

On top of that I had never been to San Francisco before, so I would be leaving home to an unfamiliar city, without any real guarantee that I would actually be able to make something of myself. Or be able to make a living doing art.

Looking back at my behavior in my late teens and earlier 20s, it's probably for the best that I didn't dive head first into art school and take out a bunch of loans. There's always the possibility that I could have come out the other side as a brilliant and accomplished illustrator, but I also could have just as easily come out the other side as a degenerate drunkard with a bunch of non-dischargable loan debt.

Business and art are two separate things. Surely the two can co-exist, but there's no guarantee that you can actually make any money at art, or maybe the best ways to monetize your art aren't necessarily the things in business that you're good at. So, unfortunately abject poverty is a real possibility, and when I calculated the risk for myself at that time (around sixteen or seventeen years old), it didn't make sense for me to pursue.

It was either the summer before or right after my senior year in high school, I got a job working crowd control at the Wizard World Comic Convention in Long Beach, California.

While I was there I had an opportunity to talk to Cam De Leon. He's an amazing illustrator, and I would say he's probably best known among people my age as the guy who did the Salival album cover for the band TOOL. In any case, he sat and talked with me for a good thirty minutes to an hour. I didn't buy anything from his booth, he just gave me advice on the art world, and shared stories about what it was like to make a living as an artist. I appreciated his time and took a lot of what he had to say to heart. Plus, it made more sense for me to continue living and working in Long Beach and do night and weekend classes at the LBCC.

After I moved out to Vegas, I did end up taking a work trip to San Francisco and spent one night at a bar not too far from Union Square. A cook from one of the restaurants in the Tenderloin and I, we ran the pool table all night and played a bunch of art kids for free beers until last call. So, in a way I still got to experience a taste of what it would have been like to be an art student there myself... But that's a story for another time.

I've always been interested in art and I've been fortunate to have worked with a bunch of mediums as a child and adolescent; clay and sculpture, wood carving, painting with oils and acrylics, modern illustration (traditional and digital), water colors, plaster casting, and on and on. Comics and illustration are really my passion though. So that's been the focus of my renewed interest in drawing and sharing my art with the world.

Fast forward twenty years, and I'm finally in the a place where I feel that I have the life experiences to truly layer some meaning and emotion into my work, or sew the imagery with some true passion. And when I look back, that's always what I wanted to be able to do. Sure, being a comic artist for Marvel or DC or doing my own book at Image would be fantastic, but I'm still working on steady output; voluminous and quality output is another realm entirely.

So, for the last year I've been drawing weekly. For the past four months I've been drawing at least every other day. Then, just this last month I was on a daily streak, and I'm mostly keeping to that schedule, even if it's just a random character sketch.

Comic artists are the most prolific artists out there, and it's incredibly impressive to watch some of these guys in action. A page a day is generally the expected. To get to that point is really to kind of be on another level. Not saying that it's necessarily hard to reach flowstate, but every artist that I've listened to has always complained about days where they just force themselves to do it because they know they have to, not because they have any deep affinity for the work at that moment in time. That's a hard barrier to cross for a lot of artists.

Since I am still out there just working a regular 9-to-5 job, and I'm married, a lot my free time goes into spending it with my wife. Carving out an hour (sometimes more) per day to draw hasn't been that difficult, but it does have to be a conscious decision that I make. Then there is the deliberation in my mind on what kind of art I should be working on.

If you've read through my last post you'll see the mini comics that I made... Those didn't really garner any attention. So I've pivoted a bit to do more fine art illustration; think Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. However, I do plan to do more mini comics in the future, I'm just focusing on building an audience on Instagram now. As much as I didn't care to use that site/app, I had an account on there that I had made just to preserve my moniker, then I'm watching an interview with Todd McFarlane and he comes out and says:

“I look at all the art websites. I look at, you know, Instagram and Facebook and, like, any place where anybody’s posting stuff. I’m always phoning sort of, you know, either complete unknowns or somewhat unknowns…”

Listen to the interview HERE.

So, I figured fuck it, let's just start posting on Instagram. Most of the people I went to high school with are on there and they're starting to catch on to me posting every day as well. Most everyone that follows me knows me in real life. Specifically the people I went to high school with, they were sort of my original fans anyway. Plus, Todd Beats called me out in a comment I made on one of his posts.

Nothing to loose, everything to gain.

So far, that's what art after 40 has been like. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. If you're still interested in following my art journey, feel free to follow me on Instagram and continue to watch this blog for more updates.

This project has taken me longer than I anticipated. But here we are, the store page where you can buy mini comic versions of The Ghost of Jupiter is live. If you want to support my art, I would appreciate it.

The comics themselves are remastered versions of the pages I have posted online. As part of the process of getting them set up for print it made sense to adjust the brightness and contrast of some pages, and also re-do the lettering digitally to match the newest pages that I've been doing.

A couple of the two-page spreads I made didn't quite translate, but that's fine, now I know going forward and I have the formatting in mind while drawing (or even plotting and conceptualizing) the pages going forward. I still think these first two issues came out awesome though. I'm happy with them.

I now also have a system in place, and some infrastructure, and a handle on processing orders. So, going forward, I will keep releasing pages online as I finish drawing them, and then release a mini comic for every 8 pages completed. Effectively everything happening in the comic will be planed out in 8-page increments, though, I still have an overarching story in my mind that is being told. I haven't decided on how many blocks of 8 pages, or issues, that's going to be... yet.

Shout out to all the people that I've encountered online while searching for information and instruction on putting together these mini comics, the inspiration they provided, and the enthusiasm that the independent and “alt comix” community has.

This tutorial from “Marsh Lee” was very valuable, and was sort of the main video I used to figure out my own setup:

Also, Blood Desert Comix / Small Press Express / Adam Yeater has done a series of videos on “Mini Comics from Around the World.” Being able to see so many entries in this category of comic was a massive boost to my own self-esteem and confidence. Being able to see so many people putting out their stories and art and in this format is just immensely encouraging.

Lastly, my condolences to Michael Poe's family. One of the first and only webcomics that I ever got into was one called Exploitation Now. Right now the page is up as a memorial for his passing back in March, but the site does state that it will eventually revert back to the webcomic.

If you're interested in supporting my art, please buy a copy of the mini comics. More issues coming soon, and holographic covers as soon as I can reliably fulfill those orders in a consistent manner.

Click the Logo to read the comic or visit the store:

Think of this as the “Director's Cut” for the comic that I've been working on the past few months. If you've noticed, I haven't been doing regular blog updates, it's because I've been working on this comic that I call “The Ghost of Jupiter.” You can read it in its entirety on my Deviant Art account, and in the original resolution (very high quality). Deviant Art isn't the best site for hosting a web comic, but it is a great site for hosting original artwork.

So, what is the “Ghost of Jupiter” comic?

It's part Film Noir and part Atomic Age Sci-Fi. My personal interpretation of David D. Friedman's vision of what a true anarcho-capitalist society would look like. Set in the not so distance future, the entire solar system is colonized, but this story in particular takes place on Enceledus. It's a world where various rights enforcement agencies are crossing paths, so what are the conflicts that they are dealing with? And even though space travel is commonplace, there still appears to be a need for a good gumshoe... Or, two, or three, or several.

Of course, every gumshoe needs to be an alcoholic. I call him “The Ghost of Jupiter”, it's an incarnation of another character that I've played around with in some of my short stories. However, when those short stories take place the character wasn't known as “Ghost,” he was only known as Kai Zarrison. Eventually I'll share why that is, but only when it becomes important to the story.

No home... Just the foul, the funk, and the forgotten. Cast aside on city streets or deep within alleys. Between the concrete cracks, we are the roaches, the tarnished, and the human trash.

You might be able to tell... I just started drawing pages, one at a time. The first drawing I did was back in August, with the most recent pages being completed just the other week. So it has taken me about 4 months (give or take, because of the holidays), to finish ~13 pages, or ~24 panels, complete with text (narration and dialog).

Whatever happens to strike my fancy is what comes next. That being said, the last 4 months have taught me that planning out a few pages in advance isn't a bad thing, so I'm always thinking about that while I draw. The general story is already in my head, and I know where I want it to go, but page to page I draw them a bit like people play jazz. I'm just tryin to riff on my emotions in the moment but still tell a coherent story.

Hopefully you can see some improvement as the pages have gone on... I've always sketched and doodled, ever since I was a little kid, but these days I'm rusty. I actively gave up art for a long period of my life. So, the discipline is coming back slowly, it's like working a muscle that hasn't been used in 20 years.

Comics are as much about the entire page as they are the individual panels. So the layout is important. It has to be visually interesting, but it still needs to tell a story.

I can remember my art classes from Junior and Senior High as being very enjoyable and memorable moments in my life. I was lucky and had some really amazing art teachers when I was younger.

Somewhere around when I drew the pages above (008-009), I had made the decision that I wanted to do some type of a romance or love story as well as capitalize on a noir aesthetic or feel. But instead of the traditional murder mystery (which quite a few noir films have), I'm going to focus more on the comic being a commentary, with romance and action going on in the background.

Yes... Ghost is the main character, and he will never show his face entirely. Wearing a mask and having a secret identity is such a major aspect of both super heroes and villains. With anti-heroes being vulnerable individuals who maybe don't make the right choice, but they do it for the right reasons.

Ghost is the hero, but Lisa will be his anti-hero foil as well as love interest. I think female anti-heroes tend to tread in mostly comedic waters, so there are missed opportunities for story telling if you do a female anti-hero who isn't always making fun of themselves and the world.

So this is where I'm at. I feel like my art is evolving, and I'm expanding my mediums even. I still want to do traditional art, because I feel that's when my drawing looks its best, but I also want to start incorporating alcohol markers. Sharpie are the most notable brand, but there are markers made just for artists; Cali Art and Ohuhu are the two brands that come up most often. I opted for Cali Art, even though I have more experience using Sharpies, and have had some success using them in my drawings.

What I have not done before is mix fountain pen ink with alcohol markers... My workflow thus far has been sketch, and then ink. Well, I did that this last time, and then tried to lay down some markers and realized that alcohol is what you use to get fountain pen ink off of your hands or on a surface, etc. So I had to stop trying to color the page that I was working on and just leave it as is. Going forward I'll be penciling, coloring, and then layering the inks on top of all that. I think it'll work just fine. However, I may have to let the marker sit over night to dry before putting the inks down.

Ghost of Jupiter has it's own website: jupitercomic.com.

Feel free to also follow me on Instagram and Youtube.