[ Psdtuts+: Typography, the Art of Text ]

Enjoy your week off, and be ready to return January 4th with New Year’s resolutions in hand!

In other news, and some of us have been busy creating secret santa gifts for our fellow artists. They are downright awesome so they just have to be shared to the whole world!

As budding artists a lot of us know first hand (myself included) that our biggest roadblock to taking our projects to the next level is often our day job. The start up time for a comic to start earning a livable income, if it indeed happens at all, can be considerable. In the meantime you still have bills to pay. This usually entails a very considerate and gainfully employed significant other, or you’re working a job you have to take in order to support the job you want to take.

This is never easy. There are only so many hours in a week, 168 to be exact. A third of that is taken right off the top for sleep. Then there are the hours you spend on the things that keep you alive, like eating. You’ve got all the errands you have to run to maintain quality of life. If you have any sort of social or family life you can count on at least one day’s worth of free time to be devoted to that. Once you figure out all the logistics and add them up, that could count as another third of your week right there. But hey, you still have 56 hours left. That’s plenty of time to get all your creative work in and have plenty left over to have some ‘me’ time to keep you sane.

Now subtract 45.

Now all of a sudden those 56 hours gets shredded down to 11. That’s what working a full time job does. You lose 40 hours to work and often at least another 5 to traveling for said job. You get 1 hour a weekday and 6 for the weekend for your comic and any personal time.  So you start cutting back on the time you spend on various logistics. You don’t socialize as much. More of your meals come out of a box or a bag rather than preparing them yourself. You start metering your entire life by the hour. And when you inevitably run out of logistics you can cut back on, you start sacrificing your personal time.

It can be done. It’s done every day by many cartoonists and artists. But you have to have a dedicated mind and a thick skin to run a daily cycle of waking up, work, art, sleep, and precious little else. It’s a grind, and it kills many a well made comic. But what can you do? You can’t quit your day job until you know you’re making money with your comic and you can’t make money with your comic until you have the time to develop it that only quitting your job can provide.

Well Everett Bogue has one strategy that may help you form a plan to take that big plunge, and a lot of it revolves around the idea that even in today’s economy, the big plunge really isn’t as big as you think it is if you have the right mindset and a plan.

As a disclaimer, I’m not advocating everyone go out and quit their day jobs. As interesting as the article is, I have no plans to quit my day job for the foreseeable future. It’s also not without it’s sacrifices and it may be more than some are willing or able to make. But if the only thing stopping you from quitting your job today is the fear of the unknown, than this may be of great help in figuring out how to make that happen.

[[ The Minimalist Guide to Leaving Your Soul-Crushing Day Job ]] – Far Beyond the Stars via  Lifehacker

Also, in place of our Thursday Atlantic meetings we will host themed Art Jams, so we can break out of our routines a bit and explore our art a bit. Also, it’s just plain awesome to draw together. Details forthcoming!

So anyways, thanks for checking in and we hope to see you there Tuesday. And when we’re not meeting for WSG there’s a great chance you’ll catch at least some of us drawing at Lets Draw Stuff throughout the week, so feel free to stop in there too.

Disclaimer: Personal opinions included below. Please handle any personal disagreements as an adult.

What has our small world of webcomics done to garner the ire of the one person in America who has singlehandedly dominated the entirety of the 18-120, right wing, undereducated, demographic? (See, I told you there were going to be opinions.) Naturally, they wrote a book. Yep. A book. Of the dead tree variety. Which if you really know the webcomic industry shouldn’t come as much of a shock, as most successful artists have books as their largest income source, but still worth that 1.6 seconds of irony.

Clearly, this has to be a work of Democratic propoganda, waxing on about the state of the environment and manipulating the media into talking against conservative values if Faux News blowhard Glen Beck (opinions!) takes notice. Wait, it’s a non-political short story anthology? That spent $0.00 dollars on advertising?

The book is called Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die. The idea behind it came from, of all places, Dinosaur Comics. And that idea is,

What if there was a machine that could tell you, cryptically but with 100% accuracy, how you were going to die?

Long story short, 700 submissions later and Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki ! (Wondermark) had whittled down the pack to 34 short stories. And if that wasn’t enough, it includes illustrations from some of our favorite artists such as John Allison (Scary Go Round/Bad Machinery), Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant), and KC Green (Gun Show / Horribleville). Also included is illustrations from Randall Munroe of XKCD, who may not technically fit the category of ‘celebrated webcomic artist’ but has still been proven to have a visual sense of humor none the less.

But the big question has yet to be answered. What has this collection of talent done to cause this part-time TV personality, part-time salesman, full-time fear-monger Glen Beck to publicly call out this book on his radio show? (I think it’s clear by now I can’t state his name without some sort of qualifier.) Ryan North and David Malki ! created an internet campaign to get the book to #1 on Amazon on it’s release date, October 26. And wouldn’t you know it, they did just that! It held the #1 spot for over 24 hours. Huzzahs for all! You know what else came out October 26th that they didn’t realize until later? “Broke“. Written by none other than GB the DB. (Zing!)

Yep, he was pissed that his book got beat out by an indie sci-fi anthology written by self proclaimed ‘internet people’. In fact, he only took the #3 spot, #2 going to Keith Richards’ Life. He responded on his radio show by equating the book and it’s message of death to “the left” and how it’s a sign of how our country is sinking into the crapper; a move that confounded everyone and surprised no one. I’ll refrain from repeating his exact words here since I can sleep a little sounder at night knowing that gold-hawking ass hasn’t contaminated my web server, but if you wish to read it you can find it from this article by The Atlantic Wire, quoted by actual journalists who sport things like english degrees. And objective writing. And paychecks.

As much as, to quote an internet commenter, “anything that drives up GB’s blood pressure makes my day a little brighter”, as I wrap up this little piece of internet fake journalism I do have one regret in writing it. This story shouldn’t be anything about Glen Beck. It should be all about how a bunch of indie authors came together with a lofty goal and met it. It should be the fact that our little corner of the world moved just ever so slightly more into the public eye. It should be about how you don’t need to have 15 different media broadcast outlets to be able to market yourself effectively. Had I known about this campaign and this book earlier I’d have already written all about these aspects, and this bit about knocking the biggest blowhard in America down a peg would have just been some tasty icing on the cake. But alas, I am but human, and sometimes we humans can’t help but to get sucked into these sort of things.

So I hope you all take a look at Machine of Death, not because of who it rubs the wrong way, but because it’s a damn good book made possible by people we in webcomics love and respect.

[ MachineidDeath.net ]
[ Indie Sci-Fi Anthology Steals Glen Beck's Thunder - The Atlantic Wire ]
[ Machine of Death Amazon campaign infuriates Glenn Beck - Boing Boing ]

[ Draw a Victorious Warrior Knight in Photoshop ]

Be sure to follow @webcomicstdygrp (edit: has been changed to @wsgtweets ) if you want to keep in the loop. Or if you’re just one of those forgetful people that need a poke in the ribs to remind you of the night’s meeting.  :P

[[ How To Create a Trendy Seamless Pattern in Illustrator ]]

The reward was a little vague, but one part was clear. Ange wanted to see Batman. Specifically, Batman’s ass. And I am a man of my word.

[ To the winner goes the spoils. (Possibly NSFW) ]

And of course, be sure to check out Ange’s new webcomic Inscribing Ardi.

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