#OneWeek100People 2024 : Bonus Day : What if you just made it all up?

Question for you: Why are you doing #OneWeek100People?

I’ve spent most of my adult life just getting good at drawing – for no particular reason. Besides the reason, ‘I love drawing’. That’s the best reason to do anything, isn’t it?

I’ve worked as a game designer, and of course taught art – but to be totally honest, these weren’t really *goals* of mine, just things which paid me to get better at drawing.

If I had to give a reason why I wanted to draw, there is one thing – well, two things.

One was to illustrate book covers. When I was a kid, I was addicted to reading. My dad worked at a bookstore for a big chunk of my primary schooling, and I had access to free books.

Technically stolen books I suppose. We had this ongoing scam where he would buy books from customers, and we would both take whatever wanted off the top before entering them into inventory. Though – I don’t actually think they had *inventory* as such. They just had books, and they had shelves. They had space, or they didn’t have space. When the K shelf was overflowing with Stephen King, they stopped buying King for a couple of days. It wasn’t rocket science.

So – I built my first library of Star Trek novels and John Carter of Mars with petty theft. Not so great, but, A: my dad’s long dead now so I can tell the story, and B: that bookstore is still performing highway robbery every day – offering pennies for used books for over 50 years. So it didn’t seem to hurt them in the long run. I hope the owner doesn’t read this, but I also doubt they’re too surprised to hear it. But I also doubt they’d care: they’re probably millionaires twice over, all built on the back’s of people’s leftovers.

But hey – I’ve spent plenty of my parents money there too! I’m making my family sound worse than it was :) Dad only worked there for a few years, and I shopped there until the day I left for college. I didn’t have an allowance per se, but one thing my parents always said; I could buy as many books as I wanted.

So yes; I always wanted to illustrate pulp-fiction novels, but I’ve never really done it. Games was a suitable distraction I suppose. I did write a fantasy novella last year, but that’s a long story. I’ll talk about that another time.

So by now I think you can guess the second thing.

Comics!!!

I love comics! Graphic novels if you’re being fancy. Bande dessinée in French.

I don’t think there’s a single one that isn’t a labor of love. So much drawing! It’s really a crazy proposition. The artist is going to do literally thousands of drawings to make a story, and then hope they can attract enough attention so they can afford to make the next book. If there’s a writer and a publisher involved, then good luck – you have three people to pay! I don’t know how anyone does it.

But I do think it would be an excellent theme for a future #OneWeek100People. What about #OneWeek100ImaginaryPeople? OneWeek100Characters? Anyone interested? The complete opposite of urban sketching :) You can’t draw anything from real life! Haha!

I think it would be a good project for myself. See if I can really draw fast enough to make it in comics. Maybe it’s something worth doing in September? SketchbookSeptember?

Definitely drop me a line if you’re interested!

~m