Blend Until Smooth Has a New Home

If you're looking for the next strip in Blend Until Smooth, you can find it here from now on. I started a new blog devoted entirely to the strip.

I still post every Friday, but I wanted to keep my 'toon separate from this site because theagilebadger.com is primarily my illustration blog, and I want visitors who come here to see what's happening on that side of my business. And it's hard enough carrying a story arc across a full week without having the posts mixed in with my blabs and other posts.

So check it out! www.blenduntilsmooth.blogspot.com

Back to the drawing board.

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I Finally Deep-Sixed the Box

My wife finally convinced me; our TV has been disconnected from its source, and as a result, I've been disconnected from what she loathingly calls "the brain-sucking device." She's right, and I know it.

I haven't had much reason to watch the damn thing recently. Spare time was something reserved for my bachelor days. And now that I'm remarried, I find most of my time is devoted to blending my new family, worrying about my daughter at college, tending to my fledgling illustration business, maintaining my architecture career, drumming, playing guitar, and oh yes, eating and sleeping (although I often find the eating part is disturbingly optional when the other activities are in full motion).

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I think what finally convinced me to agree with She-Who-Shall-Pull-The-Plug was the one-and-half hour of TV watching we engaged in last Sunday night.

Oh...my...God, what a load of crap we saw paraded before our astonished eyes. I guess I'd been away from that monstrous machine long enough to have forgotten how awful televised entertainment has become. The time lapse of six months or more allowed me to see television programming with fresh eyes. It sucked, and sucked hard. And to top it off, I was paying $39.95 a month keep it available to me 24/7.

I think Rule No. 1 of happy living should be, "Never pay money to keep something around that either sucks or that you don't use. Terminate with extreme prejudice if it falls into both categories."

If any of this resonates with you, maybe you'd be interested in reading The 9-Step Television Diet in the amazing ThinkSimpleNow.com website.

Back to the drawing board.

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Another Italy Watercolor

Cartooning is fun, no doubt. But I'm susceptible to other distractions as well. Here's a watercolor I just finished from a photograph taken on our honeymoon. My wife took the picture on a day-trip we took to Montalcino, a tiny Italian hill town famous for Brunello wine.

The final work is about 13 x 22. You can click on the image to open a larger version in a new window.

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FreelanceSwitch.com Article

Here is the article I wrote for FreelanceSwitch.com. I hope the subject has some importance for you. Even if it doesn't, the whole website is terrific and deserves a good looking around.

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We have a winner!

With three hours left to vote, I'm declaring a winner: "Blend Until Smooth" will the be title of my comic strip. I changed the past participle "Blended" to the imperative, "Blend" because it feels more, well, imperative.



Thank you all for voting! The next strip I post (tomorrow, 11/23) will have the new title and an overall more professional look. I'm also working on a prequel comic for the entire airplane vacation series. Seems there's some confusion about whether Evan, the 13-year-old boy, was on the wing of the airplane while it was on the ground or in the air. The entire scene actually takes place on the ground, and I need a little more "lead-in" to make that clearer.

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There's Still Time to Vote!

Please take a sec and vote on your favorite title in the sidebar.

Here are the first three in sequential order. Click on the image to see the full-size version.

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Details Obsession Article at FreelanceSwitch.com

In the next few days, the outstanding FreelanceSwitch.com website will be posting an article I wrote and illustrated called Details Obsession: Four Ways to Take Control of Your Work. The article focuses on an introspective approach to controlling those deliciously pesky details that absorb way too much time. I'll post a link directly to the article once it's up. Meanwhile, here's the illustration I made for it.

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What do you do when the remote is too far away?

I started thinking about the lengths people go to in order to avoid doing something rather simple. Several months ago, I was sitting comfortably on my couch watching TV when I noticed that the remote was farther than an arm's reach away. Rather than get up to retrieve it, I started looking around for anything I could reach that would help me drag it to me: a pillow, my drumsticks, anything. I was struck by how difficult I was making things in order to make them easier. Then I started wondering how absurd could I make this?

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How Many Artists Does it Take to Make a Book?

I just got confirmation from the good folks at The 100 Artists Project that they received my contribution to their Single Mailer. It will be bound in with 99 other artists from around the country and auctioned off to benefit The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and The Hero Initiative. I think they're up to about 74 out of 100, so there's still some time left to send something in.

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Software Developer Business Logo

I'm designing a business logo for Dru Sellers , a software developer and all-around nifty fellow. We fumbled around early in the design process trying to figure out what visual identity we should affix to the field of software development. After trying several hi-tech, LCD-looking fonts, we decided the best look was from his own signature. He made dozens of them on a scrap paper, and I stylized the best one in Illustrator. Here's a couple of the final options that Dru is currently pondering.

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Corniglia, Cinqueterre, Italy

My wife and I just returned from a two-week honeymoon in Italy. We delayed the trip a few months after our wedding hoping that we'd miss the peak tourist season.

Didn't work.

Cinque Terre -- five tiny hill towns perched precariously on cliffs along the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea -- has a reputation for being quiet and relatively undiscovered by tourists. Something changed recently because even in late September, we fought shoulder-to-shoulder crowds and fully booked rooms. We got lucky and found a small apartment room in Corniglia, the smallest and hardest to access of the five towns. This is a watercolor scene onto al mare from the narrow street below our room. Every day starting around 9AM, hundreds of tourists march down this street to the bella vista beyond, but by 7PM or so, the town quiets down and becomes quite magical.

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Enronzilla

Pure evil: Kenneth Lay as Godzilla.

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