Sunsugar Tomatoes

Five things from this week

This week: Tomatoes. Our back door. More thoughts on art and work. Portraits. Comic Shop Locator. And more!

🔗 Any text that is underlined is a link that can be clicked 🔗

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1. Tuh-may-tow? Tom-ah-toe? Tow-mater?

Our Sunsugar Tomatoes are coming in. They’re delicious and it’s given me an excuse to use some of my True Grit Texture Supply brushes that have been collecting dust. The font is from Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

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2. Pen drawing + digital color

Most mornings I sip coffee and try to make marks in my notebook before the kid wakes up. One morning this week I drew what was in front of me. I scanned the drawing and added color in Photoshop. It was fun to spend time zoomed in on the pen drawing and see what it looked like up close.

Back in February I made a map showing where our houseplants are from.

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3. Follow up on Art or Work?

Last week I wrote about art and work. In the comments

Andrea La Rose

shared a video made by Phill Niblock in 1974 called The Movement of People Working. Part of the video description says:

Threshing, seeding, weaving, painting, carving or fishing, bodies and hands are set in a relentless and often impersonalized motion that creates a hypnotic tapestry of repeated gestures and diversified techniques of immense choreographic beauty.

Is there a part of your job that’s repetitive? Do you enjoy the repetition or not?

The “hypnotic tapestry of repeated gestures” reminds me of Passage à l'acte by Marin Arnold (make sure your sound is on, but not too loud). Arnold takes a couple seconds from To Kill A Mockingbird and makes it last 11 minutes.

It’s wild but I think it’s beautiful. This tribute is pretty funny.

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4. Drawing without looking

Carly and I made blind contour drawings of each other while waiting at a restaurant.

Here’s my drawing of Carly:

And her drawing of me:

Blind contour is a really low pressure way to draw things because you can’t see what you’re doing until it’s done. It makes you think more about how your hand is moving than realistic representation. Plus it might produce hilarious results.

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5. Comic Shop Locator

On the copyright page of Concrete: Volume 1 there is a number you can call to find local comic shops.

You call the number, type in your zip code and they give you the name and address of comic shops in your area. It was fun to get information that way but I actually got better results from their website.

I used to skim the copyright page of books just to see who designed the cover, but now I read every single one because of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. She treated the copyright page as part of the book.

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*sets his Packers helmet next to his bed* “I’ll just set my helmet right here so I can think about it.”

ALSO

• Kent Peterson
  on the difference between Streets and Roads.

• Every single frame of this stop-motion animation ad has been physically printed on a receipt.

• This is from 2015 but I wonder if Lucas Blalock's ideas about photography and manipulation are more important now with the rise of AI.

• “There will be plenty of folks who know the design tools better than you or have access to things you don’t, but a good idea will transcend.” -The Offhours

• Paramore: Tiny Desk (the person on the left is playing an OP-1 from Teenage Engineering and all of their stuff is beautifully designed).

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Comics I read this week:

Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? - Chris Oliveros

Anna - Mia Oberländer

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