ANXIOUS 2 ZINE NOW AVAILABLE!

I did it! I finished ANXIOUS 2, and it is now for sale on my Etsy shop!

The last week putting this together was very interesting. I definitely found myself too close to the project, constantly going back and redoing pages, obsessing over the order of the pages, I could have picked at each page forever, but at some point I had to walk away and be done. 

I am very happy with how it turned out, looking at it now. I got it to a place where I was content with every page.

4 THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM THE FIRST 30 PAGES OF ART & FEAR

If you are an artist, and you haven't read Art & Fear, please make a point to do so. When I am feeling the paralyzing fear and self-doubt that so many artists know, a few pages of this book gives me the perspective and inspiration to continue working. It is a really powerful book, and this is coming from someone who scoffs at most self-help books, and hates inspirational quotes. As I read the first sentence, "Making art is difficult." and then the first page, "We do work that does not feel like our own" "Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds than the pieces we have completed" I knew this book understood a whole lot about me, and about my art, and about my daily negative inner dialogue. I wanted to finish the book before I wrote a blog post about how wonderful and helpful it is, but I got 30 pages in and couldn't contain myself any longer. Here is a list of the many helpful things I have learned in that first chunk of Art & Fear.

1. The work you imagine is always more incredible than the work you actually make, and that is totally normal and doesn't really change.

I have always loved making thumbnails because of the potential they have. This could really turn into something incredible. Vision races ahead of execution. The very first brushstroke has the potential to turn into a masterpiece, and every brush stroke after brings it further and further away from the imagined masterpiece. There is an anecdote in Art & Fear where a piano student is learning from a master and says to the master "But I can hear the music so much better in my head than I can get out of my fingers." to which the master replies, "What makes you think that ever changes?". It's not you being a bad artist, it is just the reality of our imaginations. All you can do is try to improve with every piece.

2. Everyone else feels like they're only pretending to be an artist too!

Apparently a lot of artists feel this way, and I definitely do. I know exactly how I make things, and how much of it is unplanned, accidental, happy mistakes. We doubt our credentials. We compare ourself to people we admire, and we don't think we measure up. But really there is no such thing as "pretending to make art", if you're expressing yourself artistically, and making the best art you know how, you are making art, and you are an artist.

Seriously what the hell Jeannie. Stop all of this tremendous work. 

3. The artists you look up to are not actually magical creatures who easily make masterpieces.

I am definitely guilty of thinking that these people who make the art I have pinned to my illustration board, or my artist friends who I admire so much, are secretly magic. I mean I don't really think they're magic because I don't believe in magic, but I definitely don't picture them as mortal beings slaving away, making mistakes, deleting their mistakes, revising, hating their work, feeling exhausted. I picture them in beautiful studios with charmed lives where every brush stroke is an act of genius and they know all the answers before they even begin. I just picture their successes, not their struggles. But as described in Art & Fear, "Art is made by ordinary people", and in fact ordinary people are the ideal artist because great art needs to include warts and flaws and happy mistakes. If a perfect person made perfect art, why would I care about that? And guess what? I'm an ordinary person, and can therefore make art just like all of my wildly talented friends, like Jeannie Phan and Noreen Rana.

4. Striving for perfection is dumb and harmful to your work.

Making mistakes is really scary. But it is important for artistic growth. If you try to avoid making mistakes, you will either stop making art, because if you aren't making anything there is no way you can mess it up, or you will stick to things you know you can do really well, and never challenge yourself. This is bad. Your mistakes show you what you need to improve on in your next piece. They are helpful and awesome, and being perfect is probably overrated and boring anyway.

ANXIOUS #2 - IMPROVEMENTS

As some of you know I have been plugging away at a new black and white comic zine about Anxiety. I haven't been posting a lot of the illustrations I have been working on for this on facebook or twitter, so I figured it was time I update you.

After completing my very first zine (also about anxiety), ANXIOUS, I was ready to keep drawing and keep improving. I guess art is like that, as soon as you finish something you are overcome with hatred for it and just want to create something BETTER. I am extremely proud of ANXIOUS, but I see all of the things I would do differently every time I read it.

Here are some of the things I will be doing better for zine #2

TYPOGRAPHY:

For ANXIOUS I wanted to hand write all of the text, because I thought it was important to have my fingerprints on everything. I never get to see everyone's interesting writing anymore because we're all frantically typing away, and I thought it would be more personal if I wrote everything with my tablet pen. Unfortunately I was doing everything in photoshop, and the words came out a bit blurry and sad. AND wonky. Very wonky. I have a tendency to write on an extreme slant when using my tablet, and it took a lot of editing to make the text in ANXIOUS at all legible. It really limited how much text was in the zine, because I couldn't write huge paragraphs without it being unreadable.

SO for zine #2 I experimented with a number of handwriting fonts, but it all felt too impersonal and cold, and when I looked at it all I could see was the writing of someone else explaining my very personal experiences. Luckily my friend Cal swooped in and showed me how to convert my writing to a font that I could type out, which I knew was possible but never knew was SO EASY. I used Myscriptfont.com and it worked perfectly.

MORE COMICS:

Because of my new brianneburnell font, I am able to have a lot more text in the zine, and it doesn't take a zillion years to get it in there. This means MORE COMICS less full page illustrations. The Americano comic in ANXIOUS was my favourite page and I decided zine #2 should have a lot more content like that. The pizza comic below shows the new font, and one of the many comics.

LENGTH:

Zine #2 will be 32 pages, while ANXIOUS was only 20. Maybe I had just seen all of the images so often that flipping through ANXIOUS felt really short, or maybe it was really short. All I know is when I got to the end I felt like it was over too soon. There were also some things I couldn't explain fully in ANXIOUS because of the page limitations I had originally set, so that left it with a lot of one page comics/illustrations. Zine #2 will have more double page comics and at least one 3-page comic.

HUMOUR:

Everyone who knows me knows I have always, and will always, find the humour in having anxiety. You can't survive it if you don't laugh at yourself and your life. Plus laughing is good for you. ANXIOUS had some really sad pages that I found really hard to draw. And after I did draw them I wanted to curl up in bed forever. I know that people do really connect with the sad, personal stuff, and I do love connecting with people, but I don't like portraying my life that way because a lot of times it is really awesome and crazy and silly and not sad. Zine #2 will have more humour because I think my experience with anxiety is funnier than I portrayed in ANXIOUS. There will still be some sad stuff though.

STYLE:

I was still majorly experimenting when I worked on ANXIOUS, and although I am still experimenting now (and forever) I think I have found a style that I can use consistently throughout zine #2. It also helps that everything is black and white in zine #2 and I don't have to worry about making cohesive colour choices throughout.

ALSO, I would like to mention two artists who have really inspired me with this zine.

Firstly, Hyperbole and a Half, which I have always loved, published the best book ever. I begged Eric to buy it for me for Christmas, and then read the whole thing in one sitting. It is the funniest book ever, and Allie is really great at explaining things in comic form, the funny and the sad. She also colour coded the pages, which you can see on the side of the pages, so each story is a different colour which made it really easy to find each story.

Secondly, OYSTERFACE. I ordered this super intricate black and white zine on Etsy, and it came all the from Australia and went straight into my heart. The artist, Ben Constantine, is seriously talented. This zine definitely showed me that black and white doesn't have to be blocky and boring, it can be so intricate and beautiful! I turn to this zine when I miss working with colour and need to be inspired again. You can read the entire thing here. 

I am aiming to have this zine complete in the next 2 weeks. I have 15 of the 32 pages remaining. I am currently stuck on one specific illustration and it is driving me crazy! Anyway, thanks for reading my long-winded update and I hope now you want to go make cool things.

Woops

It has been approximately a million years since I have blogged. While I don't really do New Years resolutions, blogging more in 2014 is probably a good idea.

A lot happened in December 2013. I completed my first zine, a 20 page zine full of colour illustrations about anxiety and my life. I have sold about 20 of them so far, enough to help cover half of the next months rent. ANXIOUS is available here.

After a nice Christmas holiday in Thunder Bay with my parents, which included an amazing day of skiing and tons of food, I began working on a book cover for a friend of mine. She wrote an extremely compelling novella which I devoured in 2 days. The finished cover:

 

I received a ton of positive feedback on this cover, and I managed to complete it really quickly which I was thrilled about.

I am now working on a new black and white zine (two actually, but one is a little secret), which I will update you on in a new post.

Project in the works

I am very excited about a new personal project I will be working on, a zine about anxiety and depression, based on my personal experiences. The zine will include some of my comics, illustrations and a teeny bit of writing.

I will have the zine complete by DEC 15, at which point I will be printing and assembling it myself. I splurged on a 25 dollar long reach ruler and everything!

Below are some of the complete or partially complete pieces for the zine.

comics!

I had a bit of a revelation about how funny my life can be sometimes, with my anxiety and social awkwardness and sweet cats. I started drawing some rough comics of eric and I at the post office, me ordering an americano, and my fluffy cat Harpo running to watch the toilet flush, TADA!

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback about the Americano comic, people seem to really be able to
relate.