Happy St. Paddy's!

I was going to say "top o' the mornin to ya", but to be accurate, it's "middle o' the night to ya". Figured since it's now a couple of hours into St. Paddy's Day, it was safe to get the early greeting out. Hope you have a great and green one, wherever you are!

2:17am where I am, out on my patio. And you know what? It's 55 degrees out. Beautiful! We were supposed to get a little rain today (technically, yesterday), but I never noticed any - not that I left the apartment much. But the next two days are supposed to be gorgeous and in the low 70s. I'll take it! Moments like this one, right now, are my favorite. Not really cold outside...serenely quiet...very peaceful. The car traffic is at a minimum so it's so quiet I can hear the hum of my laptop's hard drive. Glad I decided not to use the iPod out here tonight. I prefer the sound of the near-silence right now.

Hey, you know what's hard? Trying to find an artist. I spent a lot of time today online, trying to find someone to work on my graphic novel script. This is a pain. And no, for those of you thinking the question, this is not a job for Tim. Tim's working the Nice Guy, and it's a miracle he has any time to work on that book. He's a married man! No, Tim's got that and another little possible project of ours, so he'd have no time to crank out a hundred pages of graphic novel. So I'm looking for another artist for that.

It's a tricky business. Your first option is to post up an ad on a board. There are several good sites for this. But I've been down that road before, back when I was first taking a stab at comic writing. The results can be...kind of scary. You get a lot of responses, but the problem is, the majority of people responding...? Well, there's a reason why they're not currently working on anything else. I'm not trying to be mean, here. I'm just saying when I'd get the samples, they were nowhere near publishable quality. God bless 'em for trying, though. Hey, they're out there working it, trying to hook up with a writer, following their dream. I'm just looking at publication as my goal, and I have to be realistic about the artist I work with. Nobody looks at a comic or graphic novel on the shelf and picks it up for the snappy dialogue. People buy for the art. If it's not there, no one's going to care about my story. So I'm putting off the ad until the next step to avoid that depressing (but necessary) email flood.

So I've been hitting artist sites. The best-known one right now is deviantart.com. Sounds dirty, but it's not, I swear. This is a very cool site for artists. They get their own page, a place to post up their art, a journal they can write in, and a comments section where other members can post notes about each piece. It's a great network place for artist. And also a great spot to browse around in to find artists you like and might want to work with. This, too, however, has been depressing today. I haven't had much luck finding a middle ground. The majority of it, today at least, was embarrassingly bad. Much of it looked like it was drawn by school children. And it occurred to me - maybe some of it was. And that's pretty cool, if there's a kid out there with a love of drawing who's gone as far as to create a page to showcase his vampire drawings. He/she is taking steps early. Rock on. But I think the bulk is just people who want to draw, but really can't. Hey...I'm not the one to take the illusion away from them. I can't even draw at ALL. If they want to cling to the "I'm an artist" persona, that's all good. Just doesn't do me a lot of good. Lots of bad anime, bad big booby bad girl art, bad macho guys with guns art, bad "furry" art (don't ask...there's a group of folks out there that believe Disney and porn should be combined...), bad "Twilight" fan worship art, bad elf art... A veritable sea of cringe-inducing scribblings. It can be a bit overwhelming. But you push on, because somewhere in all that, there's a gem waiting to be found. One hopes.

The other end of the spectrum is finding AMAZING artists. I found one guy in England whose stuff is remarkable - and almost as important, there's a LOT of it. This is one of the three things I look for. Quality (which I tend to define as an understanding of basic anatomy and a lack of obvious artistic laziness) is first, of course. Then you look for quantity. Any artist can get lucky with a good shot once in a while. The trick is, can they do it regularly? If someone has five or six shots max on their gallery, that either means they only put up their best stuff, and it's likely the rest of it ain't that great, or it means they don't draw that often and only have a few pieces to put up. This means that chances are good they're not going to be able to draw page after page of comic story, and definitely not with any workable speed. Which leads us to #3 - this is, actual comic pages. Not all artists can tell a comic story. Some don't want to, frankly - it's not their thing, and they love to do pinup shots and portraits. I look for someone's comic pages to see 1) if they do it at all, and 2) if they do it well. Some artists admit that storytelling is just a mystery to them and they don't do it. And these artists can do really well doing commissioned shots and comic covers and all manner of commercial art without any need to be a storyteller. I've known a lot of awesome artists like that. They're just not what I'm needing right now.

So this British guy had amazing talent, over twenty pages of gallery (with about 24 shots per page), and comic pages. Clearly, he was a pro. Aha - there's my next problem. At that end of the spectrum, *I* become the weak link. These guys don't NEED me. They're professionals, and expect to get paid. They're looking at me like I'm looking at artists, asking "So what have YOU done and why should I waste my time with you?" Few of them are going to want to do what I'm looking for, which is work together and put together a pitch to sell to a publisher, putting off payment until the book sells. These guys are artists for a living, and have to put food on the table, and don't have time to jerk around. So I go back and forth between "Ugh, what's up with all these amateurs?" to "Oh, wait...I AM the amateur." The dream is to find that budding, hungry artist that shows some talent and hasn't hit it yet, and is looking for some way to show their work, something that will allow them to move on to other, better paying work. That guy or gal is out there. I just need to keep looking. At this rate, though, I'd better move on to the ad soon.

Though I'm not giving up on the British guy. He's actually not right for my graphic novel (he's not a very "real people" artist, more into the fantastical), but I'm already trying to come up with some kind of project that would fit his style and his likes (you can tell from an artist's gallery, if it's big enough, what kind of stuff they most like to draw). We'll see...

Speaking of which, back to a little more searching, and then it's time to call it a night. Or, in this case, a morning. Yeah, my days and nights are starting to get turned around. Figured that might happen. I've always been a night person, but my career turned that around quite some time ago. Though I was trying to avoid this and keep on a day schedule, circumstances (illness) have been keeping me up, so I may end up a night owl again. I'm cool with that. Long as I stay productive.

On to more bad goth art!

Have a great St. Paddy's, all.