The slaying of twelve people, many of them journalists, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French newspaper in Paris, has come as a psychic sucker punch to me this week. It is hard enough for writers and artists to fight the general negativity of society and their own self doubts in order to find their voices and speak their truths within their work. The threat of violence, let alone actual violence, can be…
Amanda Palmer is a musician, but that’s not how I know of her. I first heard of her through Neil Gaiman’s online journal. Neil is a writer of strange and glorious tales of gods come to earth and secret doorways to places and beings outside of this world. (Hard to capture his work in a brief sentence, but that’s my stab at it.) My intro to his work came not through his acclaimed Sandman series,…
You know you’re long out of college when you read textbooks for fun. It helps when you can choose your own textbooks and when they are particularly attractive. I’m currently reading “Designing Brand Identity” by Alina Wheeler. It discusses the ins and outs of what it takes to brand and re-brand organizations. What’s great about the book is the spare amount of writing to convey what brand designers need to know. The cover and layout…
As I was posting photos of drawings on my portfolio page, it dawned on me that I haven’t done a bone study since college. I love bone studies and rock studies, anything that has me really working with chiaroscuro. So, I printed a few pictures of bones from the internet yesterday and sat down to draw this: If you want to see the pic I used to draw the skull, visit this page. I think…
My sister-in-law Jill Warner has been working feverishly over the past few months to fulfill a dream. She wanted to record an album of music for use in progressive Christian churches. By day, Jill is the minister at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Aberdeen, South Dakota. By day, night, and every other time, she is a musician. For years, she has been writing new music in order to update hymnals for those who…