A few weeks ago I signed up for an online course called Make A Comic Book. It’s sort of a cheaper, less personal version of the SVA course I took almost 4 years ago (jeez, I’m progressing glacially with this whole “pursuing my craft” thing). It’s been a little disappointing, because the the instructor has given no personal feedback, and in fact instructs very little, aside from 5-minute videos and a syllabus of online tutorials that are freely available. Everything is peer-reviewed, which helps, but I’d find feedback from a professional much more enlightening. And from what I can tell (based on the material I’ve been asked to peer-review), there’s only a handful of people taking this session, so I think they could afford to be more hands-on.

That said, I knew going into it that the most important aspect of the course would be shelling out money in order to motivate myself to finish something! So, here goes…something.

I have to admit, I find most photos posted to Reddit Gets Drawn kinda boring; sure, I need practice, but selfies bring out the old man snob in me. Back in my day, we expressed ourselves through Transformers action figures, and we liked it. Anyway, I appreciate it when people post something that’s fun to sketch, like this.

I finished off my weekend re-watching Season 1 of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” on Netflix. Season 2 premieres April 15!

I think Kimmy’s roommate/sidekick Titus, in his knockoff Iron Man…er, “Metal Hero Friend” Times Square character costume, is the closest I ever want to get to drawing a superhero.

My brother-in-law requested a logo for his company’s baseball team, which is named after a minor league club branded with a similarly metallic and ornery oinker. So yeah, in terms of the basic concept (and color scheme), this is a total rip-off, but the cartoony head, for whatever it’s worth, is all mine.

I worked on this from start to finish on my iPad Pro. The initial sketch (below) was done in Procreate, and the vector art was done in Autodesk Graphic, formerly known as iDraw.

The first thing people often noticed about my favorite coworker was that her office chair was an exercise ball. Today, she made a move that was both gutsy and rational: leaving her post simply because she was ready for something new. Does she have a new job lined up? Nope. Will she succeed? Yep.

Have I thought about following her example? [REDACTED]