12 rules (Patreon)

hello hows it going

here are some of the rough pages from this '12 rules for strife' book that Jeff Sparrow and i are making together for Scribe, alongside our editor David Golding, who held my hand with Our Members Be Unlimited.

Jeff tied off the script a while ago, we finished a super rough and scrappy draft of the visual concepts of all the pages (thats what i did while i was in Perth on that fellowship), then did a more schmick coloured version of the rough draft of the whole book. now i’m on to drawing the finished artwork. we have less than two months to tie it off so i am……scrambling, lol 😆

i will drop in some of the rough layouts from the final draft below :

the process has been pretty demanding, the last while. it’s such a different thing, a book length project, compared to the quick and dirty single panel drawings that are my usual bread and  butter. this kind of longer work is more rigorous and satisfying, but also feels a lot more gristley and sludgey to wade through. i feel like the single frame drawings i do have become harder to pull off, the “rah rah” of them, it almost feels cringe to me sometimes. there is an immediacy that those single image artworks demand, and an oversimplification that is seductive and necessary cos of the form, but feels a bit ~off~ sometimes. best summed up in how the late great Bruce Petty called the cartoon “an appalling abbreviation” hahah. the longer form work feels a bit more like a meal. i hope to do more of it if the opportunity arises and if i can be effed!!!!

thanks for supporting me to work on this kind of thing, which pays appallingly, again i probably get about $2 an hour for all the work involved, if we were to map it out, based on the advance from the  publisher :-V so yeah thanku!

I’m  sorry i haven’t been sending out as bigger updates as usual on patreon - will be back to regularly scheduled programming here once i get the final artwork for the book submitted in August. until then i’ll try to send some bits and pieces from the book from time to time, as it takes shape.

i hope u like it when it’s finished. rly hope it’s useful for people, it’s been good working occasionally in this day job at the same time as we develop it, and thinking lots about how the messaging might resonate with my workmates, who have good values for sure but are not rly what you’d call on “the left”, showing them some of the drafts and just trying to see the messaging from their perspective...

i’m nearly done with the cover art, will try to send that through in the next week or so !

<3 and thanx from Sam