Kreation Stories

A recent post on his blog from Dale Martin about enjoying reading fellow creators' creative process along with something similar in some emails we've exchanged has prompted me to write a little bit about mine.

You can break down what I do into two parts. The art and the writing. Sometimes one begets the other and sometimes they have nothing to do with each other.

I was making some envelopes with Tarzan wrestling a tiger in anticipation of the upcoming Edgar Rice Burroughs postage stamp release. This led to my thinking about if I were wrestling with a big cat, it would be for play. I then wrote some thoughts about it.

Carrie and I are constantly doing various wordplay with each other: punning, rhyming, alliteration, etc. Doing something like this in the middle of the night does happen. I wrote about it. The art had to go along with the text to really work. I was reading a collection of Secret Agent X-9 comic strips and admiring Al Williamson's skill in doing more than just talking heads (panel 3) in the small panels allowed in newspapers. He often will focus on active hands (I did feet) and he can have more than one plane in the panel (Qwill in foreground, bedroom in back.)

Most of the time what I want to write and what I want to draw have nothing to do with each other. In my first kard of last year I felt like drawing a cavern, but had other things to say. Still, I try to do some tie in anyway, even if it's only symbolic. In this case I had me carrying a lantern as if in search of something. the text ended with "if I can find the time..."


If you have some of my other postkards handy, take a look at them and try to guess which category they fall under.

click between the panel borders to enlarge a kard