First Day
When I was in college, I always had painting classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Two-and-a-half hours of painting or critique. It sounds kind of stupid to say, but I’ve never learned so much about who I am, what I like, and what I am capable of under pressure than I have while painting for those classes. When painting, you have to make decisions with every single brush stroke. Painting is a series of tough choices that result in an image. If you make the thousands of right choices, you might end up with a great painting. Or not. It’s incredibly frustrating, but equally rewarding, like most things worth doing. Get together with a group of painters in a setting like a class with a really hard-to-please teacher, and you’ll all feel like you’re old war buddies by the time the class is over.
Painting and drawing are completely different things. I’ve always been more of a draftsman than a painter, and it shows in my work, just as it showed in my paintings. A good painter can ignore almost all fundamental rules of drawing and produce a fantastic painting that doesn’t make the viewer obsess about its horribly unconvincing perspective. Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna is proof. That’s not me, though. I’ve always made drawings masquerading as paintings. I lean on line, structure, and space to make an image, not light and color.
Renee’s a painter. She thinks in forms and values. It’s obvious from how she draws (which she also does really well). We went to different colleges, but we painted together a few times when we both had assignments due. We’d paint for hours early into the morning. I’d end up with a series of horrible choices staring back at me from the makeshift easel that I’d made out of a chair, and she’d have a painting. That’s why I asked her to color ALPHA FLAG for me (well, and because we’re both unemployed). I had some incredibly vague notions about how I wanted the colors to work, but I knew she could make them into something cohesive.
So here it is. ALPHA FLAG. Starting today, and every following Thursday until I finish the story there’ll be a new page. The Thursday release schedule is my nod to my college painting classes. This one’s for you, class bro *fist bump*. As far as releases go, ALPHA FLAG will be broken up into chapters running about 12 or so pages apiece. Those will be collected into pay-what-you-want CBRs/PDFs (do you have a preference?) at the conclusion of the chapter, and then two chapters will be collected into issues. If there’s adequate demand, I’d like these to be print issues, but we’ll see. A lot of this depends on what you want, so let me know.
I’ve been working on it as a project for about a year now, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. Even better, I finally get to share it as a real series with all y’alls! I really hope you like it, and I’ll be proud if even one person makes it part of their Thursday routine. If you do like, I double-hope that you’ll share it with your friends. Let me know what you think of it, too, via the comments, or by email. This is the internet, after all.
I’ve never seen the colored cover. Smashing.
I’m so glad to see this go live.
Thanks bro! *fist bump*
we are totally getting it done!