Art How-To |

Calvin and Hobbes Cartoon Art Museum sketch, Fusain’s Liquid Charcoal, and Paint Flex

Colleen Doran — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 01:45:03 +0000

A look at Colleen’s original art for the Calvin and Hobbes benefit for the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. A talk about Fusain’s Liquid Charcoal, Thrifty Art Supply Shopping, Elaine Lee and Mike Kaluta’s “Starstruck”, and studio tips. Chakra Sketchbook Fusain’s Liquid Charcoal “Starstruck” Lock-Eat Jars Daniel Smith Watercolor SetCartoon Art Museum Colleen Doran’s Patreon

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Brain Fog

Colleen Doran — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 22:47:30 +0000

You used to be able to do long division in your head. Now you can’t do simple math on paper. You always knew what time it was, never needed a watch, and had the entire television schedule memorized. No one bought a TV Guide because they had you. Now you can’t keep up with your favorite shows because you can’t remember the storylines. Or when they were on. You never had to study because one pass over a book and you had it down. Now you can barely remember what you’ve read a half hour after you put the book away. You write for a living, but you stumble over spelling words like “who”. Brain Fog or Cloudy Consciousness is a cognitive disorder caused by…something. …inattention, thought process abnormalities, comprehension abnormalities, and language abnormalities…reduces quality of life by impairing work activities, social interactions, and driving, but it does not effect basic daily life activities such as dressing, personal hygiene, eating, shopping, answering the phone, or taking public transportation…may even exhibit normal cognitive performances, but overall productivity may suffer from inattentiveness and fatigue secondary to attention abnormalities…(Doctors) have a tendency to “psychologize” it and misdiagnose it as depression or apathy. So, I’ve been struggling with this for over a decade, and did not get a diagnosis or adequate treatment until 2012 (UPDATE: diagnosed in part, but underlying cause not addressed until 2016 – auto-immune disease. Bummer.) It got bad enough that for years there, I was pretty much disabled, producing only a few pages of work a month. I was so out of it that I had trouble remembering things like my middle name. Every day was one long comedy of errors – variations of not being able to find my keys. By 2006, I thought I was pretty much done and would not be able to work in publishing anymore. A close relative also had the same symptoms, and, as I did, later developed severe migraines. (For those of you who have never had a migraine, chronic migraines are debilitating. Mine include migraine aura, temporary blindness, and vomiting. Hit with migraines up to 21 days every month, as a writer and artist, I was simply unable to perform.) He was diagnosed with ADHD and given drugs that made his problems even worse. Only after years of bad reactions to the medication did a doctor finally figure out the real problem behind his brain fog was chronic Lyme Disease. My issue was an even more obvious and common problem – an endocrine imbalance (EDIT: alas, caused by that auto-immune disease that went undiagnosed for years. Can you say bummer, twice? I knew you could.) Once that was addressed, most of my brain fog symptoms disappeared (They can go into remission as the disease does, and come back whether you’re getting treatment or not. I got gobsmacked Fall 2016, but feel better several months later. Hope springs eternal.) After years of unproductivity, I’ve published a number of books over just the last couple of years. Brain fog isn’t just forgetfulness: it’s living in a bizarre twilight world where you are half in and half out of consciousness. Everything seems grey, and you don’t feel the passage of time. ( I could not remember the month, day or year it was.) You float through life, but it’s not a good feeling. You have an almost complete lack of awareness. You’re there, but you do not process what you’re experiencing. What memories you do manage to internalize seem as if they happened to someone else. If you’re a high energy person like me, you feel as if you’ve had a personality transplant – not a good one. You are listless, apathetic, and you don’t have the energy to fight to get better. What’s worse is it may seem like depression or ennui to others, when what you really have is a medical problem no one has caught yet. So you’ve got people telling you to snap out of it as if you have magical powers over your thyroid or your progesterone levels, as if you can talk yourself out of Lyme Disease, Celiac’s Disease, or Lupus. After a few years of dealing with all this, you do get depressed about it in the end. Back in the 1980’s I had chronic fatigue syndrome (they call it myalgic encephalomyelitis now, I’m told,) and when I began having brain fog problems, I was terrified that the viral infection had returned. I’d been symptom free for over 10 years. However, unlike chronic fatigue, my brain fog had no accompanying flu-like symptoms or fever (EDIT: not at first. Later came joint and muscle pain, but I no longer run a mild fever, which I always did when I was first hit with encephalomyelitis. I ran a fever almost constantly for years. Researchers believe that encephalomyelitis, which is an auto-immune disorder, may go hand in hand with the Hashimoto’s disease, with about 20% of patients having both diseases. Hashimoto’s also runs in my family. ) I wondered if a series of personal problems hadn’t plunged me into a depressive state. Everyone feels sad when people die or when someone embezzles your money. Most of us move on. I moved on, but didn’t feel better. Whatever, I felt lousy and couldn’t get stuff done. I was able to get some relief from my symptoms with over the counter energy supplements and herbal remedies supposed to increase pep and attentiveness, like Black Cohosh and green tea. Back in 2010, I blogged about “losing my mojo” and gradually getting back in the game. Even so, I was only working at about half the rate I used to. Now I feel pretty darned good and am working at about 80% of my prior work capacity. I expect that will improve in the coming months. But I wish my doctor had found out what was really going on, oh, about ten years sooner. Because I lost a heck of a lot of quality of life in there. There are many medical problems that can cause brain fog. It’s hard to deal with because you feel so listless and out of it that you have trouble finding the motivation and energy to find out what’s wrong. You may have something that affects a lot of people such as low testosterone or peri-menopause, or a thyroid problem. Or you may have a disease no one thought to look for. If you are unproductive, people tend to dismiss that as a character flaw. At first, I wasn’t very kind to myself when this was going on. I kept thinking if I exercised regularly, or ate the right foods, or stayed motivated, I’d snap out of it. I thought I’d gotten lazy. I’m sure lots of people thought so. People would joke about my absentmindedness, and when I was at shows, I’d be embarrassed by my inability to add up a total on a purchase, or remember things I’d worked on. Clients didn’t appreciate my spacey attitude. Friends who used to chatter on the phone with me wondered why that stopped. People I met at conventions were offended that I couldn’t remember them. I’d screw up orders and commissions. I’d forget entire assignments. Now that I know I have an medical problem, it’s easier to take. But I have a lot of catching up to do. My income plummeted for a long time, my medical bills skyrocketed, and I’ve lost years of prime productivity. When I first mentioned my spaciness, dizzy spells, headaches and other problems more than a decade ago on my old (now down) blog, several of you figured it out immediately, long before my doctor did! But a couple of you blogged that I must be a drug addict or drunk. That was sweet. I forgot a lot of things during all this, but I remember you. Several readers who also struggle with brain fog ask me to blog about how I deal with the problem. Sometimes, not so well. Sometimes like a champ. These days I’m much better, because hey, we know what’s causing this and the fix is pretty easy. But it’s a question of maintenance and I still have brain hiccups. For whatever reason you’ve got your brain fog, your working memory is completely screwed. You have to reduce stress and replace working memory with organization. Get organized, stay organized, and keep notes and records on everything. You will not be able to remember things other people take for granted. Think like an engineer, and back up, back up, back up. Redundancy is your friend. This is why I beg people to follow up with me, and to never make requests of me at conventions or other events. I simply won’t remember them, and then I have to deal with these people being pissed off later. Keep a blog or private journal, save every email, take notes on everything, and keep them in an organized format to which you can easily refer. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with list-making: keep to a simple, easy to follow routine. Let the people who need to know realize that they must follow-up with you. You don’t have to give clients your sob story: few people appreciate it when they feel guilted into treating you differently. Everybody has problems and some are much worse than yours. Just send a friendly note once in awhile to let your associates know to follow up with you. OK, I’ll blog more about this later. I promise to remember. Acephalous made Work Bird. Work Bird made Acephalous write a dissertation.

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Guest Blog: Julie Ditrich on Unlocking and Accessing the Darkness Within: 7 Keys for Comics Creators

Colleen Doran — Sat, 16 May 2009 13:28:05 +0000

[WARNING: Some comics, film and book plot spoilers ahead!] “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” Stephen King A few weeks ago at Australia’s Supanova (Brisbane) pop culture convention, I had the privilege of meeting US comics creator Jhonen Vasquez whose satirical work Johnny the Homicidal Maniac I greatly admire. Despite the fact that I’m not usually drawn to creative properties with the words “homicidal” or “maniac” in the title or indeed ones that hint at or overtly promise great acts of depravity, my business partner and artist Jozef Szekeres persuaded me to read it and I’m very grateful to him for doing so. Vasquez’s portrait of insanity in the form of a deranged serial killer was not only convincing but, in my estimation, was a multi-layered and brilliantly executed tour-de-force. Johnny is not quite my idea of the quintessential anti-hero, as his methods of dispatching victims would make even Dexter cringe. Yet in his quieter insular moments Johnny possesses a modicum of self-awareness and displays moments of a kind of distorted sweetness as he strives to find the meaning of life and ultimately find out who he is. In the ten minutes I spent gushing to Vasquez about the impact of the work on me, I asked him a question I’d been wondering while reading the series: “Did you do a lot of research on profiling and the psychology of serial killers or is this all you?” Vasquez paused for a moment and with a glint in his eye, which could have been interpreted in any number of ways, confessed, “It all came from me.” Vasquez’s revealing admission got me thinking again about something I’ve been grappling with for a long time – when my personal internal and seemingly benign archetypes include the healer and the seeker amongst others and when the genres I traditionally work in are fantasy or visionary (metaphysical) fiction, how do I step outside of my emotional comfort zone and into the darker side of myself in order to channel it into creative works? Outside of resorting to chemical means such as drugs and alcohol and the subsequent cliché scenario of spiralling down into a psychologically disturbed oblivion brought on by childhood trauma, I’ve identified seven practical keys that have helped me create some of the darker characters and moments in my own fiction work and that of the upcoming Elf~Fin: Hyfus & Tilaweed comics series. These keys could prove useful for both comics writers and artists to harvest the darkness within and ultimately redirect it into their storytelling. Before we examine them, it’s important to discern the necessity of introducing darkness into your stories. The actual argument in favour of it is threefold: – Without going into abject darkness how can a character experience the light in forms such as love, joy and redemption, which invariably accompanies traditional happy-ending plots? – Without understanding the evil lengths an antagonist and his/her allies will go to in order to fulfil their objectives, how can we create obstacles and conflict for the protagonist’s journey? – And without these stark contrasts, how can we get readers/viewers to identify with the lead character/s and in the process give readers a visceral experience that evokes a large range of feelings and emotions (which is one of my success measurement tools about whether or not a work translates into a rich reading or filmic experience)? The reality is that outside of creating a fiction work for pure entertainment value, many of us choose to step into the darkness in our stories in order to challenge a society in denial and to expose controversial themes that in the past were commonly excised from our attention. The objective here is to introduce these issues not for titillation sake but to shine a spotlight on humanity’s evil-mongers and hopefully provide solutions and hope to the lost and forlorn spirits out there who relate to the characters and situations. Audiences and readers have also reached new levels of sophistication, and black-and-white portraits of good and evil just don’t cut it any more. Characters actually need to be multi-faceted. Some of the best examples of deep and complex characters I’ve come across in the last few years are on the television series Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In comics and graphic novels, the aforementioned JtHM, as well as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (the serial killer convention was quite extraordinary!) But getting back to the seven practical keys that can help you access multiple parts of yourself… (1) Personal Experience Dredging up traumatic or dysfunctional personal experiences and using them as the foundation for story and/or art is the most obvious key. Australian comics creators Christian Read and Paul Abstruse’s graphic novel WitchKing is a case in point. It’s a veritable blood bath. I cringed over entire sequences while reading it. Having said that, it’s also a stellar piece of writing and is quite brilliantly illustrated. At its very core it’s a story about chronic bullying and the aftermath – that is, what happens when a victim fights back against his perpetrators. When I talked recently to Paul Abstruse (whose body of illustrated comics work is characterised by dark themes) about how he approached the script he said he is usually attracted to the murkier stuff because it often parallels his own difficult upbringing. He related to the WitchKing material so much so that in his own eyes he became the embodiment of a tortured artist who descended into his own personal hell in order to channel those experiences onto the canvas. While working on the art, he specifically remembers recalling instances of his own anger, shame, and resentment, which echoed aspects of the script and, in turn, helped him endow the artwork with a powerful energy. Similarly, Colleen Doran’s graphic novel A Distant Soil (Volume II): The Ascendant offers up what I consider is the most shocking and confronting scene in the entire four volumes. It comes in the form of a ritual known as “The Choosing”. The Ovanon, she writes about, don’t believe children have souls until they go through a ceremony, whereupon adults in the upper echelons of the society’s hierarchy capriciously decide who is worthy of a soul and who is not. Children become disposable objects and in some cases are offered up for sexual gratification and profound physical and emotional abuse. Colleen didn’t directly experience the horror of this first hand, but during her childhood she witnessed several incidents that left an indelible impression on her psyche and gave her the starting point to explore these ideas in her story. At a very young age Colleen recognised that children – the most helpless and vulnerable people in our society – were not valued as fully fledged human beings and often underwent a kind of devaluation process. This even happened in the court system. Punishment meted out to the transgressors of physical and emotional abuse against children was less than that given to offenders who had abused adults. Children who could not articulate their pain and who had undergone horrific trauma were relegated to the roles of second-class citizens with no rights. In particular, Colleen witnessed an incident where a little girl who had been starved and tortured was wrested out of her abusive family situation only to be returned to the same family after she had sufficiently recovered. The family then picked up their bags and moved – never to be seen or heard of again – and Colleen has always wondered what happened to that little girl. Justice in this case was not served, and merely served to reinforce in young Colleen’s eyes that there seemed to be an habitual violation of children’s essential humanity. Your emotional reactions to traumatic events (or even seemingly minor injustices) are all fodder for your stories and characters. And for those of you who feel vulnerable and anxious about exposing too much – just remember that characters are actually composites/collages/patchwork quilts (all these synonyms and more). Writers rarely duplicate the living exactly, but usually borrow facets or idiosyncrasies of themselves and others, then add part research and then part imagination and sew all these pieces together like Doctor Frankenstein sews together body parts from various corpses to create his monster. Using personal experience can ultimately be therapeutic and cathartic – the act of reconstituting your own demons and darkness and channelling them into your characters can be liberating and healing. (2) Introspection and Self Analysis This key is closely linked to personal experience (mentioned above) but differs in the method – it’s a conscious and active process of getting to know yourself and releasing blocks that may impede or in fact shut down your creative facilities. This process often requires an element of detachment where you become an observer of your inner and outer life as it unfolds. You ultimately become a student of yourself. In the first instance, I encourage writers to experience various therapies to release negative repressed emotions that may be causing creative blocks, do psych tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which identifies whether you’re an extrovert or introvert, are thinking or feeling oriented, intuitive or sensing, and perceiving or judging. Understand your archetypes (read Caroline Myss’s book Sacred Contracts for a comprehensive list) – these include advocate, warrior, rescuer, trickster and victim. Embrace the feminine and masculine traits you possess inside and identify how they manifest in your life. Examine your developmental journey through various ages. Strip away your barriers and lean into your authentic self so you can endow your characters with emotional honesty. If/when you experience emotions such as jealousy, obsession, rage, and resentment as a reaction to triggering incidents, ask yourself how you can translate them into words and pictures. Then ask yourself how characters could exhibit some of your personal characteristics, as well as traits that are alien to you, in various conflicts. Many creatives also talk about possessing a kind of split personality (not in the true sense of a Dissociative Identity Disorder but a disconnection nevertheless) – that is, they may find themselves participating in real life scenarios but also be observing (as if they’re outside themselves) at the same time. This observer part of them captures and imprints all the detail of the unfolding scene in their memory, and then, with a twist of the imagination, may play out that scene into several different takes with different resolutions. For example, a writer friend once told me that he cannot have an argument with his wife without his mind offering up several different simultaneously-dramatised scenarios about how the argument will unfold – in one she slams the door and drives away and the opposite end of the spectrum is that they tear off their clothes and make love on the floor there and then. Maybe we all need a dose of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now to keep us in the moment, but the simple truth is that this ability serves our profession and our creativity. (3) Create Boundaries – Honour Yourself and Your Readers Differentiate between who the character is and how they act and who you are and how you act, but also be aware of crossing any boundaries that may undermine, conflict or betray your personal values and your essential self. This is not about pro- or self-censorship: it’s about making conscious choices and having a vision and a message of what you want to say about yourself and your stories in the world. If you want to experiment with genre and story and darkness then that’s great – it will be a personal challenge and a process of self-discovery. However, if it means betraying a personal core truth or belief system then be aware of the implications for yourself and for your audience in the short and long term. A few years ago I attended a publishing conference in the USA, where one of the key speakers was Eric...

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11 Things Designers Should Avoid: Guest Blog by Val Trullinger

Colleen Doran — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:33:10 +0000

Often I get interns and designers who are dab hands at InDesign and Photoshop, but lack crucial skills that aren't always taught in design classes. Namely, how to work with other designers, clients, and an art director. It's wonderful that you can design mind-blowing work, but if you can't get along with your studio, you're doomed. This is a hard lesson for some. Luckily, that's why the gods invented art directors: to school the uppity.

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