Work Cycle
Throughout of my life as an artist I have become more and more fascinated with how other artists organize their time. From the time management strategies of Cal Newport to the explanation of Flow State by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi I have come to place great value on work flow.
I have started hundreds of projects that were never completed. Usually because I became interested in another project and then another and then another, until the original project drifts into apathy.
So I hade this cycle. I took the 8 ideas that I was the most excited about and dedicate 20 hours to each. Once the 20 hours is up I move to the next project. No matter where I am in the project no matter how excited I am about. I note the things I want to work on the next time around.
I started this Work Cycle in December of 2023 on my 45th Birthday and I think it’s been very successful. Although I have not yet completed a full cycle, I have found that it allows me to move with efficiency and confidence and best of all, allows my projects to not sit in limbo for years at a time.
Below you will fine a short synopsis and links to each project5.
Gift
Making art to gift to people has always been important to me. I crave validation, a trait I am not particularly proud of in myself but have grown to accept. Creating art for people fills that need to know that I am a good artist. I have also been broke most of my life, so making good art for people allows me to show up with something in hand that is valued and appreciate. (Well most of the time anyway)
Nothing exemplifies my desire to create art as gifts more than my comic Alpha Force, you can check it out here.
Over the years I found myself stalling on a project because a birthday or holiday was coming up. I would hit the gift hard and then lose motivation on the project I was doing before or get a “better idea”.
So I put Gifts in the Work Cycle so that I could fill that need.
Website
I had a mountain of work that I needed to upload to this website, so after I reached 20 hours I realized I was not even a 1/10th of the way to completion. It seemed as soon as I had started this Work Cycle thing it was going to crumble. There was no way I was going to be able to just put in 20 hours into my website at a time. It woulde’t be done for another 2 years.
So after doing one section of Work Cycle I realized I was going to have to change the rules and spend more time focusing on my website than the rules of Work Cycle was going to allow.
I decided I would make a list of the components I needed to be on the site before I launched it and then made a list of things that I wanted to see on the site eventually .
When I was at a computer I worked on the website, noted the time and crossed off objectives as I completed them. When I wasn’t near a computer I worked on my tablet and continued the cycle as normal. Its been both successful and very rewarding.
Never Grey
Never Grey is a sci fi epic graphic novel about virtual realities and clones galore! We follow Never Grey the Pocket Communication Specialist of the space station Primus. Her job is to enter the virtual world contained on the ships main frame (The Pocket) and trick AI entities into jumping in to real bodies (also made aboard the Primus) and completing tasks that will eventually alter the time line of the universe. Never Grey takes place in the Space Bear universe (about 500 years after Dr. Hieronymus Cho launches the Space Bear Project) but it is done in a more dramatic fashion.
Back in 2018 I was selling prints and comics at Last Thursday here in Portland Oregon. It’s a great event, very old and was one of the last great art events still alive in PDX today. Check it out if you are in town. While I was selling my array of monsters, random sketches and stickers a customer) asked, “Do you have any robots?” With that question Set 1 was born.
I wanted two things out of this project, to create a more marketable product and to take a break from comics. The high stakes and cerebral bandwidth of story telling can be exhausting, I find that sketching and experimenting keeps an artist fresh and inspired.
Because of the experimental and marketable goals of Set 1 however, I always kind of got pushed it off to the side. I never considered it “serious work” so it was always the first to be neglected if I was more excited about something else.
If there is a project that my Work Cycle has helped the most it is without a doubt this one.
I’ve been writing Space Bear in some form or another since 2001 but have very litel to show for it. In a way Space Bear taught me more about comics than completing a comic ever did. I think constant failure and testing out techniques is the best teacher.
Space Bear was one of the first comics I ever finished and that accomplishment has carried my interest in comics for the last 20 years. I am currently publishing 1 page at a time for my friend Alexander Turbin’s comic, Random Access. A monthly 12 page cyber tech fantasy power comic that you can support it on his patron here.
I began Honored Citizen in 2020. My good friend Jack Kent was the Art Director at The Willamette Week here in Portland and asked me if I wanted to contribute to the paper. Jack was one of the people featured in Alpha Force and I think that book showed him what I was capable of. However at the time, all my comics were these long run on epics and I had little experience going gag based daily’s. Squeezing a subject into 3”x4” was going to prove challenging. I mean if you are given enough time anyone can be funny or enlightening. Like, if I just say Bulldog or Rapscallion over and over again you’re going to laugh. Well funnies don’t have give you that luxury but I was up for the challenge.
I found it very easy to write them, in about 6 months I had written about 300. However drawing them was much more labor intensive. I just could not find a fast and loose style I was happy with., So Honored Citizen was made with deliberate lines, painstaking lettering and full color, highlight and cell shading.
Because the art was so labor intensive I found that almost all of my time was being eaten up by this comic and left me with little time to peruse other projects. So I dropped out of the paper. However I still had all of these comics written that I still want to make. Now I’m not saying there were Bill Waterson level stuff, but I thought the message in them was good and a few of them made me laugh and I figured if I kept at it they would get better. So here they are in Work Cycle. I can do 2-3 in a 20 hour chunk. So stay tuned!
Judy
In this 70 page graphic novel we will follow Rus Goss from childhood into adulthood as he is plagued by the specter of his emotionally abusive 5th grade teacher, Judy Turnkey. It’s semi biographical and deals with some trauma that I have been processing over the years.
Unlike Set 1 I consider this “real work” but because the subject matter is uncomfortable I push it off to the side rather quickly. Putting Judy in The Work Cycle forces me to work on the project and deal with the past.
War Pigs
War Pigs is a war game that I wrote in note books while stopped at redlights when I was driving the bus last summer. Since I shelved war pigs I wrote another role playing type game that is much simpler and would be quicker to produce. So I might shelve War Pigs for that one. We will find out when we get there.
As Cal Newport says, your schedule should not be so rigid that it can’t accommodate for the fluidity of life. I am making sure that my Work Cycle obeys those words.
Thank you for taking the time to go over my process. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
