I’ll draw your Signature!1!

Well, for many reasons I’m still not completely into what I’m supposed to be doing.
Plus my bank account this month is the colour of mature tomatoes but much, much sadder, which adds to my mind being all over the place.
So today I ended up doodling stupid things (my face) and it wasn’t that bad. Actually it was good enough to deserve a body below it, and the whole bunch respectable enough to be used as a signature for my emails.
I showed my wife and she went “wow, cool, I want one!” So I did another one and it wasn’t bad either, and I thought, “Hey, I could make lots of them and beg people to give me money in exchange! So here you go, I’m officially selling myself to whoever wants himself to be distorted in a horrible but funny way.

Come on, don’t be shy, your ego will be pleased! You can have yourself as a sticker to stick on your windshield, or as a signature for your emails, or you can have it on a card to show that girl that keeps turning you away!

Plus – the most important – you can help my sad, sad bank account to go back to black, by clicking on the shiny Paypal button in the side bar!

Note: gmail users will find out that gmail doesn’t support images in the signature.
If you’re using Chrome, Autopen is the best extension to do it (in my humble opinion). It allows great control over every detail of the signature, plus you can sync all the changes and your different signatures over different machines.
Black canvas apparently does pretty much the same thing on Firefox but I haven’t tried it yet, so any feedback will be appreciated.
Setting up a signature on Thunderbird is pretty straightforward.
If, on the other hand, you’re using Explorer or Outlook you’ll have to figure it out by yourself, and possibly consider the idea of switching to another browser and email client:)

I can has more brains?

I’m pretty sure it’s common knowledge that the two halves of our brain have different attitudes. One half is dressed like a hippy and cares only about figures and shapes and colours and abstract ideas; the other one is all suited up and takes care of all the bills.
I’ve always wondered how two personalities THAT different from one another could get along well in the same narrow space.
Well, the point is that they don’t. At least not in my narrow space. While I was at the bank the other morning I could hear them arguing. I think my suited-up half of the brain is lazy. And mean. Which is why whenever I see a number somewhere my mind blanks out.

Clerk: … and so as you can see there’s this thing going on, started in June 2009 and ending May 2014, right?

Hippy Half: … dude, DUDE! That woman scribbled something on that piece of paper, I’m pretty sure they’re numbers, aren’t they? I’ve seen numbers before.
Suited-up Half: lololo lalalalala lololololo
HH: What? Come on, don’t be silly, do something!
SH: lololo lalalalala lololololo
HH: Stop it! She’s looking our way, I think she’s expecting us to say something clever.
SH: lololo lalalalala lololololo
HH: Whatever, I think I got it

Paolo: ok, so that means it’s only three months to go, that’s ace!
Clerk: What? No, it means it’s more than four years to go.
Paolo: …
Clerk: You know, it’s March 2010 now

Current Status: Multitasking Mode

I eventually started to concept some of the characters for the story I just wrote, and they’re rubbish. I mean, my-three-year-old-daughter-could-do-it-while-on-a-rollercoaster-and-possibly-even-on-drugs kind of rubbish. So I decided to give up for a while and go into Multitasking Mode. Multitasking Mode implies that you completely forget about what you are supposed to be doing and start doing something completely different, hoping that Karma, the Fairy of Good Ideas or possibly Yoda’s astral projection will eventually come and sort out the stuff you left in the background of your mind. Someone would call it Play-Videogames-Until You’re-Stricken-By-The-Idea-Of-Your-Life mode, but there’s more to it than that.

Multitasking Mode is a tricky thing if you tend to get distracted by shiny things as I do. It has to be mastered or you’ll end up doing random stuff for years (as I did before), leaving you with a constant undefined “I should be doing something but can’t remember what” feeling, and an endless line of unfinished projects behind you.
So, the first thing to remember if you’re playing the MM card is that you need to set some kind of alarm to remind you that there are things that need doing. Don’t use post-its if your conscious mind registers them as visual background noise, like mine. iCal is fine, though. This is what I did on this occasion.
Once you’re done setting those reminders for the greater things awaiting, you can start putting your energy into all those activities that will somehow trigger the background solving of your problem.
My list for the moment includes the following:

– stare intently at something visibly dull. A blank wall would do but – err- Win98’s defrag screen is the best. I could spend days watching those little blue squares jumping into place. However, if you don’t want to dedicate one of your hard drive’s partitions to observe one of the highest products of human wit, the closest alternative is a good old lava lamp. Just buy one and watch those bubbles going up and down.

– prepare a bunch of good excuses. Claiming you need to knit a real size woolly version of Chewbacca (assuming that’s your source of inspiration) instead of doing your yard chores might be frown upon by most. Just do what you need to do and get ready to deliver a well-rehearsed line such as “shush, I’m intensely concentrating on an urgent matter you wouldn’t understand”.

– feast lavishly on chocolate. I read on the Internet that it’s the best food for thought, and the Internet is never wrong. Ten times your average monthly consumption will be enough; in my case a few bags of delicacies found by afriend in a place that in my imagination looks exactly like this.

– as I might have mentioned, play videogames, but avoid addictive ones. When I was younger I skipped work for a week to finish Baldur’s Gate and that’s not something you can do when you have a family or when you’d like some energy left. Intense and senseless violence is perfect though. The ancient, animal part of your mind can have some fun, leaving the part that matters free to wander into Fairyland.

-read the Internet: other people’s experiences can help, although if you live in Europe it might be impractical to take a trip to the Grand Canyon for inspiration.

– listen to *the right kind of music*. Lately I’ve been alternating between Mastodon and Italian opera but anything will do. What I recently discovered is that music that doesn’t demand your attention works best. A couple of days ago I was listening to this album, which is about the worst recording ever made since humans began recording anything. I mean, worse than any bootleg ever made with a ten-year-old cassette Walkman on a reused tape. What you hear is José Carreras from a distance trying to make himself heard over a crowd of people coughing at the top of their lungs. Why is it that people can’t help coughing the hell out of themselves in a situation that requires silence? I bet that if I showed a sign reading QUIET PLEASE in a room full of silent people, everyone would start coughing. Anyway, don’t buy that cd, it sounds like a concert in a sanatorium.

As part of my Multitasking Mode I also had another quick look at the (tenth?) draft of my manuscript, and although I’m still quite happy with it there’s something that doesn’t work with the rhythm.
I read an interesting article about this matter a few days ago linked fromhere. I never thought of including Shakespeare in the list of must-reads for picture book making, but I found it to be good advice and I think I will follow it.

My great 2010 discovery is Stanza, which I think I was the last one on the planet to find out about. But hey, just in case there’s some kid brought up in the jungle by a pack of wolves who only just discovered the internet yesterday, Stanza is the best way to read classics on an iPhone, and it’s free. Just install it and download every classic you can think of, there’s no copyright you need to bother with.
At the moment I’m being delighted by a collection of short stories by LeFanu, but Shakespeare is next. And this, above all other considerations, is the awesomest thing in history, no kidding. I mean, having the chance to access human kind’s highest literary creations while you are – let’s face it – sitting on the toilet is something that makes me come to terms with the fact that I will never be employed on a Federation Spaceship commanded by Captain Picard.
 And this sets off a stream of completely random and useless thoughts, which means my Multitasking Mode is sort of working, but still needs a little tweaking.

First One

Several months ago I had a brilliant idea. Actually I must have had more then just a brilliant idea back then, but right now I can remember only that particular one: I had to write a book.
I’m not new at writing, in the sense that I’ve already written a few short stories in the past (and my friends said they were awesome, so, there!) so it’s not like I said anything like “tomorrow I want to be a mathematician”. I could actually do it.

Plus, instead of having a lot of good beginnings and no endings in mind, as usual, that time I had both of them. I mean, the beginning and the end of the same story, all together. I couldn’t believe it. However, the great epiphany was the fact that, though working in the videogames industry, I am a professional illustrator and I could have made the illustrations myself, be paid twice as much than your average writer, and become rich and famous in no time.

So I put some serious heavy metal into my playlist, poured myself several glasses of wine and started writing my first picture book. It was the first time I was writing something with the deliberate intent of being published and I was quite excited, so I ended up writing about three thousands words in a day. There.
Now I only had to illustrate it, but I had no idea of the size of a standard picture book. You know, painters always need to know the size of the canvas they will be painting on. So I googled it and, well, I didn’t expect to find what I did. I started with the various sizes and shapes of picture books, then I read about signatures, end pages, self-ended books, agents, queries, rejection forms, slush piles, adverbs to be avoided at all costs, bloggers and fellow aspiring writers, and I found myself sucked into a world of information I’m still struggling to process. Plus, since I want to illustrate the stories I write myself, I had to face the fact that drawing for videogames is nothing like drawing for picture books, and I would have to learn a completely new set of skills.

I bought a gazillion picture books (my three-year-old daughter didn’t mind), I read a few books on the craft, went back to life-drawing classes and subscribed to several forums and blogs. Oh, and I got rid of the three-thousand-word manuscript, it was crap. And I started to consider the illustrations in my website and also found them crap, and I am going to have to re-do it all from scratch, I can barely stand the sight of it now. And I was just googling for the size of a sheet of paper for christ’s sake.
Anyway, one of the things I found out during these past few months is that you need feedback at all stages of your work, you can’t be a good judge of what’s on stage when you’ve seen the bunnies get stuffed into the hat  (I’m quoting someone but may I choke to death on the spot if I remember who).
Hence this blog. Mostly to force myself to write on a regular basis, then to post works in progress, both drawn and written, and have people tell me “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG”.
I mean, before I write three thousands words for a picture book again.

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