Lots of discussion of shitty behavior from an unhelpful art teacher, so here's a GIANT THREAD about giving critiques.

NB: I have no formal training as a teacher, but I was a student, & I've spent a decades giving artists feedback on their work. When someone brings me a portfolio, I like to establish my limitations & clarify my perspective. My work is firmly rooted in traditional US comics storytelling (i.e., not manga or art-comics.) I can give feedback on other approaches but they should know where I’m coming from.

If any of the 70 thousand people who saw this today need to buy a copy of the book, I’ve got some signed and sketched copies of the paperback in my Etsy store! Free shipping in the USA. etsy.com/listing/877872…

https://twitter.com/DC_moments/status/1657818533026209793

Holy cow. Keep those orders coming, folks! I’ve got more copies available. And thanks for the shout out, @DC_moments!

11 ideas for enlivening a comics page.
Some pages will just lay there, not engaging you. And if you're not engaged, the reader won't be either.
Let’s talk about ways to solve those problems from the picture-making side.
🧵 Your goal is STORYTELLING. If the scene isn't interesting, maybe there's nothing happening to engage the reader—no relevant conflict, no attempt to overcome an obstacle in pursuit of a goal. Fix that rather than just trying to obscure story problems with clever pictures. BUT...

Time to retell my NYE story. 21 years ago, S & I were awaiting Y2K in at a friend's house in the country. Their unspayed dog was in heat. At 11PM the dog got outside. Somehow it was my job to go running thru the kudzu with a flashlight, trying to find her & bring her back inside. Unbeknownst to me, our friend's no-account husband had gone trash picking earlier that day. He'd brought home some stuff, decided it wasn't worth keeping, and chucked it in the dark woods behind his house, where coincidentally, I was looking for the dog.

If you're an emerging artist who was hoping to get feedback on your comics portfolio from me at #eccc2020, here's a roundup of what I probably would've told you: 1. Violating the 180 degree rule makes this sequence hard
to follow, particularly without any environmental clues to tell the reader that the p.o.v. has shifted so drastically.

Good time to rework an old #protip thread: Some advice for showing your comics portfolio at conventions. First thing: Lots of people today build great careers without ever showing a portfolio or being published by anyone else. How much should I bring? 6-10 pages of your best sequential storytelling. Show you understand narrative, and that you can keep characters, situations, & settings consistent and recognizable. Show what you can do with acting and staging, and with character, prop, and set design.

THREAD time! No one here will be surprised to learn that mentorship & teaching are obsessions of mine, so here are some things I've learned about working w/ emerging artists. (At @HelioscopePDX, I spend a lot of time w/new cartoonists, so my examples below are drawn from there.) To start: KNOW WHO YOU'RE TALKING TO

Different artists have different needs. Some artists thrive on harsh criticism and direct feedback. Andre’s path for getting better might only require helping him identify problems in his work and eliminating them.

1 Art books thread
I thought I'd write about some good how-to books for aspiring comics artists who want to acquire some academic, foundational drawing skills without spending tens of thousands of dollars. 2 I'm not knocking school. It was great for me! But there are plenty of self-taught artists who can draw circles around me. And in my whole career, no one has ever once asked to see my diploma.