August Recap pt 1 - FINNISH EDITION!

 Hello, all! I’m finally back home and reunited with my dogs. So many things happened this month, and so I wanted to write a special post about it.

The Project:

Toward the beginning of the month, I flew to Finland to participate in an artist residency program. Me and ten other cartoonists stayed in the Finnish countryside for two weeks with all expenses paid while we worked on a project together.

Here’s a list of the people I had the enormous honor of working with: 

Each day, we were asked to meet as a group and work on our joint project. Our goal was to create an educational guide for comic artists around the world on how to make money from their webcomics.

The guide covers topics in four general areas: Starting Out, Monetizing, Expanding, and Keeping it Together. In general we worked in groups of two or more to write about a specific subject within those categories. We also created autobiographical comics that depicted personal experiences with those subjects. 

During our stay, I ended up tackling most of the “Subscription Models” and “Merchandising” sections. It was difficult distilling what I’ve learned over the years into a general (but not generic) guide, but I enjoyed the challenge.

We started with the goal of creating a concise 25-page booklet. Instead, we ended up completing a 100-page book.

Artwork by Eelis, who did an incredible job of capturing our personalities along with lots of references from the trip

We are finalizing edits to the book, but once they’re complete, it’ll be released as a free e-book for people to read and print!

The Trip:

It’s hard to put into words all the things that happened during the residency. It’s still difficult even with comics or pictures! In case the following descriptions and pictures don’t do it justice, I wanted to say that I gained so much knowledge, peace, and friendship from this trip that I really needed, and I hope I can continue to carry these things with me moving forward.

Outside of the group work we did, there was plenty of time to explore the area and hang out with others. Originally I wanted to take time to plan some personal projects, but I decided to make the most of the limited time I had with the other residents. We drank, barbecued, told ghost stories, played pranks, and had a lot of fun adventures.

The group sans David, who had to leave early because of an early flight

I’ve also put together an imgur album with more pictures from the trip, plus explanations. I’ll also be posting the first batch of autobio comics tomorrow for $3 patrons, which document some of my favorite moments and jokes of the trip.

I can say that webcomic artists in general are some of the nicest, funniest, most genuinely great people to keep as company, and I’m really honored to be a part of a community of such wonderful people. 

The Takeaways:

I learned a lot of things on this trip, but some of the ones I’d really like to focus on are -

• I work best in the morning and for a bit at night. I’m useless from 1-4p
• Frequent breaks are healthy, normal, and help me work more efficiently
• I create so much more in a day than I realize
• It’s okay to slow down
• Balancing work with play keeps me feeling happy, healthy, and prevents burnout

These are all pretty basic and ‘no duh’ discoveries, but I think there’s a huge difference between knowing something intuitively and experiencing the effects first hand. Simple advice does not always mean easy to implement! Having no obligations for two weeks gave me time to reset my expectations in my work and myself, and let me figure out what I wanted to prioritize in my life.

The Next Thing:

I’m going to be settling back into work and figuring out how to merge my at home workload with the things I’d like to incorporate from the trip. I will be posting another update soon discussing some of these things. 

For now, things are scheduled to return back to their normal update schedule on Sept. 1!