What inspired you to go into the craft business & do you still have a day job? I used to work in the film industry (I was a movie-trailer editor) and I started making comic strips on the side because it was a fun way to do something creative that wasn’t subject to the whims of a client. Many years of toiling in obscurity later, someone wanted to buy a book of my comics and since then I’ve developed a line of books, greeting cards, apparel, art prints, and strange novelties that manages to precariously support me and my family. So technically I do have a day job — it’s just one that’s way harder and more complex than anything I ever did for an employer. But, much more rewarding as well.
What’s the best advice you have been given about your craft? Make something that jerks would like, and you will attract an audience of jerks who will make your life miserable and negative and unsustainable. But make something that nice people will like, and nice people will find you and support you and your life will be filled with smiles. Meanwhile, the jerks will be bored by you and leave you alone.
What is your workshop/workspace like? My workspace is a constant flurry of activity as I rush from one mad project to the next, one trip to the next, one half-completed prototype of something to the next. My list of things to do grows faster than my list of things done, which someday will be a problem and I will be crushed by teetering, top-heavy stack of projects full of pointy ideas and deadly ambitions.
Have you ever developed a great idea, which has wound up on the editing room floor? I’ve developed a ton of horrible ideas, and some of them wound up being made, so I’m sure some of the stuff that never got done must have been brilliant. Occasionally my most brilliant-but-pending ideas get thought up and made by other people eventually, though, so while I curse my tardiness I’m also glad that the ideas manage to get out there into the culture. The music-video-made-of-infomercial-footage-showing-people-doing-things-wrong was MY IDEA DANGIT. But I never got around to it and someone else did so HAVE AT IT WORLD.
site: http://wondermark.com