Today is a rest day for me. I was fortunate enough to be able to take today off and just stay home for some relaxing time. I can’t sit in front of the TV for long periods of time so that means I am “relaxing” by sitting at my desk doing creative work.

​Now, there is a process to this. A cup of coffee/tea, comfy sweats, shuffling downstairs to my office and the first thing I do is open the shade. This mornings  ritual produced some wonderful surprises, specifically a handful of robins, 3 ducks and a rabbit to welcome me when I opened the shade. In fact, the rabbit was INCHES away from my window enjoying his breakfast! We both froze for a moment and then he ran away when I moved to get a picture but I DID manage to get a shot of the ducks “boots up” eating there breakfast!

Now, sitting at my desk, looking out my window, nature sounds playing in the background from Siri and a cup of warm coffee doing it’s duty…my mind starts to wonder. I see the ducks sitting out there in the overflow pond eating and I see them just sitting in the water, like… it was just… holding them up and I start to think of when I was a kid, growing up with a lake shore cabin and how swimming and drawing were my major past times. No internet, phone, tv, or even a radio. Just me, the beach and the lake. I can still smell it, the water, the beach and even the breeze.
At a young age I learned to swim, hold my breath and dive done into a different amazing world, but more importantly, I learned the ability to stay buoyant IN the water, i.e. if I relaxed and  controlled my breathing, I could actually “rest’” on top of the water and it would hold me up. Portions of my head, belly, and extremities would rise and float on the surface. Years later in Scuba Diving Class I would find out that there is a scientific principle for this and trying to teach it to someone is nearly impossible. You have to FEEL it. I just knew it as “resting ON the water.” You could swim and swim and swim and when you needed a break, roll over face up and LET THE WATER HOLD YOU. It was calm, it was quiet and it worked in all kinds of surface conditions as long as you timed your breathing properly. Did I mention I LOVE the water??

Back to the ducks.

Watching them on top of the water, floating, feeding and swimming around reminds of those quiet times as a kid, and the beach, and the water, and I smile and laugh to myself and then…just like that…I’ve slipped into “Creative Mode.”
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I start by drawing “Barney” standing on the shore watching the water come up to his toes; nah, needs more. Drawing two; Barney dipping his toes in the water to check the water temp, funny as it is, still needs more. Finally, minimal drawing; just a few parts of Barney showing up above the water as it holds him, Bingo!

It’s quiet, relaxing and he is going with the flow of the water…I should do more of that in my life. Instead of running to the next minute, whats the harm in having life just… hold me for a moment …and rest …and breath.

Man, I am learning a TON from this window!
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Just for the record, even though the cabin is gone. A few years ago I took a sound recording of the waves lapping at the shore on the very same beach that I learned those lessons of all those years ago. Oh! I did mention that I got some of the beach as well?

They say when you grow older, you can’t go back, but I refuse to accept that.

​I have the Beach, I have the Lake… and now, I have the ducks.


Go make your life SPECTACULAR!! 

When I draw these cartoons, it is usually on the weekend, early morning or late evening and I start with a blue line pencil and begin by drawing a nose and then building the scene from there. They almost NEVER turns out as I think it will. Its always just better to grab onto the pencil and hold on for dear life.

The other thing is that sometimes things come out in these pieces that I never even planned. More than just Bunny Slippers and Heart Boxers. I mean, what I think are deep meanings. Let me show you.

(My personal point of view here!) 

1. I see that Barney…thats what I call him; “Brother Barney.” Focused on a goal and he has not even NOTICED that everything else is crashing down around him he is totally engulfed by his goal.
2. All the items falling from the sky are LIFE THREATENING. Each one would obliterate a human and again, he doesn’t even notice, no fear.
3. He is holding a Net, he is close enough, why isn’t he using it? Because right now he is just into the chase, he is smiling and bouncing, he is just enjoying the run.
4. Work, he is sweating, he is putting effort in to get to his goal.
5. Lastly, wait until he stops to catch his breath and he sees all that he has come through, we see his path that he took but, what cool things would he have missed if he had taken his eyes of his goal just to look at one of the first few items.

These are just things that immediately cross my mind when I first look up after doing these drawings? Do you see something else? Let me know in a comments below..


Enjoy the run!

I draw on everything. Napkins, placemats, scraps of paper, bills, checks, you name it, I have probably left a mark on it. Including the dirt on the side of a my TRUCK and even sometimes, the side of the occasional school bus! I do these kinds of cartoons ALL THE TIME, for Shannon, the kids, family, etc. They are fast and just meant to get “the guys” out on paper. I never thought much about them, it was just something that I have ALWAYS done. They don’t take that long to make, just a few minutes each, sometimes even seconds. 

A few months ago I received a box of business cards for my new position at SERVPRO of The Saint Croix Valley. A THOUSAND OF THEM. My Boss told me; “When you get to the bottom of the box, I’ll buy you some more!” If you have never seen a thousand business cards lined up in a box, I ASSURE you, it is A LOT! The goal with theses cards? Get rid of them, all of them. Now I am no stranger to the game of passing out business cards, there is an etiquette to it, when, how many, and to whom all play a role but a thousand of them? I seriously wondered how long it was going to take me to pass them out to clients!

Fast forward to last months sales cycle. I try to see my insurance clients every 6 weeks and I was preparing to go out and while I was getting ready I happened to DUMP the card box!

Cards. Covered. Everywhere.

I had sometime to kill because I was waiting for a co-worker who was riding along with me and while I was putting the cards back into the box I realized that there was printing on only ONE side of the cards. I placed the box back in the desk and while I was waiting, pulled one card out and drew one of my quick Doodleton Guys on the card, holding a jack-o-lantern, and after looking at it for a few seconds realized how much like a greeting card it looked like! Just for fun I wrote at the top; “Happy Halloween!” then I signed the bottom. Ha! It really DID look like a greeting card!

​It was at that moment that it hit me to hand these cards out to my clients, just as a way to say “hi” and for them to remember me by. I do service many clients but I found that if I do just a few everyday I can replenish for the day ahead and only have a few left.

So, at the beginning of the last sales cycle I started taking the blank side of my SERVPRO business cards and putting hand drawn cartoons of the Doodleton guys with a message for the next calendar holiday on them, Halloween. In the middle of all this, we attended my very first Corporate Sales meeting in the Wisconsin Dells. I handed out a couple off them and by the end of the meeting people were coming up to me asking for them! The next week I finished the routes and heard several compliments and “You did this?” and when they found out my background I even managed to see a rise in views on my website. I was pleased.

Within the week I started getting responses from these little cards. I got an email from an CSR asking if it was ok for them to scan the image and send it on to a family friend, I said “sure” and forgot about it. Fast forward to THIS sales cycle. My very first stop the woman behind the desk greeted me by asking me if I was going to have a Christmas Card this time?? I handed her a card that I had just drawn an hour prior and she laughed it and said; “Hey! Now I have a collection!” By the end of the day I had met with several offices that had asked the same thing, several of them had last months card posted up on the wall and taped the new Christmas card right next to it. At one office I made a second stop, after a customer left and found that they had cut out the cartoon that I did in the newsletter and put it with their cards!

​A day later, I received a text message from another office…

There was NO WAY I was goin to turn this down, I made a SPECIAL 2-fold card and delivered it. A few hours, I received this…

These photos are just the beginning. The NEXT DAY I had TWO different offices introduce me to a couple of agents as “Sketch, the guy that draws those cards!” How cool is that?! I have seen the cards taped to computers, stuck to side of cubicle walls, and duplicated many, many times!
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How lucky am I?!?!?

There are many things that I can say that I have accomplished in my short life here on earth.  I have addressed politicians and they have listened to what I had to say, I have spoken to groups of people that have numbered in the thousands, I have stood in Disney World on Christmas Day and felt the energy of thousands of people on one of the best days of our calendar year, and today…I was in Best Buy for Black Friday. I saw  the best and the worst. I saw people literally jump into mountains of products only to have that same pile disappear moments later, I saw people make fun of others as they were forced to crowd together, like cattle, in lines as long as the eye can see and I saw others be defiant standing in the ways of people that were simply just trying to get around them in an isle. At one point in time, I simple grabbed ahold of Shannon’s hand like a vice, placed it in the center of my back and PLOWED through angry people just to get to the other side for Shannon’s own safety…I don’t care WHAT time of year it is, people move when a 6’5”, 300 lbs man comes barreling through. Thank goodness they did, I had no intention of stopping to see what they were screaming at each other for.


I also saw something else. While standing in what seemed to be miles and miles of check out lines, crying children, and complaining customers; I saw Shannon. For a second she looked up at me and smiled. At that moment I realized, that I should be thankful. Thankful that we could afford to go shopping for “non” essentials like electronics, thankful that we were financially stable enough to put this on our credit card that our jobs help us pay for, thankful for my wife, when so many these days find it impossible to stay together. Thankful that we would take our packages out to our paid for vehicle and take them to the home we own and then have a meal of LEFTOVERS from the GIGANTIC meal that Shannon prepared for us, and her family, the day prior. I found in that line, in that crowded store, on the BUSIEST shopping day of the year, surrounded by the ugliness of others self preoccupation, I found thankfulness. I leaned over, kissed her on the top of her head, enjoyed the view of others and we went home. Today, on Black Friday, I got the best gift of all….peace.

The new book is finished and ready to go to print, unfortunately it is not with the printer that I had originally been going through. In an effort to lower the cost of publishing I am shrinking the size of the book to "Manga" size(5"x7.5") and I was going to publish through an online vendor called "Kablaam" who is very popular for printing but it would take some time for turn around. I changed the format of the cartoon and the book in June with intentions of doing it this way. Fortunately for me the situation changed about a month and a half ago. While getting  organized to speak at a local art store in Ellsworth, WI "Brush Strokes" check out their link here, the owner told me that they were getting equipment in to do printing of books! I had to jump at the chance...any time I get to support local business I am going to EVEN IF it changes my publishing schedules. The owner Kayleen, an energetic and positive artist herself, deserves all the support that I can give since she is offering a place for local kids to come and do art work, as well as welcoming the community classes on different art forms, I had no choice, I felt I had to support her because it is the right thing to do.

What does this do to my upcoming show at St Bridgets Craft Fair? Nothing. We will be selling vouchers at the table for the book for reduced rates and a little bonus to be decided. While I believe in supporting St B's and their craft fair I also think this is the proper way to handle this so EVERYONE benefits from this. Thats the best way isn't it?

I can talk. I can talk and talk and talk and talk and talk! You give me a little bit of information about something and I can create a sales pitch around it, package it for a presentation and then deliver it sprinkled with enough humor that the client will want to buy the product AND the presenter, all at the same time! Did I mention I like to talk?

​On the opposite end of the scale one of the drawbacks to being a cartoonist is that I can spend vast amounts of time by myself staring at a drawing board with no human interaction. This can be for hours and sometimes even days. I have been known to loose entire weekends and holidays in the pursuit of a deadline. Currently there are no windows in my current office so even if I did look up I couldn’t tell you what time of day it is anyway!
And there between those two differences lies the problem.
A long time ago I read somewhere that “it is the responsibility of this generation to pass on their knowledge to the next generation” and I one hundred percent agree. Basically, if we didn’t ,how would there be any advancement of anything? More importantly thought I see it as if you don’t pass on knowledge and/or passion how will anyone get it? I realized this about a decade ago when I first started talking to groups about my background and cartooning.
Since then I have spoken to THOUSANDS of students in Studies, Assemblies, Libraries, Schools, and Comic Book events. While I don’t get to every student there are those four or five that, out of the group, really seem to understand what I say to them and have the drive to want to keep going.

   Many years ago when I first got the idea to take my art and publish it on the internet, options were, slim, to say the least. Electronic tablets were not anything close to what they are today (back when I originally had the idea, not even scanners were the norm! My first scanner cost me around $600 and was bigger than my present day computer!) However, there was one thing that I saw, that was clear to me, that was going to affect how I did my work and that was the application named “Adobe Photoshop.” Now when I was in school we were working on version 4.0 of Photoshop and as of the writing of this article my Adobe Photoshop CC is on v.20 and WOW have things changed!  I will assume that most of you know what Photoshop is and how it works but, for those of you that are just hearing about it I will summarize it in a nutshell. Adobe Photoshop is a in-depth computer application that manipulates photos, pixel by pixel. It can do everything from repair old photos, to the other end of the spectrum and create things in photos that aren’t even there(the final project that I had for INTRO to Photoshop was a photo of my long deceased Mother shaking hands with my Father’s 2nd wife on the day of their wedding. I received and A on the project and my father received a heart attack!). All this is to say, for a graphic artist skilled in this application the sky is the limit. I saw this application as an avenue to create work directly on the computer, color it, shade it, package it and then distribute it, all this and never once would you have to use a sheet of paper! Unfortunately, while I was right, I was also a little head of the curve, about twenty years ahead.

​Now fast forward those twenty years and those ideas are the norm. Technology has given the artist the ability to create amazing worlds, do fantastic works of art and has even forced the Federal Government to up there game in the acquisition of counterfeiting criminals. I believe all these things changed because of one computer application, Adobe Photoshop. There are many knock offs of this app and regardless of whether you like the application or despise the corporate side of the company, there is no getting around that Adobe cut the path and continues to set the standard for the industry.

I used Photoshop, religiously. I did everything in this program and I swore by it for cartooning, it could make my work pop off the screen and I could fix anything with just few clicks of a mouse. I impressed non-believers by fixing photo problems while they watched and I didn’t think anything could change my relationship with Photoshop…

…then a company named Smith Micro released "Manga Studio."

Now again, I will not go down the technical aspects of this application but if you are not familiar with this application just know that Smith Micro had taken what I would consider a Photoshop "base" and streamlined it geared directly for comic book artists, Manga Artists more specifically, but comic artist in general hailed this program as the next thing in the progression of comics/comic book creation.

When I was first introduced to this application, it was an one of those “end-cap” applications that sell for $29.99 and were mixed in with other apps like “500 different kinds of Solitaire” and "Mahjong." When I opened it up I saw immediately what they were trying to do with this app and I was impressed.

There was only one immediate problem that I could see from this app. While they had it all set up for the artist…INPUT of said work could just NOT come from a mouse, I was going to need a tablet. I was out shopping one day at a local Office Supply Store and I found a Wacom Intuos for a fairly decent price, a couple hundred dollars, and I bought it. Brought it home, plugged it into my computer and found myself having to look at the screen after years of staring at the paper, it was a little awkward but,  it was exhilarating! 

​That was 2015, I have been using this setup since now and while it has been a somewhat expensive investment, I highly recommend it. I handle multiple assignments, weekly, and this has been the best way that I have found to get through my assignment load. I have done other things to make my workload more manageable also, pre-made templates for layout work, finding certain settings for pen sensitivity and finally, button assignments for repeated work (undo, erase, etc.) are all a matter of personal preferences. There is only one real drawback to this setup and that is that there are no “originals” to be able to hold onto or sell since it is all digital artwork, but I have found that if I just draw the project by hand, scan it in, use the scan as the blue line work, that is a good work around. 

​I am not saying that this is the perfect setup or something everyone has to do, I am just saying this is how I have it set up and it works best for me.

Hope this helps.
…S