Paris Street; Rainy Day, Gustave Caillebotte, The Art Institute of Chicago

In less than twenty-four hours I am going to board a plane and end up in the city of my childhood. I am returning to the Windy City because it is Spring Break and because I yearn to have ...

image from The Art of Veiling, by yours truly

There have been posts before (I think) about how to go about creating a world, especially when it comes to fantasy settings. You’re supposed, if you want to do it right, to build everything that makes up the world in ...

They say that how hands are drawn is a good indicator of the technical expertise of the artist.
Makes sense!

Hands are definitely the most varied parts of the body, capable of the most diverse configurations. Add in the always-challenging angles and forshortening and you have a very difficult hill ...

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith beheading Holofernes, 1611-12, oil on canvas, (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples)

There are several different ways to read a painting. The perspective of the reader adds a new insight to the history behind the art. For the purpose of this article, I have selected Judith beheading Holofernes ...

So last week we started off talkin' about rules and why we might need em, right? But what exactly do these rules apply to, ya might wonder. Ya might not wonder, actually, but too bad, I'ma tell ya anyway. We'll start where any comic starts: with your basic ...

A character will stay stuck in their ways if they can, just like a real person tends to. It takes effort to move forward and achieve things. And we resist.

In the beginning of a story, a character might feel comfortable where they are, but they are usually incomplete in ...

Welcome back, gang! Er, can I call y'all “gang”? Is that too informal or too assumptive about your willingness for complicity in my extra curricular activities? Eh, too bad. Once you're in the gang, there's only one way out. Now, while you're letting that sink in ...

Huh. You're still here? I'll be damned.

Well then. Let's just go ahead and pick up where we left off last week, which if I recollect, was the beginning. Or at least, that's where you stepped into my world. Now, how you think about beginnings has ...

Deep in the forest lives a pale, white squirrel (that might not be a squirrel at all) and it instills fear in the hearts of the country folk who believe it to be an evil beast. The prince of the kingdom has vowed not to marry a bride until the ...

Every good story (true, fabricated, or more typically, somewhere in between) here in the City That Forgot to Care, begins with a thoughtful pause, a drawn out “Well,” followed by the phrase “what had happened was…”

“Who drank my beer?”
“Dude, what happened to your face?”
“Why are you carrying ...