I am very excited to share that I am creating a webcomic called Any Here Now (NEHN)! You can learn more about the comic itself on the dedicated page: https://nathanparkinson.com/any-here-now/.

Here I want to elaborate a bit on why I’m making this. For the last year I have been working to improve the quality of my illustration through Tim McBurnie’s Line and Color Academy (LCA). Stages 1 and 2 helped me establish a consistent drawing practice and a simple, reliable process for making art. If you’ve been following along for the last year, you have seen the results of my efforts. In stage 3 I am currently focusing on making and measuring progress. The specific area of progress I have been focusing on is intentionally incorporating abstraction into my work. So far in LCA I have mostly restricted myself to single one-off images to avoid getting too involved with story. I’ve been happy with the results, but my illustrations have generally been detached from one another, except being related in subject matter or theme. Recently I have been trying to weave some story to connect my illustrations while still keeping them separate.

I’ve heard Tim say many times that creating comics is a tremendous way to improve one’s skills by increasing drawing mileage. I also fell in love with the idea of comics when I read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics a couple years ago. I never read comics growing up, and it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve had any considerable exposure to them at all. Therefore it’s no surprise that I had never made a comic, even though I had dabbled with the idea a few years ago and even roughly pencilled several pages before concluding it was more work than I was looking for at the time (besides, I couldn’t stand those ugly speech bubbles mucking up my pretty art!).

Recently Tim suggested I give comics a try as a way to reduce the amount of new visual library / subject matter I needed to learn with each image. I started with a 1-page comic. Next I did a 3-page comic. Writing those stories broke a dam of ideas in my mind which has been flooding ever since. I recently learned of the work of artist Minna Sundberg; I was blown away by her comics and was very inspired by her artistic journey. I also remembered the Team Fortress comics I was introduced to a few years ago; I love the way they make their comics into a sort of animatic – it’s so engaging! – so I decided to try building my own webcomic viewer to recreate that experience for my own comics; I built the viewer with the assistance of Perchance’s AI helper and am super happy with the result (you’re welcome to use it however you wish or even fork your own version): https://nathanparkinson.com/webview.

While I generally love drawing and making pictures for the sake of it, I find it so much more rewarding to incorporate my art into a story and for it to serve a purpose, not just to look pretty. So, as a way for me to draw more, develop my ability to use abstraction, tell a story with my art, and create something that might possibly matter to more people than just me, I plan to create a practice webcomic (in place of my one-off illustrations) for the foreseeable future.

Without further ado…