Cropped and Colored
this feels like a “cheat” to post here on the site, as anyone who has clicked through the 2016 Inktober doodles may recall this being one of the “better” attempts that year. However, there are a lot of folks over on Instagram who never got the chance to see any of these, since I wasn’t on there then. (if you’re interested in that platform, here’s a handy link for my page. @levi.krause
Hopefully, anyone who’s been actively viewing this site over the years will at least like the fancy colors. I’m liking how the colors turned out on this. Good practice for me, and since I have so much work that’s black and white, I have near-endless choices of things to use as my own personal “coloring book”. I’ll try not to rely on that too much for posts.
I’m not in a “rut”. I refuse to call it that… It’s SO MUCH more “existential” than all that… How much of this should I even write here??
I’m always at odds with sharing anything TOO personal on the internet. It’s sort of an interesting topic. The old school Cartooning Masters (and Celebrities in general) always remained such a mystery in their “public” relations. In interviews, they’d have a handful of clever stories or anecdotes that they’d tell, but never very much about their families, or personal struggles. (An example would be someone like Sergio Aragones. Before he did the autobiographical stories he wrote and drew for Bongo Comic’s Sergio Aragones Funnies, we never knew very much about his personal life.) The world has changed along the way. I personally can’t say who got it all started, but we started to see people like Robert Crumb (and SO MANY OTHERS) tell increasingly more and more personal stories. People became more and more interested in Biographies of their favorite Celebrities, and Content Creators. Over the years these personal accounts became their own genre of comics. The Internet has taken all of this and completely changed how we think of (and view) the “celebrities” we admire. It’s so much more personal now. I know more about certain Cartoonists (and to my shame, Celebrities) that I admire than I do several of my own family members. I can’t say if this is “better” or “worse” than it was before. Who can really say? “The world has moved on…” as they so often say in the Dark Tower books… (Yes, I still won’t shut up about those books. Ha ha)
So that’s why I’m conflicted. I’d love to be as “classy” as that older, seemingly more refined age, but I know that I don’t live in that world. Difficult sometimes to know how to even try and appear relatable. Sometimes it’s difficult to express all the madness in my head in the style of art I’m so well-versed in. I constantly search for ways to show some of the emotion? and I struggle to show exactly what’s going on in my brain, so you get giant dumps of nonsense like I’ve written here.
If it wasn’t TLDR, that is. I dunno. NEXT!
