Word of mouth... well... 'Post.'

Chase
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I have a contract with Professional Surveyor magazine and I draw a strip each month. In addition I have a little online store with calendars, shirts, etc. It is a lot of fun and recently (and with the help of Clint) I have moved to doing the strips in color.

I get my ideas from my experience of marketing to Surveyors over the past three years. A lot of the people I work with at Hayes are surveyors as well, so of course I use them a lot for resources.

Anyways, a competing magazine (P.O.B.) has a very popular message board for surveyors. They can come and post all of their problems, solutions, ideas, or general thoughts on the board. I just finished a full year of doing the site and cartoon before the board noticed my work. A couple of days ago however, someone made a post on the board about my cartoon.

Saturday's post | Monday's post

Within an hour more than 200 visitors flooded my website, Out-of-Plumb.com, which is more visitors than I have seen in over three months. Nobody bought anything, but that is my fault. I have to do a new calendar, Christmas cards, etc. before people will want to buy anything. And on all of the posts the feedback was always positive.

The point that I am not making very well here is this: the outcome to this scenario could have been completely different, seeing how I am not a surveyor, have never surveyed, and have only affiliated with the industry for a couple of years. After so many surveyors witnessed my brand of humor applied to their profession they could have ripped me a new one. They could have said things like, "He obviously has never surveyed a day in his life." But they did not. They found the humor relatable and appreciated and supported the continuation of my work.

Whew!

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Etchings from College

Chase
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I found this in my desk recently, it is an etching I did while I was in college.

This was done on clay board. It works like this: they take a piece of masonite board and paint it white; then cover the masonite in a thin layer of clay and paint that India ink black; then you use these little tools to scrape off the black clay, revealing the white board underneath.

Very cool stuff. It makes you draw in reverse. Normally you draw shadows, with this technique you draw the highlights.

Asher's Album Art

Chase
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For Asher's next album, and it is a long ways away, I already have a vision of the album art. Several months ago I was walking through my Florida room when I stumbled upon the picture below (figure A) tacked to a bulletin board. I had seen this picture several times but for the first time ever I noticed the strange symbol in the picture.

Figure A:


Clinton took this shot (and several others) inside of an abandoned train in our hometown. So I looked through the other shots, and I seen it in there as well. From what I can determine, it is not a logo, but rather decoration for the train. And the train itself was probably 50-60 years old... at least.

It was a very strange feeling when I seen the symbol, I instantly seen the cover of the next album in my head. I jumped on the computer and whipped this up in about 20 minutes.

Figure B:


Now this looks like a photo, however it is all digital. I created this from scratch, armed only with the photo in figure A. If you were to buy the cd in the store this is what the front of the jewel case would look like.

I like the mystery and intrigue I feel when I look at this image. I like the simplicity and the texture. I came up with a title of the album to go with the icon: "Up and Away."

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