Anonymous asked: Oh dear sweet Jesus, do you have plans on doing any dolls for the HBO series The Wire? You would make my YEAR.

1.  You can call me Kyle.

2.  As a matter of fact, I am working on a few Wire dolls right now (Omar, McNulty, Bunk at the moment).  I’m only on season 2 as far as watching the show goes, so it may be a while before I post any, as I don’t want to leave anything huge out.  But it’s already become my favorite show, so yes, definitely.

I feel like Bill Murray is the type of person that would be sick of hearing how much people love Bill Murray.  

I find myself getting super bummed out by keeping up with things online.  A friend of mine was telling me a while back how checking Facebook really brought his self esteem down.  He said all he could manage to do was compare his life to all these people he kind of sort, really didn’t exactly know.  I didn’t understand it at first, but I’m starting to.  I quit Facebook a month ago and have really felt more whole as a result.  I feel a little smaller, a little more at peace somehow.  Daily life feels more like how it’s always supposed to.  I talk to the people I see and I better understand my place in the world.  And the more I think about it, the more I get what my friend means, not so much in regards to keeping up with others’ lives, but keeping up with others’ work.  Blogging and following blogs is a source of unnecessary self-deprecation from time to time.  I tend to follow a lot of people that inspire me when it comes to comics or illustration.  I log on, see a bunch of new work, and I’ll get inspired by some cool use of line or color.  It used to be great getting a daily dose of much-needed inspiration, but after a while it’s turned into this daily dose of pressure, pressure that I’ve unnecessarily made for myself.  There’s a few things I know I want to do with my illustration or “work” or whatever it’s called, and when I’m not keeping up with other illustrators or thinking about someone else’s work, I feel like I’m headed in the right direction, the direction to get those things accomplished.  But it’s when I stop and look to my left, or look to my right and take in the paths of others that I start making lists of all the things I’m not doing.  Why am I not making more zines? Should I be drawing more girls holding deer skulls? These aren’t things I care about, necessarily, but I feel like I should be doing them because others are.  It’s lame.

One of my favorite people, period, is Andrew Bird.  He’s one of the few musicians that I feel an instant kinship with when listening to, and more so than just his music.  In an interview I heard him give once, he spoke about the importance for him to get away from all inspiration or influence when he starts work on a new album.  He goes to a barn that he owns outside of Chicago, and spends his days in solitude, writing, recording, and creating.  It’s smart, and his work is better than most for it.  You listen to it and you just get the sense that he’s doing exactly what he wants to do, and nothing else, because though it sounds amazing, it doesn’t sound like anything that’s really all that popular.  It’s just… him.  It’s a two-fold thing, I think, to keep yourself from outside influence from time to time.  One, in the case of music or art or writing, you run less of a risk subconsciously plagiarizing another’s work.  So that’s good.  But, also, more importantly, you end up making something that just comes purely from within.  Sure, there are influences that are intrinsic to what you do, the things that got you into what you do in the first place, but the fleeting influences of a song you heard in the car, or an illustration you saw in a magazine, or a plot from a movie a friend told you about, those things get caught in the sifter.  And what you’re left with is the only kind of pressure you need.  The pressure to do what it is you wanted to do the whole time, and to do it well.   

I don’t necessarily have the resources to spend a few months in a barn.  But I can still find that same solitude from influences.  Spending less time online, less time keeping up with people I don’t know, less time keeping up with the work of illustrators or artists who are working on paintings or webcomics or zines, or really just anything that I’m not doing, frees me up to stop criticizing myself and reminds me of the things I am doing.  And I can sleep at night not worrying about made up things.