The Art of First Person Plural

For the past three years, much of my professional illustration work has been for the podcast First Person Plural: Emotional Intelligence and Beyond (on which I’m also an associate producer), a podcast on emotional intelligence hosted by Dr. Daniel Goleman, Hanuman Goleman, and Elizabeth Solomon.

Below are some of my favorite cover illustrations for the various (40-ish) episodes.

These illustrations were all created as vectors using the software Affinity Designer. Over time, I started adding more raster elements to them—noise and textures to break up the clean blocks of color. The first two images below sort of represent the effect I’m going for.

About a year ago, I was featured in Affinity Spotlight on my technique.

From How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict

A mix of vector and raster elements created in Affinity Designer from the episode George Kohlrieser: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict

For Stress and the Brain

A mix of vector and raster elements created in Affinity Designer from the episode: Richard Davidson: Stress and the Brain.

From The Pandemic’s Effect on Children

A mix of vector and raster elements created in Affinity Designer from the episode: Claire Caine Miller: The Pandemic’s Effect on Children.

From The Decentralized Self

A mix of vector and raster elements created in Affinity Designer from the episode Akhila Kolesar: The Decentralized Self.

From Workplace for All

Vector illustration created in Affinity Designer from the episode Workplace 4All: The Great Place to Work Institute.

From Dancing with Capitalism

Vector illustration created in Affinity Designer from the episode Dancing with Capitalism Part 3.

From Navigating Bias in Corporate America

Vector illustration created in Affinity Designer from the episode Navigating Bias in Corporate America.

From Chasing the Happiness High: Part 1

Vector illustration created in Affinity Designer from the episode Chasing the Happiness High: Part 1.

From Self-Awareness: An Honest Look in the Mirror

Vector illustration created in Affinity Designer from the episode Self-Awareness: An Honest Look in the Mirror.

From Beauty in Diversity

A mix of vector and raster elements created in Affinity Designer from the episode: Beauty in Diversity with Modupe Akinola.

Teaching Baby Paranoia: Honey, Honey

New Year’s Eve, 1999. The world is teetering on the brink of collapse. At least, that’s how I remember it. Something about Y2K. That night, perhaps tipsy on Belgian beer, and champagne chugged hastily from a paper cup (I was 26, and so, so classy), I made a New Year’s Resolution that I ended up keeping for exactly 10 years: to make a weekly webcomic.

From January 2000, until January 2010, I made 519 episodes of my comic Teaching Baby Paranoia (the title came from a single panel comic I did in college; something about parenting technology teaching children to fear that little blinking light next to their bed). It started as all comics created by 26 year old white guys do: autobiography. Eventually, as I discovered that I’m really not that interesting, it mutated into weird fiction. With footnotes. (The footnotes thing came from an old issue of The Red Herring, a humor magazine at McGill University that I was an editor of, in the ’90s. There was one issue where every joke and reference was meticulously annotated, which I thought was funny as hell. I added footnotes to Teaching Baby Paranoia as sort of a meta-humor commentary about authorial credibility. I don’t know… again, I was in my 20s.)

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to make a new episode (strip?). Honestly, I’ve been wrestling with the comic’s legacy a bit. I basically made a comic about lying with a straight face, which after the apocalyptic presidency of 2017-2021 feels weird.

Anyway, here you go. No footnotes this time. Maybe I’ve outgrown them, or something.

Oh, The Beating Drum!

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Here’s an excerpt from Oh, The Beating Drum! number 8. This one features lizardmen, funny hats, rain, houses on stilts, people complaining about things, anachronisms, and a reference to a classics professor I had in 1993. As always, the entirety can be read in the magazine of swords and sorcery Worlds Without Master.

Continue reading “Oh, The Beating Drum!”

Oh, The Beating Drum!

Every once in a long while comes a comic so profound, it changes all the rules.

This is probably that comic. Though, as the author, I might not be an objective opinion on this matter. Actually, this is the first page of that comic. There are two pages in total. You should probably subscribe to the magazine to see the other page. And the fourteen other pages I’ve made for this series, so far.

Continue reading “Oh, The Beating Drum!”

Oh, The Beating Drum! Episode 2

A second issue of Worlds Without Master has been published, which means that a second episode of Oh, The Beating Drum! has been published! It’s like serendipity, except planned.

Here’s are the first two pages (of three), featuring Unnamed Swordswoman #1 and Unnamed Sorceress #1.

Continue reading “Oh, The Beating Drum! Episode 2”