Thursday, August 13, 2009

Waaaaaaaay Advance Notice

Just a note that I've signed up to be a "Cartoonist in Residence" at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., on January 9, 2010.

Every second Saturday of the month, the museum has a writer/artist set up shop in a little classroom upstairs so that anyone who wants to can drop by and poke a real live cartoonist with a pointy stick. As a member of the museum since it opened, I've visited some Cartoonists in Residence myself (Jimmy Gownley, Shannon Garrity, a few others) and found the events to be agreeably low-key, with small numbers of people wandering in and out while the cartoonist pretends to work. You talk to nice people, show off some original art, draw some sketches, maybe sell a couple of books. It's cool to be asked and it should be fun.

Mark your calendar! I know I will--sometime in late December when I buy a new one. (Will a Post-It note stick to the side of my monitor for five months? Let's find out!)
.

6 comments:

ronnie said...

This is really cool!

Now if I could only move California about 3000 kms closer to here...

Brian Fies said...

But wouldn't that put it somewhere around Minnesota?

I do miss snowy winters . . .

Mike said...

It is a wise cat who would rather move California than move TO California. Or at least a cat who wants to live with health care and some kind of rational budget ...

Mike Lynch said...

Last week, I was in Bunny Hoest's kitchen, having a conversation with Bunny (of THE LOCKHORNS newspaper comic panel) and Juana Medina (soon-to-be RISD graduate who won last year's Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship). We started telling Bunny about your blog; in general about how good the nuts & bolts behind-the-scenes information about drawing a graphic novel is -- and -- specifically -- the entry where you learned "painfully" about the difference between printing a photographic image and line art(from January 1, 2009). If your ears were burning a couple weeks ago, this was why: three cartoonists, of different generations, were all gabbing about Mr. Fies' Files!

Your kind of honest, insider information is of tremendous value and it resonates. The Schulz Museum is lucky to get you, my friend!

Brian Fies said...

I thought I felt a little chill run down my spine. You've got me blushing, Mike. Thanks.

Karen van Hoek said...

Thanks for the advance warning. If I'm still in the area, I'll come by, maybe ask for an autograph on Mom's Cancer. I normally live in Boston, but I'm out in Northern California for an indefinite period, helping 2 family members fight cancer. I guess you don't have to be psychic to figure out why I picked up your book, but it's interesting what happened next -- the clever ways you used the resources of the visual medium to convey concepts got me thinking about whether I could use cartoons to augment my explanations in a book (not on cancer, on another topic)I'm working on. Long story short, I'm learning simple cartooning and finding that thinking about things visually is helping me tremendously in getting my ideas down. Whether I'll get good enough to include my own drawings in a published version is a whole 'nother question, but reading Mom's Cancer has been a real gift to my own creative process.