Instructive places and people

Here are a few links I’ve found very useful in my pursuit of making comics and illustration in general, listed in whatever crazy order I thought of them at the time and constantly being updated:

Escape From Illustration Island - the podcasts and interviews here from Thomas James are amazingly informative. Apparently concluded as an active site, but still a good repository.

Chris Oatley’s website - His artcast podcasts have been really inspirational, and instructive in the arcane ways of digital painting.

Paperwings Podcast - Reviving the long-lost art of apprenticeship in the world of visual storytelling, and hosted by Chris Oatley and Lora Innes. They’ve lately focused on comics a bit more, which is awesome.

Lean Into Art - A great resource for making comics, they also have numerous podcasts and downloadable workshops at a great price, and some are free. Really affable guys, too: Jerzy Drozd and Rob Stenzinger. I’ll try to list the (many) podcasts they do here eventually.

Man Vs. Art - A cool podcast about all things Art: comics, animation, museum exhibition, Illustration, poetry…Raul Aguirre Jr. covers it all. (Also, if you’re into learning more about do-it-yourself animation, check out Jim Lujan’s Ghettomation site; which I found through Man Vs. Art.)

Paul Caggegi hosts a great site where he reveals his process creating for his webcomic Pandeia, as well as many other cool things. He’s also got a lot of tutorial info for 3D software Blender, and is an advocate of Open Source software, which even further democratizes the process of making these things-an idea that I am totally behind. His process diary was an inspiration in the making of my own, here at Atomic MiniComics, too!

Kevin Cross and Mark Rudolph, alumni of the late, great Art&Story podcast (which is completed but still a great resource for..well, Art and Story). The aforementioned Jerzy Drozd was also involved with that one, which reinforces my suspicion that all the podcasts on the internet involving comic books involve him with the help of various voice and appearance altering technology. (He loves comics that much) Kevin and Mark now host the Illustration Underground Podcast, spotlighting what it’s really like being working professional illustrators today. And between them, they have Punk and Metal covered too.