Happy New Year

I knew it had been a minute since I posted, but this is my first post for 2025. Eep!

So let’s get the pimping and the shilling out of the way:

Enough of my sports portraits have piled up, where I need to get them out of the house and out of the internet, and into the real world. I did my first sports card show as a vendor a couple of months ago in a couple of decades, and I had three of the portraits available as prints. It was a small show, and people seemed very interested, and I sold a few. So now, I’m doing the opposite of a small show this weekend (thankfully in Portland, so I don’t have to worry about travelling show expenses. Here’s the flyer for the show…

So I’ll have an expanded selection of prints available, and since I need to send those to the printer to get them back for the show, I’ll be spending the week leading up to the show doing athlete sketch cards. LeBron James up there is the first one I’ve finished. Most of them will be black and white pen and ink sketches, but I’m hoping to get three more color ones done in time for the show. If you’re interested in something like this of your very own favorite sports star, feel free to message me. This is the only commission work I’ll be doing in the immediate future

Okay, pimping and shilling over

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So where does the time go? It’s a fair question. I can’t even remember if I mentioned what my day job is before - I run a tax prep business. My mom ran it for nearly 30 years, I learned directly from her, and now that she’s gone, that’s what I do. So it should just be expected that January through April, my time is going to be at an absolute premium. I do what I can to squeeze in art and other things, but there comes a time where you just have to stare down the tsunami of work and paddle your ass off. This year, for a million reasons, I wasn’t making much art, and you can confirm that across all my socials.

When my mom passed, one of her friends who had office experience was helping me out. At the end of last year, her health took a drastic turn for the worse, and this tax season was the first time I’ve had to do a tax season absolutely alone. In May, she passed away. It’s been a heck of a decade, these last six months.

I understand the basic ebb and flow of what the work year looks like. Tax season is pure hell, but profitable so I work as hard as I can and then once April is over, May is complete decompression. Part of the flow is that you have a very, very high-pressure job where your phone almost never stops ringing, and you’re juggling a million things and also trying to calm down people whose returns didn’t go the way they were expecting. And in a year like this, the government chaos definitely complicated matters. Once that’s over (and for me, I have some business payroll work that extends things through the end of April after the tax deadline), it’s almost as if you don’t exist anymore. I worked 30 days in a row without a single day off to end tax season this year. It’s really intense, and exhausting.

But when that peak season ends, for me that’s May, all the exhaustion, all the pressure, all of the stress hits all at once. Very frequently I get sick immediately. But it’s like I’m worn down to the nub, everything hurts, I’m desperately trying not to slip into burnout. And all the adrenaline that gets me through the deadline just dissipates, which leaves me feeling hollow and empty. That can last for up to two months.

So now, here we are, smack dab in the middle of July. I finally feel okay, if not great, and the back half of the year is a lot more open for other projects, for things I want to do but can’t during the peak busyness. Now we double back to the card shows.

I joke that I’ve spent my whole life behind a folding table, and it’s not far from the truth. I’ve been doing comic cons since I was 17, but I started doing card shows before that when I was maybe 13. I started off getting a booth at the local flea market, and moved up to doing more proper card shows before long. I’m halfway through my fourth decade of this bullshit!

I enjoy card shows a lot - there’s a lot less stress selling cards than selling your own comics. My plan is to just split my table at card shows, half for prints of the athletes and the sketch cards, and the other half is for cards. It’s been a nostalgic trip going through my card collection. I spent years collecting autographs at games, and I never planned to get rid of any of them. But it’s time to cherry pick what I want to keep, and try to find new homes for the rest. And I have a ton of them. I think I’m going to be doing card shows for the foreseeable future. Some comic shows as well, but I’m not convinced that comic cons can be useful for indie artists anymore. It’s fine when a show can brag about 5 figure attendance, but the truth is 80% of the attendees are walking through the door already tapped out. When tickets and maybe a night’s hotel for an out-of-town show and a couple of autographs/pictures from big celebs can push you close to $1k before setting foot on the con floor… well, what’s left for the hundreds of artists you’ve sold tables to? Tons of attendees walking out of the show empty-handed except for promotional posters is not a sign of a healthy show.

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I find myself promising to show up more regularly seemingly every year or so. I intend to, now, again. It may just be part of my regular ebb and flow where I’m consistent for about six months, and the other six is when I’ll do what I can, no promises. At some point you have to acknowledge yourself, and stop trying to pretend an idealized version is real. I have to stand here, and not apologize for what I couldn’t do, and hope that what I can do is enough.

c.