J. Holt's Newsletter of Illustration & Myth
07.06.24 - Rebooting the System
Folks,
I took this newsletter offline because my drawing life and schedule rapidly changed, and I wanted to rethink the it’s purpose.
I went under contract on a graphic novel outside of my Theseus work, which I’ve been quietly working on for the last 6 months.
Theseus had to be put on hiatus, although I’m very much looking forward to wrapping this project and picking it back up (hopefully by summer’s end)
I started using Youtube a great deal. And I’ve added a lot of videos I personally think is very interesting.
So although I’ll still be including pages that I complete in this newsletter, I’m expanding it to include other projects I’m working on and interesting things of art, illustration, myth and history.
So here we go.
All of my days have been spent on comic pages, and in March I took a packet of blank cards, drew a bunch of gods, monsters and heroes on them, and started working out a card game with my kids at the kitchen table, mostly as a way to blow off steam.
I wanted to work but I was exhausted by panels and figures and narrative and wanted to do something simple. So I started drawing cards. As a result, I somewhat accidentally created an entire card game with 67 original illustrated card designs.
You can read more about this at panomachea.com. But for any of you who are local to the Cleveland, TN area. I’m hosting a tournament to playtest it on Monday, July 8. I’m taking signups here. It has prizes and pizza.
Youtube
Realizing that I was still sleeping 4-6 hours a night and it was making me weak, I began putting time into Youtube videos.
I’ve been very active on there, doing art and media analysis as well as tutorials on illustration. Go watch this one on a story from art history. Getting people to watch videos about art history is like pulling teeth. I put a lot of jokes and time into that one though. I’ve also got this one on the color theory of Aladdin, for the popular media oriented types.
Outro
I’ve been extremely busy for the last eight or nine months creating lots of new things (and increasing the number of my children by 33%), so I won’t overwhelm on this submission. Instead, I’ll leave it here for now and encourage you to look at the card game and the Youtube channel while I work away on this new graphic novel (which I’ll get to say some more about soon). I’ll leave off with a few sketches I’ve knocked out lately, and I’ll put together a new newsletter soon.
