Comics process: The Workspace

Hello Patrons! 

Today I'd like to show you the inside of False Knees Corp. 

False Knees started on a small dinner table in 2011, then a few years ago Josh was crammed into a dark, tiny corner in the attic of our apartment (where he started going full time - I should do a post about the False Knees history one of these days...). But now, he's lucky to have an entire room in our house dedicated to making comics! Many artists start off in really small spaces, but with time and developing a practice, getting your own studio can become a reality :)

The words "artist's studio" sounds very glamorous. What does it really look like, in practice? Let's take a look:

I would give this a solid 7/10 on the glamorous scale. We've got the tools you'd expect: coffee, an iMac, a Wacom tablet for digital editing, the drawing table next to the desk. The ergonomic chair became an absolute necessity when he went full-time. But we've also got important reminders next to the desk, which if you can't see, read: "JUST DRAW" and "SHIT TO DO BOARD". It's actually quite hard to find motivation / get over the blank page sometimes when you're working from home; and there's a lot more to making False Knees than drawing comics, so these are definitely getting used! He's also slowly building a mural of prints he likes. 

As you can see (or not because of the contrast), in front of the drawing table is a bird feeder! This man is all about them birds. The shelf on the right is where he keeps all his printing paper for selling prints, and the scanner used to scan the originals once they're ready to be edited digitally. This thing has been scanning comics since the beginning! 

Let's zoom in a little on the drawing area:

As you can see, cats are an important part of the drawing process. For some reason they really seem to like sleeping on the bag of tissue paper used to pack posters. 

Finally, to the left of the desk, is another shelf with all the supplies needed for printing and shipping his comics, which is his main source of income:

These orders will be walked to Canada Post tomorrow morning. Josh has two printers because they are often temperamental; it's useful to be able to keep printing while one is out of service and he's figuring out what's wrong with it. And the rest of the time, that means he can print orders twice as fast and have more time for drawing. He was able to buy his first one thanks to the support on Patreon! He's got the shipping supplies and the ink for the printers in the shelf, as well as the paper he uses to draw the original comics on. Finally we have "the archives" where all the comics that have been drawn are kept. He says he's got a system of classification based on seasons... that was organized chronologically until I went through it for the post about the dialogue process. Haha, oops. 

In the window is a makeshift attempt to get privacy from strangers staring right at him as they're walking by the house. 😅The studio is on the ground floor and very close to the sidewalk, so it was a real distraction (and a little creepy) for a while. 

As you can see we have the pile of T shirts in the corner! Yours have been already put aside, thank you so much for your enthusiasm, we're so happy you like them so much! I'll be in touch once Josh figures out shipping :)

And that's it! I hope that shed some light into what the working environment of a full-time comic artist can look like. He did tidy up before I took the photos, though. Usually it has a lot more packing peanuts and bits of eraser on the floor.

We are going to take a couple of weeks off starting next week, so I probably won't post anything over the next two weeks. But Joshua will be sketching while we're away in the Canadian wilderness, so you can expect sketchbook drawings when we're back :)