Recently I took on the task of filling out a survey for the school that I work for. One of the things that they wanted to know was what art groups and such I might belong to. Shows, publications, and things like that. Stuff they can use to brag about their professors. That makes sense. Plus I’ve noticed that groups like groups and organizations like organizations. The problem is that artists are famously not very good joiners but that’s also because no one wants us to join. Most artists rely on individual effort rather than groups blessing them.
I saw a video on social media a couple years ago in which a woman referred to “Art with no destination.” This is art made with individual effort and there is no end place for the art. Most art is made that way. There is no big show sponsored by some big corporation at the end of the project. There is just the next project to work on. No one applauds you and there is no group to motivate you to do more. You’re on your own and have to put in the effort to get anything done yourself.
I write this all as a praise for individual effort and to brag on some of the stuff I’ve gotten done over the years. No one told me to do any of this stuff, I belong to no group that backs me, not many people ever care to buy anything I make, hardly anyone actually even sees it, but still I go on putting in the individual effort.
Let’s start with this very blog. 2025 is my twentieth year posting a piece of writing once a week. I think it was around year two or three that I decided to make each one about a thousand words. I think I just passed one thousand of these blog posts. That’s a lot. How many people have done that? Probably most of them who have did it on their own.
I started the web comic that goes on this site in January of 2010. That means that it is now my sixteenth year of posting “Four Talking Boxes” five days a week. No one pays me to do it. I do it because I want to make a comic strip. Within a few years of 2010 I added “Message Tee” and “Drifting and Dreaming” on the weekends. That’s a new comic everyday for over a decade. That’s an accomplishment that very few people have ever achieved.
But without a group it’s just, “Jared has been posting a comic a day for ten years.” With a group it would be, “Jared had been making comics for Big Comic Book Company for ten years.” People are more impressed with a Big Comic Book Company involved. People are impressed by work but don’t see anything without money involved as work. Individual effort is not always respected unless it comes with a payday.
I just finished inking “Dreams of Things” #276. That is the 276th cover in my “Covers to Comics That Don’t Exist” series. That’s a big number. I’ve done a lot of these and I will probably be reaching #300 sometime this year. I think that’s an impressive bit of individual effort. I don’t even have a spot where I could possibly display all 276 of these covers. At 11×17 inches each that’s a lot of real estate.
Of course people would be more impressed if I worked for Marvel Comics and drew 276 Spider-Man covers. People know and love Spider-Man because a big corporation has spent a lot of time and money getting them to love Spider-Man. All of my covers are individual pieces that you can love or not on their own. But I only have individual effort. It’s tough to compete with a company that has paid artists to make Spider-Man covers for sixty years. But I still put in the effort.
Another thing I put in the effort with over the last ten years have been my Big Ink Drawings. They are 22×30 inch drawings made with black ink. Each one is individual and each one is a unique picture. I’m not ever sure how many of them I’ve made but it’s over fifty. Once again that’s a lot of real estate. A lot of square feet of art. I think it’s an impressive bit of individual effort.
Back in 2019 I developed my three marker technique for drawing 6×9 inch ink drawings. It was just something new I came up with so that I could create drawings and work on images. I like to create new and unique images. At some point after I had a bunch of them done I dedicated to keep going with them and someday make a deck of cards with the images. I now have 340 of these drawing and can make multiple decks if I want to. That is a lot of individual effort over the years.
There is also the “Great Gatsby” illustrations that I’ve been working on. This is my third year that I’ve been working on it and it’s close to being finished. I’ve made more than a hundred drawings for it and it has been a lot of work. If it was being published by a big book company people would be impressed. That’s something they could wrap their heads around but for me it’s been all about the individual effort. I’ve been doing it because I want to do it.
I’ve been making art with individual effort since the late 1980s. You’d be hard pressed to meet an artist who has made more art than I have. There are plenty of things that I haven’t even mentioned here. I have made about a hundred small 8×10 inch acrylic on canvas paintings. I have about as many larger (various sizes) oil or acrylic on canvas paintings from my decades of painting. I have a couple of thousand small art card sized pieces. I have a lot of gouache and watercolor paintings. I have twenty five sketchbooks (my Inkbooks) on my shelf that are filled with small drawings. I have a lot of pages of comics that I have drawn. I’m still forgetting a lot of stuff.
So there you go. I try to practice the art of humility but sometimes I have to brag about myself. In this world that likes groups I wanted to put in a good word for individual effort.