Last night I got to take a bunch of people to an advance screening of Nowhere Boy, the movie about John Lennon’s teenage years and the origin of The Beatles.

Here is the video of the excursion:

My friends at Maple Pictures sent me ten double passes to the screening:

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And a 45RPM record featuring two songs from the movie – Autographed by Aaron Johnson (who plays John Lennon and played Kick-Ass) and Sam-Taylor Wood (who directed the movie)!!

You know me, I am a huge Beatles fan.

So much so that the other night, I started a new blog.

Check out my new Beatles blog at beatles-covers.tumblr.com

Yesterday, I went over to visit my friend and colleague Mister Michael J. Nus who prepared a hell of a feast for the pair of us.

Yeah, I vlogged that.

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SEE YOU NEXT TIME!!

iJustine laid down the challenge, and I have answered the call.

Here is the image from my submitted assignment above…

With my compliments, enjoy my recent posts to the online periodical Bite Daily.

http://bite.ca/bitedaily

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Top Five Iron Men

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Top Ten TV Moms

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Too Cool For Social Media

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Last weekend’s Saturday Night Live Recap

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Real Life Vigilantes

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How to Spot a Chick Flick by Its Poster

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Is Hollywood Racist?

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Those are just a few choice selections.
See the full collection at
my Bite Daily profile.

This is an e-mail I got over the weekend, seeking advice.  I asked Steve, the writer, if I could respond in a blog post since his question is of a kind that I get asked much more than any other:

Hey Sean, I need some words of wisdom from you on how I can get my own art career going and on track. I am working in an office right now – Fraud detection analyst for a Mastercard issuing bank.

In short, I have lost my sense of humor, and each day seems to lack a sense of purpose.

I have been watching as you’ve grown and progressed, and realized that we both have the same 24 hours in a day to work with.

I need some words of wisdom from you in this regard. I used to have a wicked sense of humour. I want it back.  I want to reclaim it.

-Steve

Hi Steve!

Thanks very much for writing.  I am flattered that you would come to me with a question like this.  I thought all weekend about your question and I thought of a catchy way to explain how to find what you’re looking for.

It’s all about The 3V System: Values, Vision, and Vehicle.

Values

First, you have to know what you stand for. You have to know what’s important to you, who you want to be, what you want for yourself.  Be opinionated, keep high standards, and surround yourself with people who inspire you instead of people stuck in the same rut as everyone else.  You don’t want comfort in forgetting your cares, you want to be uncomfortable enough to take action.

Vision

Your vision is the effect you want to have on the world.  It doesn’t have to be earth-shatteringly huge.  It could be as simple as a word of advice for the people around you.  Care passionately about what’s important to you and you’ll start spotting places where there is a bit of class, taste, or beauty missing that only you can fill in.  That’s what art is for.

Vehicle

Your vehicle is the form in which your vision expresses itself, and the arena in which you explore your values.  You need a vehicle because otherwise the ideas inside you collect dust and eventually disintegrate.  Whatever you feel is the best expression of your talents and your vision whether writing, drawing, speaking, or any other outlet, you need a project to get passionate about.  This will give you something to look forward to while you’re doing the things you’d rather not, and it will provide the means and opportunity to get to know yourself better so that you’re more of the real you in all areas of life.

The hardest part is making the time for your vehicle.  There are a million and one perfectly good excuses for why you have no time for it.  You get home from work, unwind, prepare dinner, check in with the world, relax a little bit, go to the gym if you’re on your fitness game, and next thing you know it’s time for bed again.  That’s the routine.  That’s also how the Universe finds out who is serious and who is just phoning it in.  Most people want everything to be in place, but I’ve always been a big fan of just jumping in and seeing what happens.  Besides, at this stage what have you got to lose except for some of your sleeping hours?

I started seeing the microscopic, incremental day-to-day changes that the workaday world was having on me and that’s why I stopped showing up to work to be an Artist with no plan, no money, and no idea how I was going to pay the rent.  My way is hard and sometimes it’s not very fun, I’m not going to lie.  But for me it’s about what’s going to make for the most interesting story to tell at the end of it all.

I hope his helps.  Keep me updated on how it goes!

-Sean

All of the Top Five most popular posts on the Bite Daily blog (at least when I took this screen shot yesterday) were by me!  That’s very exciting, and to all of the people who have been clicking the links when I put them out on Twitter and Facebook – Thank you for reading!  I’ll do my best to come with the realness all the time!

Check out the Bite Daily comedy blog for funny articles, funny pics & vids, and various other assorted baloney.

In this week’s Monday Meditation, I am going to share with you a hard lesson that I learned about content creation. I try not to write from the point of view of “don’t do what I did”, and only be proactive, but an innocent tweet got me thinking about the importance of creating content.

NEVER STOP PUMPING OUT CONTENT

Here is a tweet sent out last Friday by one of my favorite Twitter peeps, Scott Stratten of un-marketing.com - @unmarketing on Twitter:

“Community, sponsor, content. Content builds community, sponsors want ur community”

Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It, also stresses the importance of content creation as the foundation of building community online.

When I first started my career as an artist, I instinctively knew that content is king. With no education and no money, I knew that I would have the edge if I was more prolific than the other guy. I pumped out photocopied comic books like crazy, and quickly developed a style, an audience, and a modest business.

DON’T REST ON YOUR LAURELS

But then my first taste of real success came. I signed a development deal with a production company for a TV show, entered into a publication agreement with a comic book publisher, and went to work for a late night TV show helping them launch a spin-off comic book and rebranding the show for the web.

Surprisingly, all of these deals brought my content creation and being prolific to a halt, costing me time and ruining my momentum.

The comic book publisher delayed and delayed and delayed and then went out of business before anything by me got published. The network wanted to see another edition of my underground cinema event, but the production company spent a year writing Word documents. Working on the late night TV show, a lethargic and complacent corporate culture meant that I only got to do about a quarter of what I was hired to do.

For the two years that all of this was going on, I wasn’t sharing my vision, nor creating content around my passion. I was caught up in other people’s schedules, other people’s priorities, and other people’s goals, instead of continuing to do what attracted those opportunities to me in the first place. I was sacrificing my momentum and the community I had built, putting my success in other people’s hands. I treated my business like the game was over and I had won.

I learned the hard way that it never gets easy.

In fact, the demands on your creativity and problem-solving increase with the scope of your challenges.

This is why it’s so important to create content around what you’re passionate about – you need that high level of passion to get you through when it gets really tough. Lucky for me that I’m so stubborn and single-minded about being an artist.

Welcome to INSIDE THE ARTIST’S MIND – real talk for creative people. This week I’m going to address the Artist and money, and the new forms of currency that creative people are investing in.

I’ve been thinking lately about money, and the artist’s relationship with it. I get to remembering where Dave Sim explains that when you’re an artist, the time you spend on your art is an investment and you have to treat it like other people treat their mortgages and RSPs.

That was before the Internet, and his point rings even truer today. What Dave Sim was talking about was building a body of work that will pay off for you down the road. But now, in the age of Social Media, the investment you make in yourself, your brand, and your creative vision can pay off even more directly.

Social Media is a currency, and I’m surrounded by people who are cashing in. The Internet is how you stake your claim, mark your territory, build your brand, and express your vision. The Internet will let you know in a minute if your work is connecting with people. And the more you connect with people, the more say you have. That translates into influence and opportunities.

How have you implemented tools like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr, etc. into your work? Are they central to the work or just a vehicle for getting the word out? Let me know how important social media is to your work in the comments!

And connect with me:

Twitter: seanward
Youtube: seanward
Facebook: seanwardsuperparty

Today is Friday, and that means that there is a new SUPER PARTY for you to read!  In today’s Super Party adventure, Benny Bunny and The Queen are out skateboarding when they are recognized by a couple of kids, but it’s mistaken identity.

Click here to read today’s all-new edition of SUPER PARTY!

On a personal level, I really hope that you enjoy this one because I’m happiest with my drawings of The Queen than I have been in a long time.  She really is the star of the show, but you wouldn’t know it from how infrequently she appears.  I’ve laid a big nugget of her backstory in this edition so down the road, when the full story reveals itself, you can be all like “yeah, I caught that!”

While making this Super Party, I shot all kinds of material for a behind the scenes video that I will put together for next week.  I got enough comments on that little glimpse of drawing Pants on the Ground from my video earlier this week that I’m really excited to give you a huge look at how I draw comics.  Watch for that next week!  Click on NEWSLETTER up in the menu to sign up for the Sean Ward ‘What’s the Word?’ Newsletter and be the first to find out about that when it goes live.

Additionally, you can subscribe to my Youtube channel, subscribe to this blog, and follow me on Twitter to get the good word however you like it best.

Enjoy the new Super Party, and be sure to let me know what you think in the comments over there!

Thank you all so much for continuing to enjoy my art!

This is something new that people can say: I live on the internet. For most people, the internet is still a tool. But for some of us, the internet is a place and it’s where more and more of us are choosing to spend our time. Every so often it becomes an issue with someone, whether they think I spend too much time online or just think it’s funny that I”m as active as I am. Those people enjoy the blog posts, see the comics, and interact on Facebook, but they don’t understand what it takes to keep up that level of activity in so many areas.

During any given day, I am likely to be working on a drawing in my lap with my computer open in front of me. I’ve got several browser windows open, with my attention split in a bunch of directions: Facebook, my website admin panels, My iGoogle homepage (to keep tabs on my email, RSS subscriptions, and calendar) and Tweetdeck with a constant eye on what’s going on via the pop-up notifications of tweets from those on my “Don’t Wanna Miss” list.

And the funny thing is, I don’t feel like I’m a slave to my computer or to the internet any more than someone is a slave to their shoes by wearing them to walk down the street. It’s just how I do things. I turn my Gmail Notifier off frequently so that I can concentrate on one thing, and I have no problem blocking everything out when I’m writing a blog post, working on Super Party, or writing an important letter. I take frequent breaks (maybe not frequent enough. I’ll give you that!) to get up and eat or stretch.

The the world is changing, and the very nature of how we interact has been altered forever.  Personally, I couldn’t be more excited to be here to take part in it.

How entrenched is the Internet in your life?  How big a part of your day is it?  Let me know in the comments!