Note: Before we start let me tell one and all I am retired and no longer taking on new work for love or money. Making me officially a has-been, assuming I ever was a whatever the present tense of has-been is.
Jump to the entry by clicking the bulleted point
This site is intended to amuse and inform and generally fill in the empty days now that I’m retired. The success of the first two is for the reader to decide. I’m amused, at any rate. Which is why I do it. It’s a hobby. There certainly isn’t any money, fame or glory in it. Still, if you enjoy perusing terrycolon.com only half as much as I enjoy making it, then I enjoy it twice as much as you.
This is an old-school website with updates scheduled for whenever I get around to it. There is no search function. I figure if you can’t find it through the navigation bits at the left or just surfing through the Daily Dump it probably isn’t worth finding. There is no comments section and you can’t link to individual Daily Dump entries. The reader cannot rate, give a thumbs-up or the finger to anything. There is no feed or subscriptions and you cannot follow me anywhere but right here.
On the plus side, there are no annoying pop-up ads on the site. Or ads of any kind, annoying or otherwise. Which well explains why there’s no money in it.
This is mostly a one-man operation with occasional help from my brother Craig who knows coding better than I do. The I referred to is Terry Colon, illustrator, sometime cartoonist, sometime humorist whose work has appeared in books, magazines, newspapers, and on the web. Some of my many cartoons and humor articles have appeared in the likes of Cracked magazine, Reader’s Digest, and perhaps most famously Suck.com. My magazine, book, and other illustration credits are too numerous, and probably too uninteresting to the reader for me to list.
These days I’m retired from the illustration game. However, most every article and illustration, in part or in whole, found on terrycolon.com is available for re-use. Explore, read, enjoy. If you really enjoy and want to use it yourself, there’s a button at the upper left labeled “EMAIL” because that’s what it is for.
I owe my talent and career largely to my dad who took me into his studio, Art Works, as a young man. I was the young man, not him. The resulting career was an unplanned and happy accident. It pleased me, anyway.
Beyond the above, all truly personal information about my private life is available only on a need to know basis. That’s why they call it private life. That being said, there are these:
Interview of me at Existable
Interview of me at The Setup
I am sometimes asked to divulge my methods for creating illustrations. Here is how I perform the magic in all its simple majesty:
Step One: Sketches with pencil and marker on tracing paper.
Part 2: Finished drawings in marker on tracing paper.
Action C: Line art scanned into Adobe Photoshop at 300dpi. Scans cleaned up where needed.
Stage IV: Bitmaps imported into Adobe Illustrator and converted to vector art.
Next Procedure: Vector images assembled, edited and colored in Illustrator. Any type is added.
Fin: File saved as eps for print, gif or png for the web.
It’s easy as 1-2-3, even though it’s actually six steps in case you hadn’t noticed. In any event I’m always mindful of the excellent advice of the great Wally Wood, “Never draw what you can copy. Never copy what you can trace. And never trace what you can cut out and paste down.” And as my dad used to say, “If it looks right, it is right.”
Some folks ask where my ideas come from or how I make drawing look so easy.
Not so easy to answer. The ideas just sort-of pop into my brain. Though they don’t actually make a popping sound and a light bulb doesn’t appear over my head. Sometimes the idea just oozes in by osmosis, if that makes any sense. If all else fails, I just “borrow” someone else’s idea, give it a little twist and claim it for my own.
The answer to making it look easy is practice and genetics. I’ve been drawing since I was a boy in short pants, though I could draw in long pants, too. That I can do it fairly well is just a knack, a gift, I can’t really take any special credit. It would be like bragging about being tall. That is if I were tall, but you get the point.
The web pages themselves are painstakingly built keystroke by keystroke in BBEdit. Of course, with as much copying and pasting and dragging and dropping as can be managed. Just the way Wally Wood would have done if he had a website.
Rather than write the story of my progression from drawing hand turkeys as a lad up through running terrycolon.com, I provide the following chart. This shows where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing and the influences and developments that made the artist out of the lad. Doesn’t make sense to you? It doesn’t to me, either, and I lived it.
It’s a mystery, eh? You might try moving the cursor around the chart. I should say over the chart, nothing happens around the outside. Then try hovering. Those title tags that come up aren’t always empty or next to meaningless.
Not exactly current, but I thought you’d like to see what an average year in the life of yours truly is like.
Rather than a monolog or annotated lists of the goings on and off of the year, I present 2012 in its entirety in one handy-dandy, easy-to-view chart. This will save the reader gobs of time, if their time comes in gobs. Maybe you see a wedge-shaped, fat-tailed, head and shoulders death cross formation. Me, I see a sideways jellyfish. Still, I can’t imagine anyone being all that interested in what I did all year to bother making anything out of it. Heck, it was all happening to me and I slept through a third of it.
As you can see on the right-hand end of the chart, all lines are projected to converge on or about February 15th, 2013. At which point I’ll either implode in a zero-point singularity and vanish, or explode to be reborn Phoenix-like into a new and/or improved version of myself. That’s one theory, or maybe two. More likely, since these are just lines on a chart, nothing of the sort will happen. Making February 15th a day like any other day, only more average than average.
Evidently the zero-point implosion never happened and I’m still here and going strong-ish. Either that or I perfected my robotic cartoonist cum web master of the universe; in which case there’ll be terrycolon.com updates forever. Or at least until the year 2060 when, according to Sir Isaac Newton’s calculations, the world ends. With a bang or a whimper was not specified. I think it will be more of a pf-f-f-t. We’ll see. Maybe.
