Studio Makeover, A New Goal

I haven't cleaned my studio since I moved in with Reg in 2003. That's That's nearly 7 years. Every once in a while I would scoop up a superficial layer of artwork and store it, throw away some reference print-outs and some miscellaneous debris, but other than that, I haven't made much effort to change my ways. I have a huge drawing table (got it for a steal--100 bucks about 10 years ago from a guy I shared a house with), but have only really been using about a third of it in the last few years because it's been covered in art supplies and other stuff. So I finally decided to do something about it. It's taken the better part of a week, but I've finally gotten it cleaned and organized. You might notice that the keyboard is broken, dropped in the process, a small price to pay for a clean and organized studio. The process has been a kind of excavation, turning up old work and discovering just how bad I used to be.

Here's what it looks like now:




This is what it used to look like:

March 2006



July 2009



This is Probably Going to Sound Embarrassingly Earnest, but...

Right now, I'm not anything close to a full time freelancer. Until recently I felt like I had failed as a freelancer, and was very much on my way to giving up the idea that this would ever happen. But with the encouragement of Regina and a few friends and acquaintances, I've been inspired to redirect my energy towards this goal and am determined to be well on this path by the end of next year. The first thing I've done is tried to identify what my weaknesses are and address them. Organization has been one major setback, and so cleaning the studio was one more small step in the process of becoming more organized and better prepared.

Another problem is that for a variety of reasons, my work has been inaccessible to anyone but a very small audience. To broaden the appeal of my work I've redirected my focus towards children's markets and have slowly built up my portfolio with more kid friendly pieces and pieces based on classic children's lit. Apparently I had forgotten why I wanted to do this in the first place: before I went to art school or had any formal training my goal had always been to make illustrated books, both for children and adults. Since graduation I've meandered in a lot of different directions, and more recently have tried to do editorial work, something I never had much aptitude for and something I didn't even know existed before college.

Also, because of a lack of discipline and focus early on, I lacked a certain amount of technical skill. This is something that can fortunately be learned and practiced, so to this end I've started doing more life drawing, anatomy studies and applying myself to making more credible spaces with more accurate perspective. In the past I've tended to neglect backgrounds and focus mainly on figures and now I'm more focused on complete scenes and multi-figure tableaus. Color is also something I've been paying more attention to.

Tin Salmunic, Angelique Benicio and Frank Stockton

Aside from Regina who is my best friend and my greatest support, three people have stood out as inspirations: Tin Salmunic, Angelique Benicio and Frank Stockton. Tin said something that really hit home, "Don't decide what your limits are until you've pushed them." Tin has been nothing but encouraging and supportive and I am grateful to have come in contact with him even though we haven't yet had the opportunity to meet in person.

Angelique is a friend from college who I recently have gotten back into contact with. Angelique is a powerhouse, a single mom who has been determined to make her living from her skill as an artist since she moved back to the states from an 8 year stint in Paris and Brazil. Just a few months after moving here she's already achieved this by doing commissioned sculptures but like me is very much interested in getting into Children's illustration. We've both been encouraging and helping one another to make this happen.

Frank Stockton is another illustrator who has encouraged me both personally, and through his very inspirational blog. You can check his blog out here:

www.frankstockton.com

And check out Tin's blog here:

www.salmunicart.blogspot.com

And Angelique's website is here:

www.kaliart.com

2009 Alternative Press Expo

This was probably my best APE so far.

We managed to cover expenses and make a very modest profit. We sold a lot of posters, and a few comics. I got a lot of nice feedback and saw a lot of new and familiar faces.

The Elephant Factory caught people's eye, but was too spendy for most people's wallets. Surprisingly a couple of people recognized it as inspired by Haruki Murakami's short story The Dancing Elf from his collection The Elephant Vanishes.

The Oz poster also drew people to the table, but we didn't sell many. They recognized it as Oz and seem to be attracted to all the colorful characters, but since most people don't have a familiarity with the Oz books in general, they didn't feel compelled to own it. Our newest popular was the one inspired by James and The Giant Peach, likely because of the popularity of the book and movie, but the Elephants on pink buildings and Bicycle Tree continue to be our best sellers.

An Encounter with the great Barron Storey

I also ran into my old teacher Barron Storey and finally got to share my new work with him. This was a very gratifying experience because I admire him a great deal and when I was in school I didn't have much discipline or technical skill. I feel like I've reached a new level of craft this year and was finally able to show it off to Barron so that he could see that I was finally starting to live up to some of the promise he saw in me 13 years ago, something he seemed to genuinely feel. I felt like I had failed as a freelancer, and to some degree, being able to show Barron my new work felt like another small benchmark in what I hope will be my future success as a freelancer.

Old Friends and Newish Friends

Seated directly across from me was Zack Soto, a cartoonist I greatly admire, and also Thien Pham, a cartoonist who used to hang out with our old Bay Area crowd, someone I hadn't seen for many years. I didn't realize he had been sitting there until the end of the first day. He didn't recognize me because I had lost so much weight and because my work looked very different. Thien was also sitting next to Briana Miller, an excellent cartoonist who it was a pleasure to meet.

Then Derek Yu and Anthony Wu showed up at the table, two great illustrators who used to be on this message board called "The Block" that for a while was a very lively and exciting place for some amazing young up and comers. "The Block" thrived for a couple of years and then petered out. It was a great place to get feedback and criticism on your work, and it really helped me develop as an artist. Meeting Derek and Anthony was like meeting old friends. It was if we already knew each other.

I also got to see a lot of Facebook friends, like Ed Luce, John Pham, Hellen Jo and Tom Neeley, all extraordinarily talented folks.

Then I ran into Dean Haspiel. I hadn't seen Dean since the Alternative Comics days, and he gave me a lot of great feedback on the new work. Still the question that everyone repeatedly asked (even me) was, "are you still making comics". No matter how much new work you make, at APE, when it's your peers, it's always about comics. But between last years Blue Kid minis and this years Crimefighter, I came prepared. Since many of us haven't kept in regular touch, and since I haven't had a commercial book out since Yellow Baby 6 years ago, the fact that I was still making comics was a surprise to many.

The Pics:

Our display. We mounted the Elephant Factory on foam core and spent much of the previous weekend putting together the PVC display you see here. This was Reg's design, and it worked out beautifully.



Another view of the display and a glimpse of APE proper:



Oh yes, and our display and beauties:



The bounty.



Commerce.



And the Haul:



I'll try to cover everything, but I might miss a few. Here goes: Hot Potatoe by Marc Bell, Bell's gorgeous full color book of comics and pictures and paintings and sculptures and everything under the sun. Only 30 bucks! Bell was there but I missed him; Chickadee by the aforementioned Briana Miller; Ghost Attack!? by the very busy Zack Soto, who continues to make beautiful pictures but has recently returned to comics; Sublife but John Pham; a pretty little book of cat pictures from someone whose name is not written on the book; Brilliantly Ham-Fisted by Kevin Kneely--I saw some of his giant flawless originals and they are a sight to behold; Sketchanomicon by Derek Yu; Pug of Ages by Anthony Wu; The surprisingly entertaining Reich, a biography of Wilhelm Reich, issues 5 and 6 by Elijah Brubaker; Ten Thousand Things to Do by the long suffering Jesse Reklaw; and last but not least, issue #0 and issue #2 of Wuvable Oaf by Ed Luce. What can I say? Everybody loves Wuvable Oaf.

And I almost forgot! Monster Box (that little box up there) by Thien Pham and Lark Pien. Two mini comics and a shrinky dink in a box!

New Posters!

Great holiday gifts! Or just gifts in general. You want 'em, we got 'em!

6 new posters, including The Road to Oz, my picture inspired by James and the Giant Peach, and several others are now available in our store!



Also New! HUGE full color 30" by 50" Elephant Factory print!

We're selling a limited quantity of photo quality large format panorama prints of the Elephant Factory! No kidding, these things are huge! 20"x50" on Kodak Endura paper! Available now in limited quantities for only $100 in our store!

Elephant #4 of 100

96 elephants to go.

100 Elephants: #3

Here's #3. 97 to go.

More Thursday Figure Drawings

So this time we had a sort of "set list", and broke everything down into short poses and long poses with a timer, going strictly by the list. I recommend this approach. It maximizes the time since less time is spent deciding what the length of the pose is going to be, or when the break is supposed to be over.

So this is a 5 minute pose:



A 20 minute pose (probably my favorite drawing of the night):



And the long pose, about an hour and a half.



I try not to waste time on drawing the chair he's sitting in or any other details in the room, just concentrating on the figure. Again this one is a little stiff, but it's got some nice tone in it.

More Figure Drawings

These are more figure drawings from the thursday figure drawing sessions at The Natsoulas Gallery. I apologize (in advance) for the bad digital photos. I need to light these better before I take them.

A 15 minute pose:



And two 10 minute poses.




There was also a long pose, but with longer poses I'm often too fussy, so you won't be seeing that one.

Elephant #2 of 100

#2

"Crimefighter and Two Others" Cover Preview!

My new comic, "Crimefighter and Two Others" will be available on my website and at The Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco in late October! Here's a preview of the cover:



It will also feature work by Rick Grimes, Mark Martin, and late entry bonus artist Eric Orchard!

This will be a self-published digitally printed book, with Mark Martin's amazing "Absolute Vanity" logo on the cover!

100 Elephants

This is one in a series of 100 elephant drawings and paintings. This will take a while. It was done with an Esterbrook 355 pen nib.

Call me a Ka-Blamgelist!

My friend cartoonist Mark Martin recently coined the word, "ka-blamgelist" to describe those of us who are enthusiastic about the low cost digital comics printer Ka-Blam. Well now I can confidently say Ka-Blam is well worth the praise! My new Blue Kid books just arrived, and they look fantastic!







So call me a Ka-Blamgelist!

These will not actually be for sale anywhere. I'm using them as samples of how I'd like my book to look when traditionally printed. This is for my Xeric grant application. The Xeric grant is a special grant for comics self publishers.

Figure drawings

I just started a figure drawing group at Natsoulas Gallery here in Davis that's being held every other thursday. it's been about 12 years since I've drawn from the model, so my figure drawing chops are very very rusty. For the past 12 years I've been drawing mostly from photographs, and occasionally from life here and there, but I haven't done any serious figure drawing in a long time.

So here are some recent figure drawings, warts and all.

For the first few sessions, most of my drawings were pretty embarrassing, but here's a gesture drawing I was pretty happy with:



These are about 15 minute poses each:



This one has a tiny head, but I still kind of like it:



And here's a longer pose. Everything is more or less in proportion, but it's pretty labored and stiff. You can see where I was fussing with one of the hands.



I've still got a long way to go, but I'll post more so the curious can track my progress.

I've also been taking these video anatomy courses that you can get:

here.

I don't know if he really teaches you to "draw the figure from your mind" as it claims, but if you have patience with it, he definitely teaches you anatomy. here's some work I've done through the course:





Ultimately strong figure drawing requires, most of all, a lot of drawing, observation, drawing from life, and more drawing. I'm trying to be more disciplined with keeping a sketchbook, but it's never been a habit I've been good at maintaining. It's never too late to start, though! Here's a sketch I did in pen on the airplane, flying up to visit my Dad on his 85th:

Comic Book Making Class!

The First Appearance of Dude in a Fishbowl!

These are some of the mini comics that the kids in my comic book making class made. (Excuse the bad digital pics)



This one has some crazy inventive page layouts. No boring rectangles here:



An Alien Cheese:



And who could miss the next issue, introducing: "The First Appearance of Dude in a Fishbowl"?



Some Manga action here:



A story about a detective who identifies with eggplants. Quite a bit of character development in this one:



Excessive coffee drinking, and a comic book making contest:



An Exquisite Corpse!

From the handout:

An “exquisite Corpse” might sound kind of creepy, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with corpses. It’s a technique invented by a group of artists who called themselves “Surrealists”. It was based on a game called “Consequences”. Each player writes on a sheet of paper and then passes it to the next player. Each player then covers up the writing of the previous player so the next player only sees what the last player wrote without being able to see what had been written before.

There are lot of variations of the game, and People have played it using many different art forms. one variation is even done with music.

In 1998, a cartoonist named Art Spiegelman decided to apply the game to comics. 69 cartoonists collaborated on a book called “Narrative Corpse” using the exquisite Corpse technique.

So this is our own version of an "exquisite corpse":

New Logo by Mark Martin! More to Come!

I'm putting together a self-published digitally printed comic for the Alternative Press Expo this year, and Mark Martin and Rick Grimes have generously offered to allow me to publish their work! 18 pages by me, 4 by mark and a whopping 8 from Rick Grimes! I've been a fan of both for years so it's a treat to have them in my book!

I particularly recommend the Rick Grimes Fansite! It needs your love! (warning: some of the art on this site is of an adult nature and may not be work safe.)

Mark Martin designed this amazing logo for the cover! (I decided to embrace the whole "vanity publication" aspect of the thing).



Why No Recent Posts?

I haven't been making any new posts for a while because I've been busy with a lot of stuff--the class I've been teaching, I organized a new figure drawing group (won't be posting any figure drawings for a while--I need more practice before sharing), a Xeric grant application, some anatomy drawing practice, and putting together the new comic. We also took a little vacation to the mountains. Also the Elephant factory was a big undertaking. (Pfew). But maybe I've been a little bit procrastinatey too! No more excuses!

I've Been working on a new Children's lit illustration, this time for "The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle". I've finished inking the background, and so this week I should at least be finished with the ink drawing. Coloring next week and I should be done! In the words of Yule Brenner, "So it shall be written, so it shall be done".

Elephant Factory In Progress

Here are some in progress figures for my elephant factory. I didn't end up using all of these for one reason or another. Originally I was going to put in as many figures as I could come up with, but sometimes less is more or something. I ended up with about a dozen.



Yikes!

Uh, this is my studio. I really need to clean it.



In the process of coloring this thing right now, so it'll be a few more days before i post the final image.

Spongebob Ozpants!

So here's the image that I did for Nickelodeon Magazine for its special issue celebrating Spongebob Squarepants' 10th anniversary. They commissioned different artists to do their own interpretations of the characters, and after seeing my "Road to Oz" picture, the art director, Chris Duffy, asked me to interpret the characters as The Wizard of Oz characters.

Never having worked with licensed characters before, my first interpretation was a little bit conservative, and I made too much of an effort to stay "on model":



Then, when I realized that when Chris said "do your own interpretation" he actually meant it, I did this version:



Chris was pleased, and the image will appear in the August issue, which is coming out sometime in late July. Chris is my favorite art director, not only because he was fun to work with, but because he's responsible for the amazing comics section of Nick Mag. He hires the best small press and alternative cartoonists in the business, people that you'd otherwise never suspect could do kid friendly material. This is what a good art director should be able to do: look beyond the obvious and have confidence that an artist can do work that isn't necessarily reflected in their portfolio, and allow them the freedom to do what they do best.

Unfortunately Nick Mag has ceased publication, which is a big loss to kid magazines in general. Nick mag was a welcome exception to the usual condescending kid magazine fare.The good news is that they'll be publishing through to December, so be sure to get the last remaining issues of the best kids magazine on the stands! And here's a link to the magazine's website:

Nick Mag

Coming Soon:

I'm currently at work on a very large and detailed image inspired by a short story by Haruki Murakami from his anthology, "The Elephant Vanishes". I'll be posting it in a couple of weeks. Murakami's story describes a factory where elephants are manufactured, so I decided to draw what I think an elephant factory would look like.

New Color Kid's Strip

This is a comic I submitted to a kid's magazine. Unfortunately the magazine isn't accepting submissions at the moment. The magazine in question publishes some of the best comics for kids in the business, so it's pretty competitive.

Edit: The magazine in question was Nickelodeon magazine, for whom I did a recent illustration (August issue). Unfortunately Nickelodeon has been recently cancelled. It will be missed, as will the great work of Chris Duffy, the editor responsible for the deservedly celebrated comics section! I'll be posting the illustration I did for Nick Mag in late July when it should hit the stands.

At any rate, I'm looking for a home for this one, so if anyone knows or can suggest a kid's magazine that might be interested please let me know.





And here are some of the characters, inks and pencils.

Art Opening at Barista Brew on May 8th!

I'll be having a show at Barista Brew on May 8th for the Davis Art Walk. They have really great food, and from what I hear, some of the best coffee in Davis. I just had a pesto chicken wrap with sun-dried tomato spread that was awesome! And the prices are really really reasonable. My wrap was only $4.50 and was one the best sandwiches I've had in town.

I'll be showing a few originals and selling prints, and the show will be up till the 31st. Things should start around 6:00 pm.




More info about Barista Brew:

Here.

And more info about the Davis Art Walk:

Here.