Beouija

2012-02-13T13:00:00.000-05:00

I'm excited to be doing a lecture at the Society of Illustrators with two of my favorite cartoonists, Jillian Tamaki and Lisa Hanawalt. It's February 23rd, 6:30 - 8:30. You should come out if you can!

2012-02-13T10:00:00.002-05:00

Drew and I just got back from France, where Drew's French publisher, Çá et Lá, was promoting Set to Sea in Angoulême and Paris. I did a lot of sketching: with Drew getting treated like a rock star I knew I had to step up my game.

An important note is that I know absolutely no French. But I felt some small pleasure at writing things in my sketchbook in French that I'd looked up in google translate.

2012-01-08T12:07:00.002-05:00

Here's new piece for the New York Times, for Sunday Dialogue: Do We Live in a Less Deadly Time, or Not? Here are some alternate thumbs - the second one in particular I felt really pleased with when I drew it, but when I looked at it the next day I said "What was I thinking?"

2011-12-12T17:40:00.004-05:00

Another GR2 Post-It Show (#7). A series of young white drunk people; I guess I wanted to draw a lot of simple, extreme emotions.

2011-12-09T18:37:00.005-05:00

Drew put a bunch of my original art on the Little House site. If you order anything in the next couple days it ought to show up before Christmas!

Diving Belles, Spring Again, New Community, each $295

Decorator and Nester, each $85

Original art from Nita Goes Home , each page $150

Beastly Tales Series, $100, $150, $150, $150, $150 + $295

Diplopia Panorama, each $475

2011-12-05T17:05:00.006-05:00

I did the cover for this book of short stories (the AD was the extremely nice Christopher Moisan, coming out Summer 2012), and working on the thumbnails was a lot of fun. I was dicking around with drawing digitally for the first time, which is exciting once you stop trying to imitate brush or pen. These are some of the also-rans; the final piece is here.

2011-11-14T20:34:00.001-05:00

2011-11-06T08:12:00.003-05:00

Drew, David Mack, Michele Chidester, Jason Matherly and myself have a puppetry troupe called Creaky Theater Company. This Halloween we took part in Athens' Wild Rumpus Parade as a giant 5 person dragon. We all built it together; David was the head and the rest of us were its giant wormy body. Its eyes light up and it has pretty good roaring action. It was really fun.

2011-11-01T12:12:00.003-04:00

Me and Terry Gross

Drew could not tell that the thing in the last panel is a banana, which I think is important to the strip. It is a banana.

2011-10-26T23:52:00.003-04:00

Also, a one-page comic here:

2011-10-12T15:16:00.002-04:00

My new black metal band.

2011-10-12T14:56:00.002-04:00

First Second's Nursery Rhyme Comics, 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Celebrated Cartoonist (edited by the unstoppable Chris Duffy) came out yesterday, with comics by me and Drew and a whole bunch of other fine cartoonists. You should check it out, it's fun.

I finished this comic nearly a year ago, according to these sketches - there's a drawing of my '10 Halloween costume in there. The queen's figure was inspired by John Stanley's interesting way of drawing motherly ladies.
Here is the full comic!

2011-09-30T21:11:00.002-04:00

I've been doing more sketching on the computer, lately, with various results. I'm sure not getting any prizes with this batch but they were fun enough to do.

2011-09-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

Here is a sketch of a band we saw called Hail Seizures. I liked them a lot.

Also I bought Drew a bartender's guide for his birthday for fifty cents at a thrift store. It had a very boring cover so I made it a new one.

Here is the old cover:

2011-09-23T21:03:00.004-04:00

GR2 is having a benefit show tomorrow (Saturday!) and I have some little pieces in it. The theme of the show is robots. This was difficult for me: there are a lot of things I'm not good at drawing (folds, muscles, dogs) but drawing robots I'm actually kind of phobic about. I thought this might be a chance to work through my phobia by proving to myself that I really can draw robots.

But guess what! I actually really, really can't.

Finally, I gave up and drew people with tubes and wires sort of coming out of their necks. Whew! Crises averted!

You should check out the show if you can; I sure do like GR2.

2011-09-09T10:04:00.002-04:00

The latest, and last, issue of MOME just came out this week, issue 22. What a run it was - it's an anthology which I'm very proud to have been a small part of. This issue is particularly good. I tried listing all my favorite artists in it but the list got way too long. You guys know who you are. Thanks X1000 to Eric Reynolds; it was so fun.

It being the last issue made me finally get it together enough to finish something - the first proper comic I've finished in years (!). My story, Nita Goes Home, is 14 pages and in full color; you can see four preview pages here.

Here are some sketches - I spent an inordinate amount of time designing the logo for a only briefly mentioned taco stand, you'll notice. This story was intended to be kind of satirical (the main character Nita is basically a sillier version of me) but absolutely no one who's read it thinks it's funny, at all. Read it to find out just how not funny it is!

2011-06-19T18:40:00.006-04:00

Drew these after seeing the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met. High fashion sure does an interesting job combining costuming, which I love, and regular fashion, which I have problems with.

In other news, Drew received the Lynd Ward Honor for Set to Sea! Here is the great lecture he gave at Penn State talking about comics. We had a lovely time there, thank you everyone!

The second edition of Set to Sea will be out soon, it is even nicer than the first edition in subtle ways, and it has yellow endpapers. Drew has also finished lettering the French edition of Set to Sea. It's an exciting time.

Also: another illo for the NYT! This one is sciency/surreal.

2011-05-08T14:48:00.002-04:00

Card for Drew's mom! This is the first time I've ever done anything for Mother's Day: my folks didn't want any truck with fake holidays invented by the greeting card industry. (My parents are pretty hilarious.)

2011-05-05T09:14:00.002-04:00

Fan art for C.F's Powr Mastrs. I haven't done any real fan art since I submitted a Maison Ikkoku-inspired piece to Animerica when I was 12. This pic also satisfied an even earlier, more primal urge to draw princess dresses. For the Picturebox Fan Forum.

2011-05-02T22:21:00.004-04:00

Check out this mural my pal David Mack and I did at Honey's Salon. The two of us have done some murals together before but this time it was an actual job (we are getting paid in Haircuts For Life.)

We had such a good time doing this that David and I are starting a Mural Painting Business. You should probably hire us to paint you a mural. Email me.

Thanks to Jo for asking us, and blithely letting us do whatever we wanted. She is pretty much the greatest.

2011-04-25T00:33:00.006-04:00

There was an illo by me in this Sunday's New York Times! It was for a Spring poetry page - the theme being allergies. The art direction was by Aviva Michaelov. Just for fun, I thought I'd post up some process stuff.

First Aviva sent me the poems along with sample layouts of how they could be arranged, and I did some sketching and thumbnails.

We both liked the 4th one best. Aviva flipped it and sent me the finalized layout.

I tightened the pencils, trying to incorporate the drawing and the poems without it looking contrived.

I collected a lot of reference photos of allergy-causing flowers, and pollen, and lungs, on Pinterest,

And figured out a color scheme on Color Scheme Designer. This seems kind of bogus, but it's been really helpful to me.

I transferred the text-shapes and did a very light sketch of the lady onto this kind of amazing super-thick rag watercolor paper my friend Kate gave me. This used up my last sheet and I'm sad to see it go.

The lady is watercolor and the flowers are mostly gouache. I didn't realize until recently that it was okay to mix the two! (!?)

Also, the poems were all really good. I was proud to illustrate them.

2011-03-20T01:31:00.005-04:00

Practicing watercolor. I've been practicing watercolor for five years now; I hope I eventually figure out what I'm doing.

2011-03-17T01:41:00.002-04:00

More catchers.

More fallers.

2011-03-15T00:43:00.003-04:00

My mom and I are working on a comic together. It's a YA adventure graphic novel set in 7th century Uzbekistan. It is going to be really, really good.

2011-03-08T16:47:00.003-05:00

Here are some pages from a short comic I thumbnailed out a few years ago, and just recently realized I would never finish. I was an exchange student in Japan in highschool, and I was on the school's kayak team - this story is from the point of view of one of my male teammates, and it's a male exchange student instead of me. It was a fun idea - partially because I was close with my girl teammates, whereas my male teammates were complete enigmas - but without a good enough story behind it. I still like the pictures of rowing. I can still remember the weight of the water on my paddle.

2011-03-01T13:08:00.005-05:00

My friend Jeff Tobias is part of a band called Pegasuses-XL, and their latest album Psychic Entourage is out today and available on iTunes. You may recognize the album art - it's an image of mine. The thing is about this album: it is extremely good. I love it and have listened to it a hundred times and feel a pang that my art doesn't do it justice. It's big, and hard, and sad, and thrilling, and excellent. Plus it rocks out. Check it.

(Here are two preview MP3s: Basement Beat - Sea Mountain Island)

2011-02-25T12:30:00.000-05:00

2011-02-25T12:21:00.002-05:00

Adding to this print. Etching is pretty flexible. And I like any picture a lot better once I've given the people cryptic rhymes to say.

My new folkpunk band

2011-02-16T01:09:00.005-05:00

I finally posted up this piece - it's a collaboration between me and my friend Kate Guillen that we did for our GR2 show, Diplopia. Kate did the beautiful other-worldly scenery; I painted the people in a surreal week and a half visiting my folks in Tucson, only days before the show opened in LA. Taking Kate's artworks and free-handing on top of them felt insane. But now it's one of my favorite things I've ever worked on - getting to make art with Kate was so wonderful. The paintings are for sale here.

^An initial concept sketch drawn on cash register tape.

^A mid-process photo of Kate's landscapes.

Being silly with perspective: this is a giant (4.5'? 5'?) collaborative wall piece we did over the final sleepless night before the show. There is a strange corner in GR2 above the register where the wall juts out about three feet. We painted half of a giant head and put it on the back wall, and the other half a third smaller and put it on the near wall. If you stood in an exact spot right in front of them they'd line up perfectly. This would have been easy to make with a computer and printer, or even a overhead projector, but we free-handed it: it didn't deserve to come out as well as it did. I'm still not sure if this actually seemed as cool to other people as it did to us (maybe just to me?).

2011-02-13T21:17:00.003-05:00

I Hate Printmaking Vol. 1

I love prints. But it turns out actual printmaking is a fucking nightmare of technical shit! Expect regular updates of poor-quality prints until I figure out what I'm doing.

2011-02-08T09:42:00.005-05:00

More old images - these are small ones from the GR show me and my bff Kate did last Winter.

2011-02-07T16:41:00.002-05:00

I was going through photos from a few years ago and found these of The Frog and the Grasshopper, a shadow-puppet play by The Creaky Theater Company - that's my friends David Mack, Michele Chidester, Jason Matherly, and me; plus a bunch of folks who played lovely music. We all made the puppets together (mine is the grasshopper), and built the shadow-screen from scratch. When it was all lit up and the characters were leaping around it looked incredible - like it was magic.

2011-01-31T09:30:00.005-05:00

My dad gave me an amp and a record player for my birthday. He built the amp himself; it's kind of shaped like half a giant egg, and it lights up green. So Drew and I have been getting out all our old records and feeling great. I had torrid and emotional relationships with several record players in college, which were all of the giant cabinet variety and broke constantly. I drew the dancing people while listening to Harry Belafonte.

2011-01-24T22:21:00.001-05:00

2011-01-07T03:07:00.006-05:00

I did this piece last Spring for the anthology Studygroup 12 #4, and I'm pretty proud of it. I've been interested in plants, and parasites, and our ability to remain human. Lots of things went into this one: the cordyceps fungus, Yggdrasil and its wyrm, oak galls, housing developments, and Bosch's Garden of Earthly delights, with its strange red-blue circular pool and glass bubbles the tiny people play in.

2010-12-09T18:53:00.006-05:00

The above doodles are brainstorming for this series - Es vs Ich, posted at doing fine. Self-indulgent fun with tits, vag, and tiny uptight Victorians; tautly stretching metaphors over my elusive inner imagery. The series is for the GR2 Post-It Show 6, so all the drawings are on 3x3 post-its.

2010-12-05T23:40:00.006-05:00

2010-12-01T19:49:00.002-05:00

Just finished Speak, Memory.

2010-11-28T23:51:00.001-05:00

WHO WILL WIN

2010-11-21T22:09:00.004-05:00

Didn't mean this to come out so much like a beer label; I had imagined it being on a flimsy cardboard box.

2010-11-01T02:02:00.006-04:00

For Halloween I was a lamprey. Mostly foam, cut-up t-shirts and underwear, hotglue, and acrylic.

A Pacific Lamprey.

I was introduced to lampreys as a little kid by this picture in Larry Gonick's excellent Cartoon History of The Universe Vol. 1. I was fascinated, in that horrible way kids can get fascinated. So the costume was kind of cathartic.

2010-10-27T20:44:00.001-04:00

I've been walking a lot lately.

2010-10-25T21:12:00.000-04:00

Ah-CHOO

2010-10-25T21:09:00.000-04:00

Lisa Frankin' it. I started this comic after reading Forming by Jesse Moynihan and a) wanting to do a comic in color and b) wanting to do a comic that's serious, but also really funny. This comic will not, I think, wind up being funny; it might not end up existing at all.

Sketch of (my friend and extremely good artist) Michele Chidester.

2010-10-21T09:05:00.000-04:00

I draw people laughing and crying a lot, and once tried to turn that into a final piece - it looks interesting, and was good gouache practice, but otherwise didn't really work. It's big, too.

I did the poster for this years Thought Bubble Comics Festival in Leeds!

2010-10-17T01:04:00.000-04:00

All these have themes that show up again here and here and elsewhere - the New Earthly Garden series. The above image is some life drawing combined with plant drawing practice using Sibley's Guide to Trees.

2010-10-17T01:02:00.000-04:00

Trying to draw more comics to take the fear out. Miriam Ivanoff's Comic a Day project was an inspiration for these, but I'm a lot lazier than she is.

2010-10-17T00:45:00.000-04:00

Animals drawn at Bear Hollow.

2010-10-17T00:34:00.000-04:00

I was trying to read a book on economics and listening to too much NPR when I drew this batch.

Final to hair-pulling pic. (Better?)

"Animal the color of flowers" is a line in Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston, which (full disclosure) I have not read. I know it from the wonderful, wonderful lecture series This Craft of Verse by Borges.

Sketches for Athens Tiny Farm illos

2010-10-16T16:52:00.000-04:00

I've been in 3 Giant Robot post-it shows (1 2 3) and they're always fun - just doodling until I come up with 10 images someone might pay $20 for. Here are some that didn't make the cut, but are still kind of interesting.

2010-10-15T22:36:00.000-04:00

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My friend David Mack (who is a fantastic artist) and I found this graffiti where the train tracks go under the loop and we wanted to share it with folks. If you're in Athens, Georgia and you want to check it out go the end of Satula - there's a path down to the tracks. The pieces were just painted in regular house paint. Some of them are pretty large, about 18' high.

2010-10-15T22:34:00.000-04:00

Illustration for the Everyday People column in the Flagpole written by my friend André Gallant.

I have not gotten tired of drawing plants yet. I was so happy to learn how to draw pecans in their husks. Also that disco ball was fun.

I just started using Pinterest as a way to organize and archive reference photos. This is the first piece I used it for - pinboard here. I don't know who would be interested in my reference, but I'd certainly be interested in Dan Zettwoch's, or Crumb's for Genesis, or the Hernandez bros'.

Also! Elfpower used some of my sketchbook art in their latest album. Neat!

2010-10-15T00:07:00.000-04:00

In the drawing below my mom is giving me-as-a-kid a turkey sandwich on rye, which is what we had every day for lunch the summer I was five it felt like.

2010-10-14T23:39:00.000-04:00

This page has the roughs for the piece above it and this one here. As usual the sketches are better than the finals; one of the larger frustrations in my life. Also, a picture of my dad drawing a wristwatch on my wrist when I was very little. He did this for special occasions, and it was thrilling. I don't remember what time he would draw.

Another sketch that went to a less-vital final (here). I didn't have the guts to go through with that crazy skirt, for one thing.

2010-10-14T23:19:00.000-04:00

The moodier of these were drawn last Winter, which was very cold and grey, and hard on a lot of folks.

2010-10-13T23:32:00.000-04:00

^The Queen of the Night's handmaidens.

^ Sketching for halloween 09. Pics of the final costumes here.

2010-10-11T21:26:00.000-04:00

I am a pretty big fan of the illos in Awake! and Watchtower. So I was trying to capture the joy of that, I guess.

2010-10-11T21:08:00.000-04:00

^Brainstorming for this illo.

2010-10-01T22:37:00.000-04:00

Hey this is my new sketchblog! For pre-2009 stuff here is my old livejournal.