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.

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

More catchers.


More fallers.

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.

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.

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)

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

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?).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.