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.

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:

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.

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!

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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