Cover design for a rain-themed comics zine

I submitted this design as a proposed cover for this month's issue of Stumptown Underground, but they declined to print it. Oh well -- I'm pretty happy with it myself, but the cover they chose is pretty nice too, and Katy Ellis O'Brien is a very cool person, so no hard feelings I guess. I should mention that I didn't know what the name of the zine would turn out to be, so I just put "Pouring" in as a placeholder to suggest a lettering style.



It's pretty dark, so you might need to adjust your monitor to see the good parts.

Of Nightmares and Morticians: a nonfiction 24-hour comic in two parts

The first 6 pages recount a recurring nightmare that my friend Liz Spavento really had, and it serves as the first chapter of a semi-biographical book that we hope to eventually complete. If we pull it off, it'll have romance, deceit, premonitions, and more -- so, you know, fingers crossed!








The next 13 pages are based on three guys that actually used to frequent my friend Amy's tea shop in NYC. She insists not only that the events shown here more or less happen on a regular basis, but these these are the morticians' actual names. Squengl, if you're reading this, please let me know if we got the spelling right on yours.













Vacation Comix #2

Last night I was at a party at Jason Van Glass' house, chilling in his hottub and chatting him up about assorted nerdy shit. After a few drinks I pulled out my tablet PC and asked for something to draw. Apparently he'd had this script in his head for a two-page silent comic, and I could have it for free.





Jason Van Glass is a member of the burgeoning "aspiring screenwriter" industry, and I'm looking forward to reading these spec scripts he wrote for It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

P.S. I used Manga Studio since I've been meaning to make myself comfortable with its interface. Long way to go there, but it does do a relatively nice Speedball impression with no effort and I even managed to make it do my panels for me.

Did a guest strip for Jacob Mercy's "Nausea"

Jacob keeps a regular journal in webcomic form over at jacobmercy.com. Last Friday he experienced an unusual lapse in his memory and, since I was present during the missing span of time, he asked me to fill in as the temporary chronicler of his exploits.

Another sort of caricature

I spent my weekend partying at some friends' beach house. Spent all of Saturday evening doing these, and also a 9-panel comic recounting Friday evening which I'm still planning to color.













Popeye

My sketchbook has been busy lately, but rather secret since I'm doing a bunch of studies for VS Comics.

Here's what happens to your body after years of constantly abusing performance-enhancing vegetables:

Popeye

We're gonna make some promotional buttons!

Just got back from Drink & Draw, where in a few weeks we'll be drawing and pressing our own buttons! I roughed out a few ideas which I plan to clean up and mass-produce.



So hey, if you're in Portland join our mailing list and come to a drink & draw night! drinkdraw.com!

More caricatures

I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons with some very cool and accommodating guys that I know through work. They let me draw these rather-unflattering caricatures, and even posed in imitation of my weak likenesses so the drawings would look better than they really are. Thanks, guys!







Meanwhile I also did a caricature of a cousin of mine -- my mom's drawing her wedding invitation and needs some help with the previsualization. Mom: please apply your own judgment; the eyebrows are too high, which makes her look dumb, and there are other issues as well.



Also here's a business card that I drew a long time ago and never posted. It's the last one that I haven't given away (I'm holding it for Clifton) and I'd have drawn more already except that I ran out of blanks and haven't had a minute to do more cutting. Soon!

Meager attempts at caricatures

At a Drink & Draw last Sunday I met the recently re-crowned fastest caricaturist in the world -- Mr. Steve Dorris. To my great honor he seemed to be a fan of my work, and paid me real money to draw a quick sketch of a superhero pooping -- which he added to his sizeable collection thereof. He even threw in a free caricature of ME pooping, which is bizarrely accurate to my actual pooping technique. See for yourself.

Anyway, he's amazing, and when he turned out last night at the Drink & Draw that I organize, I was inspired to try my hand at capturing some of the more distinctive faces at our table (and at the mic, once the Gypsy's karaoke crowd night started winding up.) Here's what I've got so far -- I'm excited to get better.





Preview Comic!

I spent the whole weekend at Stumptown Comics Fest, just soaking up the scene and reinforcing relationships. Lots of cool people this year with lots of cool stuff, and although I didn't register in time to get a table I actually got to bring along two comics -- the 24-hour Dracula comic which you can read here in my previous post, and also a preview version of the comic I'm working on with Jacob Mercy and Steve Wilber. This is basically just a snapshot of our current draft, and all three stories will change significantly before we go to press. And of course, we expect the finished comic to be somewhere between double and triple the length.

The project has its own website, so rather than clutter up my blog homepage even more I'll take this opportunity to link you there!

http://www.versuscomics.com

24-hour comic attempt #3

Well third try's a charm... sort of. I did complete 24 pages this time, after invoking the so-called "Eastman Variant" and taking more than 24 hours to finish. I think I actually had an advantage on my first attempt since I hadn't been working on anything polished for a long time beforehand so I wasn't in the habit of making everything look good. Nonetheless, it's a thrill to have finished a full-length story, this being the longest single comic I've ever produced and only the second that I've done on my own and actually seen through to print. I did a run of 30, gave 3 to my parents, and plan to lose another 7 to my coworkers today. The other 20 will be available for $2.00 per copy at tomorrow's Stumptown Comics Fest -- assuming you can find me walking around, since I procrastinated too long to get a table.

























Optimus Christ

I drew the following sketch to help my good buddy Jeremy Kraemer in planning a velvet painting:



Tried to give it sort of a vintage-propaganda feel. The final version will have a robe and an immaculate matrix of leadership.

More colorized sketchbook entries.





Steve's cat Easy:


My Dungeons & Dragons character, Lewi:


(he's a lightning-breathing dragonboy who was raised by hobbits; that's his dad in the top picture there.)

Finished off another sketchbook

It reminded me that I've been remiss in scanning any of the stuff I draw, so I covered more or less the whole backlog. There's more to come, but some of them I'd like to color before I post them.















business cards, part 2

Well, I've been making more of these but giving them away before I get a chance to scan them. I did these ones last night and Thursday at Drink&Draw.

Front:

Back:


Front:

Back:


Front:

Back:


Front:

Back:

HUGE UPDATE

MY BLOG IS DEAD!

LONG LIVE MY BLOG!

I've switched from Blogger to WordPress, which offers a more customizable viewing interface and a more robust posting interface. Same URL as before: http://doesstuff.com/blog

one-of-a-kind business cards.

Josh Fitz, one of the guys I met at that Exquisite Corpse event I mentioned in my last post, had these small blank pieces of bristol board that he was drawing little pictures on, writing down his email address, and handing them out to people as unique business cards. They were a little too wide to fit into a wallet, but I liked the concept so today I got a pack of blank business cards designed for a laser printer. I plan to do a bunch of them in advance and keep them in my bag in case I meet an artist somewhere. I'll post them here too, and if I get tired of making new ones I can rehash some of my favorites for printing. The ones without any text are on the backs of the ones next to them.








The cards I got are, of course, designed to be used in a laser printer, so I am experimenting with the different pens in my collection to see which one works best. The one with the grin was in an ink that didn't soak into the card, just pooled on the surface. After accidentally smudging it a little, I said what the heck and just went crazy -- to a pretty ok effect, although I doubt it'll hold up in someone's wallet. The bottom one, meanwhile, was in an ink that managed to bleed through to the other side of the card, so I just made the other side a mirror image except for the text. Luckily, Sharpies seem to do just fine -- so that's probably what I'll stick with for the rest. In the end, though, I'm going to want to get some actual bristol and cut it down to size rather than work around the limitations of this stuff.

SIGGRAPH Drink & Draw

Last night I attended this animation-based Drink & Draw event that was organized by Cascade SIGGRAPH -- it could best be described as an animator's exquisite corpse. They got six of us drawing at a time, moving from chair to chair and drawing on notecards with simple lightboxes in ten-minute stints during which we were supposed to complete eight frames of animation. At the end of each heat, we had to finish our last frame and leave it at our seat for the next person to continue off of. At the end of the night they had a final group come up and draw tween frames to stitch together the six animations into a single almost-cohesive film. They even had a guy right there with a photostand digitizing each set of frames as it was finished -- they actually showed the finished film on a projection screen maybe half an hour after the last frame was drawn. The whole thing was a hilarious rush, and I met a bunch of cool people there too.

Here's the video -- if you want to know which parts I did, look for the giant shoe, the happy little dude whose eyes explode, the headlights coming over a horizon in the darkness, and the monkey being assembled by a swarm of flies (he was supposed to be getting eaten by the flies but I guess I put my frames backwards.)