Somethings I’ve been working on. Well, a lot, actually– but I’ll let you know more about it when it’s up and about (cryyyptiiic):
Some illustration samples I recently did to see if I get a job or not (in color!):
In a limited edition of 5, I present “Triangle Theology,” pseudo-explorations of the H. Trinity in the form of cut Triangles.
More pictures from the inside:
Each page has a freehand triangle cut in it:
The pages are cut from larger watercolor washes:
Halfway through, the phrase “…and in the H. Ghost” appears:
All writing is handwritten, and all copies hand-numbered:
All done by hand, like the Trinity, made by Man, to understand an understandable concept. My triangles are just as imperfect, and imperfection is a bit perfect in an of itself, of course…
The triangle: a perfect form. The pyramid: four triangles in unison, perched atop our fair planet.
Four perfect forms in one! In the year 4 billion, two things come to mind:
One, is there still an Earth? Are we still on it?
Two, if we are still on it, what are we still doing there? We should be to the next galaxy and beyond by then!
These are the questions that inform one to the mindset behind the writings in my new self-publication, “Ancient Egypt in the year 4 Billion“, a collection of selected writings!
The book contains three short pieces of pseudo-science fiction. The first, “The Four Infinities of June 12th, 2000 and 6,” is four tellings of the same situation, each one spreading out a little further from reality into the cosmos of the heart-and-soul. The second, “Ship of Bone,” is a longer piece detailing the daily activities of the last two people on an Earth completely swallowed in a sea of blood. The third, “An Excerpt from ‘The Dust-Dunes of Old Earth’” is a work-in-progress story detailing a mysterious explorers excavation of an ancient city with a deadly secret.
Also included in the book are assorted drawings of pyramids, and their mysterious nature:
Behold! A new avenue of creation. Just in time for the celebration of our first steps on another world…
And, here is a review of it from one of my classmates.
(This post was for the class I’m in right now, but I feel like it’s a good summation, so I’m putting it up in this section, as a primer fro stumblers [hello, stumblers!])
It is good to spread out, I feel.
What I mean by that is that it is nice to have many different areas of practice, so that if you’re blocked on one, you can focus on another for a while (naturally sometimes all of them are blocked, but that’s life. bear eats you).
So, of the things I do (and I am considering myself to do three things, Comics, Writing, Music), the thing I am the most focused on doing right now is making comics. It sometimes feels a thankless job, as the bristol piles up and your hands are, like, sooo dirty, but once you see it on the reduced-size page and can turn the page with ease, it’s infinitely rewarding. So making the book is the best part, for me. The finished product, when you make it by yourself, can be amazing, and you can be very proud of it. I mean, it seems obvious that you could be proud of something you made, but really, the sky (dollaz) is the limit.
I feel like I’m talking nonsense. It’s just exciting to read a book you made.
So, I’ve made four mini-comics (which, for those unaware of semantics [?] is what you refer to self-published comics as, they are not actually microscopic). Three of which I will now describe:
This (click that link for examples) was the first I made, and as such I have mixed feelings about it. The cover, I feel, looks like a New Mexican Trail Guide, that pale orange is sooo pastel (or something), and I had much to learn about layout and how to more accurately maximize the space you fill up on a page. Copy machines are very tricky that way. However, this was the first time I discovered the “pamphlet” function on the copy machine, which is a magic button that does all the collating and layout and resizing by itself. It’s amazing and time saving, but slightly limited with it’s options. A finicky beast indeed.
Life in The Cyber Winter (named after the last winter we had, which was so terrible it could only be purely digital in nature, and also best said in Tom Baker’s voice) was a comic I made for my Offset Productions class, and as such made Four Billion copies (150) of it. I will probably never run out of them. But, also, it meant I made a sweet glossy (see the glare?) cover with multiple colors. The inside, too, done on a nice cream stock, had much more options for doing full-bleed pages (which is when the image runs off the page). Here’s a spread:
This is the most recent mini-comic of mine (I am currently working on a really long story. Like, really really long). It is a great little adventure involving a young girl, a hairless (mostly) dog, a poncho, Bob Dylan’s hat, and Mac Tonight. It’s notable because I made color covers with a magic secret free-xerox machine, and that I cropped it down so that there wasn’t a whole lot of space around the images. Here’s a spread:
So nice.
I’ve done, every now and then, a few pieces of writing (i also, most of the time, keep a pretty fair journal). Most of the time, they stay confined to the class room that they are written for, like this story about two people, alone on the earth (now covered with a Sea of Blood), sailing on a Ship of Bone:
I’m fairly fascinated by the idea of putting word documents up on a site for download. I suppose that .pdf’s are easier for a lot of people, but they strike me as irritating for a reason I can’t yet comprehend.
Anyways, that’s just what I did though with a piece of writing I did that dealt with my uncomfortable relationship with Philip Roth’s “Letting Go.” The blog “real normal” put it up on their site for .doc download, which I thought was a great idea, yes I did. I also did make two physical copies of this, but I have since given them all away. They looked great though, I swear.
Here’s the blog post about it.
The idea of advertising the work with a screenshot of Word is pleasing to me and my eye.
Of the things I do, Music, I suppose, is the oldest of them, and as such is close to me as holding some forgotten and (maybe maybe not) unattainable dream of fame and touring the universe playing off-kilter pop songs for billionz of people. Anyways, I have a band called Violet Mice, and I’ve made a few albums by that name. Occasionally, I make physical copies of my CDs for which to sell at shows (usually I give them away because nobody has no money anywhere).
My second album, O, Zeppelin! I printed out Xeroxes of my color cover and glued them to a premade CD slipcover. It is probably the worst way to go about making a CD cover. Glue gets everywhere and it looks poor and sticky. But hey, I was young.
This is an EP I worked on from 2007-2008 (it’s a long time for four songs, but there was just so much gestation!). Earlier this year, I found a way, using a crafty and incredibly janky method of cutting, folding, and gluing, made little pockets to put the CD in (you can see the CD poking out. The CD is simply a white, blank CD-R, which I find great, because you can write directly on them (I generally use a little glyph that represents each album). I hear that you can also screenprint directly on these with no prob.
Here’s the back cover:
Honeybear was my 4th (gosh so many) album, and for which I used the Offset Productions class at school to print a phat cover for.
The cover folds open twice, revealing a pocket for the CD. If you turn it around after it’s folded all the way, revealed is this:
It’s an image of a street in my hometown with a snappy Violet Mice logo on it. I’m pretty proud of how it came out. And since I did it offset, I got 200 copies of it. Now I only have to cut the shape out and glue them all! WOO! :D
So, there are examples of my main vocations. It’s tough sometimes, when making them, to continue to make them, when you are unsure if anyone will ever see them. I suppose it is an unfair train of thought to allow yourself to go through, but I feel like the possibility that your work will remain pressed back against a shelf or in a dumpster is one of the dangers (?thrills) of self-publishing.
I made a 22-page book for my writing class with Mark Booth, called this:
Here are some sample pages:
You can download a copy here, or contact me for a physical copy.
This idea also started a long time ago, in some ways, at least. During the worst class I ever took (called Cyberpower, which you’d think would be the best class, but no), I drew two hideous cherubs singing The Beatles’ “It Won’t Be Long” back and forth to each other. It was satisfying to draw the connected speech bubbles with the lyrics in them, and I think a great big “YES” was drawn next to it (if I wasn’t packing, I’d show you the page, but it’ll have to wait, I’m afraid. all my sketchbooks are in boxes). The idea developed over time into people saying the lyrics to each other in a more conversational situation. Then it developed into something much more hideously morbid. I won’t spoil the big ending of the comic for you, but I’ll just say that drawing the second half of this comic was incredibly disturbing and difficult to do.
The first four pages of It Won’t Be Long:
Ho, one of the three mini-comics this semester brought upon me.
Bob Dylan’s 115th Hat came from an idea I’ve had for a long time, that being using the hat Bob Dylan wears throughout 1975 (seen on the cover of Desire) in some sort of metaphysical adventure. Luckily (as the first ideas were a little too weird, even though those same ideas will likely sprout up in the next mini I do), I sat on the idea for a while, until I found the perfect inspiration in Mac Tonight (which, incidentally, was designed by a friend of mine, Clay Hickson’s father). Thus, combined with a child-version of the Em character that appears in (everything) It Won’t Be Long, an adventure was created.
Lo, the first three pages of Bob Dylan’s 115th Hat:
Here are a few pictures I took of the installation I had up in the Undergraduate Exhibition a month or so ago:
The images on the wall were the entire version of this comic I’ve posted before:
And on the chair were copies of Girlz, the album:
Which, as a constant reminded, you can hear Here.
Oh, no, i’ll be using that name for something else, I’m sure. But having come upon it last night, I just couldn’t resist.
Anyways, these following are a series of paintings that I was working on at the same time I was working on the Ringo’s Rainbow stuff, which is to say January-May of 2008. There are a couple of different facets to the series. It starts off as a desire to put the song Wolves with images (something it would certainly benefit from, in the future, it would be very lovely if Wolves was a painted book. hmm, ideas ideas), or at least to do paintings in the world Wolves inhabits. It’s a very specific world, one that exists right outside of ours, or really just is our world, just seen differently, with more truth. Like through a peepstone, but not as lame and influential to thousands of Americans (what?).
Anyways, here are the Wolven Paintings, done in Gouache and Watercolor, all around 5 x 7″ on paper:
The project then went more inwardly for me, (wow, inwardly is a word! that’s great!), and I began to make work more directly about things that had really happened, with the exception of this first painting on a chair with a great shadow.
This painting was more trying to move myself into the mindset of when I was about to paint, which is around three years old.
The next two are from real things that happened, the first being an awkward moment at three when I accidentally got totally wasted (it was all my fault, don’t blame anyone else but me! See, I was walking around the table at a dinner party being cute and asking for sips of champagne, and then when everyone left the table, I went around and asked for more sips. so dastardly. anyways i got wasted and started driving my tricycle up the stairs. whoops.)
This last one is from this great picture of me at three when I am totally naked, painting the floor of our bungalow blue. There’s a larger painting of this picture, but I don’t have a good reproduction of it yet.
So those are more snippets of the creative mind of a year ago. The reason I don’t have more to show of this semester is that all the work is in book form, and I don’t want to give spoilers, but Oh oh OH will they come soon (I mean, they have to, the semester’s almost over. yikes.)
The vast amount of work I did in my junior year (right, because it was SOOooo long ago) was around one particular subject. That was Ringo’s Rainbow, a magical world that starred Ringo, Me, and The Pig. Ringo flew through the sky, casting a magical rainbow behind him, and The Pig and I followed him, having surreal adventures, playing basketball, having campfires, etc. It was exciting, and it’s a slight regret that I abandoned the idea…
I feel poor about not updating this visual section that often. I wish that there was a bevy of respectable work up here. So i’m going to do some closet-cleaning, putting up some Old Guard (I love that term) comics. This first one was an assignment to do a research comic about an event. I picked the Northridge Earthquake of ‘94, which I was in, and thought I had caused.
See, I woke up like, four seconds before the earthquake hit, and kicked the side of the bedframe I was in right as it started. Positive side, I didn’t know there was an earthquake, so I didn’t freak out.
In case you didn’t know here, you can click the images to see them bigger, y’all.
Tragedy’s:
—very soon.
like a cat, but only because there is some hidden sass (now irrelevant) in these sketchbook pages. they come from late last year.
Yep. Oh, and be sure to be at SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries (33 S. State St. 7th floor) this Friday (March 20th) at 7PM for the Undergraduate Exhibition (that i’m in, along with many other people I know and love). It’ll be… pretty good. The exhibition runs March 21st to April 3rd, so if you miss the opening, don’t fret. See you there.
Here’s the first pages to what will eventually be the booklet for Girlz, however I find a way to get it out. These make up the lyrics to Sparrow Camel.
Oh, and a reminder (Tee hee): The Girlz EP
Here is a comic I did for an assignment in my Comics class last semester with Jeremy Tinder. It was a super class, I am taking it again this semester (because I can, not because I failed or something ridiculous like that). The assignment was to buy a mini-comic and make a response to it in the style of the comic.
The comic I chose was Grant Reynold’s “To The Mouth of the Source.” I thought it was pretty keen. That comic had images set to Joanna Newsom lyrics. My response was to “Here’s To The Atom Bomb” by the Smashing Pumpkins. My version doesn’t have the lyrics on the images.
This is a little comic that I made for a class a few semesters ago. The assignment was to watch a nature show and respond to it. I was a little terrified with what I came up with.
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