Cropped Will Cardini artwork

November 17, 2009

First Weekend of E.A.S.T. 2009 Recap

Filed under: Recaps — Tags: , , , , , — Will Cardini @ 7:47 am

First of all, thanks to everyone who came by Boongoo Studio, stop #125 on the East Austin Studio Tour this past weekend!

I got to play host to friends and talk to some new people, including our awesome neighbor Thor Harris and these guys Ben Goddard and Daniel. Ben and Daniel recently moved to Austin from the East Coast and have settled in to Glade and I’s old house. Ben sent me his website, he takes some pretty hilarious, well-constructed photos, including this one:

Here’s a shot of something that I haven’t posted before:

It’s a collaboration between me and Glade, it was a landscape that I didn’t use for the No More Worlds show that Glade added a bunch of awesome details to. Speaking of that No More Worlds show, I should have all of those drawings back next week, so come by if you want to check ’em out!

Here’s a shot of Aaron Flynn’s installation, which I didn’t have a photo of last week:

That inside-out polar bear/coyote is amazing.

And finally, thanks to Kate Watson for the shout out on Glasstire! I invite you all to come by and snoop this next weekend.

November 13, 2009

East Austin Studio Tour

Filed under: Events,Press,Print Comics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Will Cardini @ 7:06 am

Glade and I are participating in the East Austin Studio Tour this year as Boongoo Studio. We’re number 125 on the map, come check out our spaces!

Here are some shots of my studio:

As you can see in the upper left, I’ve got plenty of Gold County Paper Mill books left over from STAPLE! 2008, including Jak Cardini Achieves the Narratological Singularity, a book of J.C.‘s poems, and Impossible Objects, a collaborative book between me and Jak.

Here’s a detail shot. I’ve also got some color drawz, raw comix pages, and black and white india ink drawz.

Here’s my drawing space and something that I was working on.

Our good friend Alison Kuo came and did an installation in our living room! We’re also going to be featuring the artwork of Beverly Anderson and Aaron Flynn.

October 30, 2009

Monster Show 4 Opens Halloween at Domy Books in Austin and Houston

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Will Cardini @ 10:23 am

Hey y’all, Monster Show 4 opens this Saturday (Halloween!) from 7-9pm at Domy’s Houston and Austin locations, come check it out! There’ll be many, many fabulous and terrifying monster drawz by tons of talented creators, including the lovely Glade Whitworth.

Here’s the flyer, image drawn by Travis Millard:

Here you can get an all-in-one shot of my monster draws in process and a fraction of my new studio set up:

I’ve had this drawing table since the mid-90s, so please forgive the stickers. If you come to our house (Boongoo Studio) during this year’s East Austin Studio Tour, you’ll be able to see my whole setup!

October 16, 2009

Funky Junction Oracles, New Work by Dylan Reece at MASS Gallery in Austin

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , , — Will Cardini @ 7:40 am

My good friend Dylan’s solo show, Funky Junction Oracles, opens this Saturday (Oct 17th) at MASS Gallery here in Austin from 10pm to 12am. If you’re in the area, be sure to check this show out. It’ll be open until Nov 7th. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

On view from October 17th to November 7th, Funky Junction Oracles employs a variety of media — prints, photography, painting, animated GIFs, and sculpture — to illustrate Reece’s attempt to fix meaning in a world characterized by ever increasing flows of information and rapid change in the complexity of social systems. Drawing from a range of sources that include the pop-metaphysics of the ’70s, the classical art of Greece and Rome, the internet, vintage nature books, rave culture, and Modernism in art, the imagery for much of the work is unified by an underlying sense of idealism and progress gone awry.

I’m super stoked about this show. Here are some choice pieces of Dylan’s old work from his excellent blog:

October 6, 2009

Taffy Hips #5 Release Party this Friday

Filed under: Press,Print Comics — Tags: , , , — Will Cardini @ 7:42 am

My comic Herakles of Mars Attacks the Lion of Tharsis has been included in the latest issue of Taffy Hips, here’s the cover:

They’re having a release party this Friday at Desert Island Books in Brooklyn (where you can also pick up a copy of Hyperbox #3, as my buddy Lanneau just reminded me!). If you’re gonna be in the area, be sure to check it out!

October 3, 2009

Manga Studio 4 Makes 16-Hour Comic Book Day Possible

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , — Will Cardini @ 8:01 pm

It looks like I’m just going to be almost two days late with both my posts this week. Since 24-hour comic book day started today at 10 am, some of my cartoonist friends and I decided to hole up in my studio at my new place and spend all day drawing comics (we’re calling it 16-hour comic book day – 10 am to 2 am!).

Because I’ve discovered that I can produce comics three to four times faster on the computer than on paper, I downloaded Manga Studio 4 the nite before last and finally got to start messing around with it today. This is my first drawing with the program:

The algorithms that it uses for the various nibs and markers feel really realistic, altho the tapering effect is annoying. I’ll have the final product up sometime after 2 am!

September 22, 2009

Dispersal/Return Animation Remnants

Filed under: Art Shows — Tags: , , , — Will Cardini @ 7:26 am

The opening reception for Dispersal/Return will be this Friday (9/25) at the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque from 5 to 7 pm. If any of y’all will be in the area, be sure to check it out – it’ll feature a special performance of “America’s Big” by my two good friends the Dirty Monke (AKA Jonathan Loth) and Li’l Bunny Krunk (AKA Gabriel Romero). You can also view my installation, Cryptostructure, alongside many other thought provoking works by Land Arts of the American West alumni.

Smudge Studio recently reblogged my post about my installation, and you can scroll down and view the work of the other artists in the show here.

I spent a lot of time working on different animations for that installation, and I’ve collected together some of the remnants into a new video animated GIF, check it out:


7/12/22 update: I replaced the old video, embedded from Flickr, with an animated GIF hosted on my site. Same content as before, but now it seemlessly loops!

The floating, segmented being with yellow eyes that you see in the beginning contains the longest bits of hand-drawn animation that I’ve done to date. This is definitely something that I plan to do more of, as I find the time in between comics and drawing projects.

September 18, 2009

No More Worlds Gallery Hours

Filed under: Press — Tags: , , , , , , — Will Cardini @ 1:48 pm

We don’t want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly.
We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror.
–Dr. Snaut, Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972

If those of y’all in Chicago missed the opening of No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery, you can go check it out every Saturday from 12 to 5 pm until the last day of the show on Saturday, October 10th.

Corinna Kirsch, co-curator of the show, has written an essay on the exhibit that mentions yours truly, here’s an excerpt:

Mark Hensel, another artist interested in the “reconventioning” of conventions, has uploaded old science fiction paperback covers onto his Flickr account. Documents of what was, the covers on these out-of-print editions–populated by scenes of a lonely cosmos or solitary wanderers–echo the oftentimes desolate landscapes in Hensel’s own comics and installations.

You can read the full essay here.

September 10, 2009

No More Worlds Opens this Saturday

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Will Cardini @ 7:04 am

The show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery in Chicago opens this Saturday, the 12th. Here’s the promotion image again, Alex McLeod’s Jolly Ranch:

If you’re going to be in Chicago this weekend, go check the opening out, from what I’ve seen the other artists are amazing.

I’ve been working furiously on my drawings for this show the last three weeks, and I finally finished them on Monday, a little too late to enjoy the pool on Labor Day, unfortunately, but early enough that I was able to photograph them and package them to be sent by Express Mail to Chicago on Tuesday.

Here’s one detail shot from each of the six drawings:

I think that adding the india ink really changed these from what they were when they were just gouache drawings. I didn’t have as much time to work on these drawings as I would’ve liked, but I’ve been working close to deadlines my whole life, so I’m used to it. I think that, like most procrastinators, I really need to feel the pressure to actually finish something. Otherwise I just dabble and consider all of the possibilities before making a move. With the time constraints that I was working under, I just chose gouache and used it, even though I had limited experience with it before. If there had been more time, I would’ve spent more time playing with different options and practicing techniques. Now, however, I feel really comfortable with gouache and I’m going to start producing more pieces like this. And one thing that I’m going to put together is the comic tools DIY stay-wet palette, check it out. It sounds pretty awesome. I wish that I had remembered that blog post earlier. Having to carefully note my color combinations and then try to replicate them every nite was frustrating. Even with the DIY stay-wet palette, however, I don’t think I’ll be doing narrative drawings any time soon. I didn’t like having to keep the color palette consistent between each piece, I would’ve much rather been able to experiment.

September 8, 2009

Duncan Malashock at Co-Lab this Saturday

Filed under: Events — Tags: — Will Cardini @ 1:22 pm

Duncan Malashock is exhibiting at Co-Lab, 613 Allen St., Austin September 12th from 7-11pm in a show called Fake Fun in the Real World. Duncan’s videos are mind-bending fusions of video techniques. Here’s a sample:

He explained his process to me once but I didn’t recognize the equipment that he was talking about. I think that basically he processes video through a number of different filter and equipment until he achieves the desired effect. A lot of his stuff is based on looping, which I’m into. Animated GIFs have ruined long-form video.