Does anyone reading this remember my Hyperbox minis? Hyperbox was a long comic serialized in minis that I started but unfortunately never finished. I drew three issues for a total of 60 pages between December 2007 and June 2008.
Someone ordered those comics from me recently so I decided to do this Hyperbox ink drawing:
I don’t plan on ever finishing Hyperbox because my style has changed too much since then but some of the ideas that I put into it will probably resurface in future works.
The James Jarvis drawings that Dan Nadel posted this past week on the Picturebox blog are a revelation.
An homage to Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster” from Day 1 of the James Jarvis posts.
A colored page from Day 4 of the James Jarvis posts. These posts on the Picturebox blog are promotion for a full-color book that Jarvis has out, De Profundis.
Pure, unfettered cartooning. The impulsive, inky scratching of them reminds me of Ralph Steadman …
This is Steadman’s homage to that same Goya etching. I posted it so large because I stitched it together from two scans I did of Gonzo: The Art, a Steadman art book.
… mixed with a little bit of Maurice Sendak and of course, Pierre Alechinsky.
Alechinsky, “Alvéoles.”
Alechinsky, “Volcan ensorcelé.” Both of these paintings are from the website of the Alechinsky retrospective at the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Check out this Alechinsky post by Derik A Badman or my previous Alechinsky post for more examples of his comic-like work.
Steadman was one of my biggest early influences and I love Alechinsky so Jarvis’s work really speaks to me. I’ve been experimenting with modifying my wanna-be Moebius-and-Brinkman hybrid style to something more spontaneous and cartoony. I like working in MangaStudio but sometimes I just want to get away from glowing computer screens and put nib to paper.
Here are two examples of me doing just that, in these drawings that I did for Monster Show 6 at Domy Books in Austin:
I was thinking about the TV Tropes entry on the Quirky Miniboss Squad when I drew this (warning: TV Tropes is a link-infested time suck).
This drawing is dedicated to my buddy Grant Davis.
Disclaimer: these drawings may or may not be in the Monster Show 6. I’m going to have something in there but I don’t know what yet. Come to the opening from 7-9pm on October 29th (costume encouraged) to see tons of monster drawings by all sorts of amazing artists. If you’re in Houston, there’s also a Monster Show there.
Inspired by KC Green’s Fan-Fiction Fridays, here’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle/Bart Simpson mashup:
Should I make this into a t-shirt?
I went and did some figure drawing last night. Austin Figurative Gallery does an event every Monday from 7 to 9pm at the 29th Street Ballroom. It’s $5 to attend.
I hadn’t done any figure drawing since I was a freshman in college but after a couple quick warmups it all felt familiar again, except for the d00d drawing with his wacom in Corel Painter. Not that I’m against it (I do most of my drawing with a wacom) but that’s definitely a tool I’ve never thought about using for figure drawing. When I was in school I would use charcoal or pastels on newsprint or butcher paper, but I didn’t want to have to go out and buy a bunch of new supplies so I used some pencils and a Prismacolor brush tip marker in my sketchbook.
Here are my best pages of sketches from this session:
Contour drawings with the Prismacolor brush tip marker. Three to five minutes per drawing.
The one on the right is more of a traditional figure drawing with a softer lead pencil, either 2B or 6B. For the one on the left, I tried to do what Frank Santoro talks about in his blogpost Color Workbook 1: define the shape of the figure with gray and then add contours on top. Three to five minutes per drawing.
Contour drawings with a 6B pencil. I balanced some levels in Photoshop so the lines are easy to see. Three to five minutes per drawing.
Contour drawing with a Prismacolor brush tip marker. Five minutes for the drawing.
I’ll be going back next week – maybe I’ll see y’all there?
After using moleskines for a while, I finally broke down and got another one of my favorite sketchbooks, an 8.5×11″ réflexions bound sketch book. I broke it in by drawing a bunch of big nose bug d00dz:
You might see some of these d00dz in a future comic of mine.
This past weekend was 24-Hour Comics Day. I spent several hours at an Austin event organized by Zach Taylor.
A sample page from Zach’s current webcomic, Bear Quest. I love how he does pixel art versions of each page.
I wasn’t there to work on a 24-hour comic – I just worked on a book-length comic, VORTEX, that I’m now about 3/8ths of the way through.
I’m not going to show y’all any more of VORTEX until the whole thing is finished.
The 24-Hour Comics Day event was fun (and productive – I finished [almost] four pages in the [little over] four hours I was there). I got to meet Jason Poland, who makes the webcomic Robbie and Bobby, IRL after many online convos.
This is a few panels from a Robbie and Bobby comic called “Wings”. Jason does all sorts of awesomely weird stuff like this in his strip, which he puts out several times a week.
I also met Austin Bedell …
This is a comic from Austin’s side project Vidyagame Library, where he draws comic inspired by NES videogames.
… Chris Sweet …
This is a comic from Chris’s webcomic Effing Decaf. He also did a great mashup comic with Zach called “16-Bit Breakfast”.
… and many other awesome local comic folks. I’ll probably continue to work on my own projects during 24HCD2012 but it’s great to get to hang out with a bunch of local cartoonists.
I recently dropped off Kid Space Heater, a masterful comic by fellow GCPM member and my sometimes collaborator Josh Burggraf, at Domy Books in Austin. Here you can see it on the zine table:
From Domy’s dope Tumblr
Here’s a close-up of the cover so y’all don’t have to squint:
From Josh’s Tumblr
Kid Space Heater is twenty legal-sized pages of grayscale space opera madness packed with Burggraf’s unmistakable high-tech Kirby-esque machinery and cityscapes. But don’t take my word that it’s awesome, take these guys’ words:
Here’s a sample panel:
The panel looks a little screwy because of interference/moiré from the scanner
Buy Kid Space Heater from Domy for $5. You won’t regret it.
While I was in Louisville hanging out with Jeff Hipsher and Chuch, Jeff’s friend (and the Catch Up web master) Nick Sturtzel took us by LVL1, a hackerspace in Louisville.
LVL1 is in a warehouse district by downtown Louisville. The entrance is in an alley.
Anyone can go to LVL1, tinker with tech, and make things; but what makes it really special is that the members pool funds to purchase special maker equipment, such as this laser cutter:
Nick offered to cut one of my drawings out and mail it to me. What should I get cut out?
Because the new issue of Catch Up is out, I decided to add the comic that I drew for the previous issue, before I became the comics editor, to my comics page.
Click the splash page to be taken directly to the two-page full-color comic, called “Summoning.”
“Summoning” stars the Miizzzard and my fellow GCPM members Jak Cardini and Chuch.
This past Labor Day I took a trip to Louisville and hung out with GCPM members Jeff:
Jeff likes to put my high school artwork on his walls for some reason.
And Chuch:
I also got to meet some members of the Louisville branch of the GCP for the first time (no pics sorry).
What’s really exciting is that Jeff had stacks of the Summer/Fall issue of our literary/comics magazine, Catch Up, ready to mail out to contributors (click here for a full list):
The Summer/Fall issue has a poetry book and a separate, full-color magazine-sized comics section. They come bundled together in a nice brown paper bag screenprinted with our logo. Here’s a shot of my copy:
Mike Miles did both of the covers. I edited the comics section and drew interior illustrations for the poetry book.
You can buy a copy to this issue or a one-year, three-issue subscription at the bottom of this page.
