Cropped Will Cardini artwork

January 12th, 2010

2009 Recap

Filed under: Print Comics,Recaps — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 7:08 am

2009 was a great year here at the Hypercastle! Here’s some of the highlights:

  • I self-published two minicomics:
    • TRANZ, a collection of one-page shorts based around action verbs like “melt,” “grow,” “muliply,” and so on; copies available from me or at Domy Books in Austin
    • Froghead Hangover, a short autobiographical story about when I was living by myself in an apartment and had a run-in with a shaman; copies available from me, at Domy Books in Austin, or at Austin Books
  • I had my comics in issues of Smoke Signal, Taffy Hips, and the online zine hahaclever.com
  • I was in a few art shows, including Monster Show #4 at Domy and No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery in Chicago, which was picked as one of the top art shows of 2009 by Time Out Chicago (congrats to all the other artists and the curators!)
  • I participated in STAPLE! 2009 alongside the rest of the Gold County Paper Mill and in E.A.S.T. 2009 with my lady Glade Whitworth
  • I finally finished making websites for the G.C.P.M. and Glade (linked above)

2010 is already shaping up to be a great year, here’s hoping that it’ll blow 2009 out of the water! I’ve got several projects in work with some awesome and skilled creative people that I’ll be talking about as they manifest, a half-table for the G.C.P.M. and Glademade at STAPLE! 2010, and ideas for plenty of more comics that I’ll be submitting or self-publishing. I hope that everyone out there is having a great start to the new year, thanks for reading!

September 18th, 2009

No More Worlds Gallery Hours

Filed under: Press — Tags: , , , , , , — William 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 10th, 2009

No More Worlds Opens this Saturday

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , , , , , , — William 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 3rd, 2009

MELT for No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 6:42 am

I’ve been working on my gouache drawings for the show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery almost every day of the last two weeks. I’ve finished the gouache parts of five of the six drawings (I still have to ink them), but I’ve been having some trouble getting the final page sketched out, so I’m taking a couple days off to doodle out a solution. Sketching out the first page took me several days too.

Once the six drawings are done, they’ll show a simple narrative of a structure melting into a huge lake of some sort of colorful, liquid plastic substance. Here’s part of my (uninked) drawing of the structure:

Here you can see part of the building as it melts:

It’s important, for me to achieve my desired effect, for the structure to go through one or two phase changes as it melts. What I mean by phase change is, as the buildings begin to melt, I draw the same structure, with the same color pattern, it’s just squashed and drawn with increasingly wavy lines. But, at some point, the melting takes on a different color pattern and I don’t redraw the same structure, but modified; instead, I draw a new structure. That’s a phase change. Here’s an example of that happening:

In this image, you can see the unmelted structure in the lower left and the lower right. In the middle and in the upper right, you can see that same structure, with the same color pattern, but drawn with extremely wavy lines. This is the beginning of the melt. But then, along the top and especially in the upper left quadrant of the drawing, you can see the phase change, where the structure has been replaced by the repeating, drippy polygon patten. For the final drawing, I’m trying to come up with a second phase change, which is why it is giving me trouble. I’ll post some pieces of the final drawings once I’ve got them documented.

August 26th, 2009

Gouache Experiments for No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery

Filed under: Admin,Events — Tags: , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 8:22 am

I took most of the content from my old blogs and imported them to this site last nite, so please, feel free to browse the archives and experience some nostalgia. I’ve been blogging sporadically since May 2007 and started to blog at least twice a week since December 2008. I’ll be going through those old posts over the next several weeks and updating their formatting and the size and source of the images.

Last nite I also went to my Okaymountain studio to work on my drawings for the upcoming show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery in Chicago, which is curated by Corinna Kirsch and Katherine Pill. I’m doing medium-sized (18″x24″) drawings that I’m coloring with gouache. I tried out a bunch of different materials because it’s been a while since I’ve colored something off of the computer. Here’s one of my gouache experiments:

In the end, I decided to do flat color with gouache and then add outlines and details with india ink. I’m going to do six drawings like that for the show which will replicate one of my MELT pages from TRANZ.

Here’s the promotional image for the show, Jolly Ranch by Alex McLeod:

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Following an investigative curatorial model, Concertina Gallery’s first exhibition inquires into the simple yet seldom insignificant gesture: the greeting. Although an invitation can take shape in a myriad of forms, the works in No More Worlds invite viewers to enter – through tactile engagement or with the aid of imagination – captivating yet unsettling environments. Featuring artists who use a variety of mediums, No More Worlds showcases works that deftly combine the fantastical and mysterious with elements of the everyday, reminding us that even our wildest ideas of new worlds are anchored in and mediated by our own experiences of reality. Reveling in the unknown surprises of the grotesque or the extraordinary sensuous qualities of the idyll, the impossible tableaux constructed by these artists hover between real and imagined worlds. These liminal environments give way to partially obscured narratives, both enchanting and monstrous.

I’m excited to be in this show alongside amazing artists and I wish I could be there for the opening. If any of y’all are gonna be in Chicago September 12th, be sure to check it out!