Recent Activities

It's been a while since I've posted, so I thought I'd put up some photos of a couple zines I put together in the last few days: WoRM and Encounters.

Conflict: pleased with zine production, displeased with neglected homework.

WoRM is my first assignment from my Self-Publishing course this winter, a zine that doubles as an exhibit. Below are some of the spreads, not all though 'cos where’s the fun in that. Wanna see the whole thing in the flesh? I made some extra copies and they're waiting on my bigcartel just for you.

Next up, Encounters.  Encounters is the latest collab zine to come out of the Inkmaggot studios (aka my hands).

Fully endorsed by Optimus Prime, It’s 24 Pages B&W, each copy has a unique spray paint cover to keep you warm and cozy. Waiting for you are illustrations and comics of “documentation of the extra-terrestrial run-ins of providence, winter 2013.” Whatever that means to you. Works by the following lovely humans: Anita Tung, Jessica Kleinman, Toril Orlesky, Vinnie Neuberg, A.T. Pratt, M. R. Trower (yours truly), and Ivy Bradley.

The truth is out there. The zine is for purchase out here.

Strip Mall

I'm still making short strips for RISD's online paper. It's nice to have a very small space to experiment with story/composition/colouring without much pressure. Also included below is a submission for a the "L O O M" zine curated by a couple of risd students.

Pizza Zine!

Introducing…RISD Pizza Zine! In addition to all the schoolwork eating up my life, recently I've been working on putting together a zine! The original idea was brought up by some other awesome illustration students, but I decided to give errybody some deadlines and actually get this made (we have so many other things to do that even really good project ideas often get permanently left on the back-burner and eventually char to a crisp).

 This pretty little thing is the offspring of eight risd isbabies and features 15 pages of luscious greyscale comics and illustrations all related to humanity’s greatest creation - PIZZA. Need I say more? Cover lovingly drawn by yours truly and layout by the superhuman Karen Sung. 

p.s. WANT ONE? HAVE TWO DOLLARS? SEND ME THOSE DOLLARS AND I’LL SEND YOU A PIZZA ZINE! 

Moebius Tribute

As (hopefully) many of you have heard already, my comics hero Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, died earlier this month at the age of 73. I was devastated, to put it lightly. Anyhow, I somehow was alerted to this project, which is a sort of collaborative tribute to Moebius via recreating the characters and scenes shown on a set of 89 "collector cards". I came a little late to the sign up party, but still managed to nab myself a spot.

Here is my contribution:

...and here is the original card inspiration, "Pooh"

Comics & Bits from Winterlude

Since RISD's schedule is an odd little arrangement due to Wintersession, I just wrapped up a compact weeklong break from school. I was lucky enough to spend it visiting home to see some family...and get my wisdom teeth pulled. During the time I wasn't lying around wallowing in nausea and self pity, I managed to get a few minor things drawn. Here they are, in roughly reverse chronological order:

First page of a comic that I would like to continue in my free time...Kind of a light thing to explore some ideas and practice with nibz. 

I asked at the dentist's office if I could keep the tooth fragments, and they sent me home with the pieces (two intact, the rest in bits) inside a larger plastic tooth container. Pretty meta...Anyway, I wanted to colour this but I had some technical difficulties. Later.

I got to spend a hot minute at the Gauguin exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum with my dear parents and got some sketching in. I actually returned a couple days later and made some better drawings, which I can post when I return to PVD.

Very rushed drawings due to grumpy security guards.

A quick digital color thing applied to a sketchbook drawing. I forgot how much easier things are with a tablet...being stuck with just a mouse seemed to make the simplest Ps tasks a huge pain.

Pretty self explanatory? I really did often just eat slices of cheese with pizza sauce by the way. And it was delicious every time.

A couple revisions

I reworked two of my XX/XY projects slightly based on critiques I received in class and on the big scary world of the internet.

What's new? Text bubble, no more lines behind the figures, a few minor adjustments to the bodies. Most significantly, person #6 lost her giraffe legs and person #7 has top surgery scars. It's still not where I'd like it to be, but hopefully it is less problematic (visually & conceptually) than the original image. Next!

This was pretty difficult to revise since it started out as a fairly small ink drawing. Mary sat down in a chair and put on some pants (she's no longer stuck wearing an impractically long dress). Meanwhile, the plants on the right grew a an inch or so and jesus put on some brighter shoes. Half the revisions were made directly onto the original via white gouache and more ink, but the entire pants & chair area was drawn on a separate page and photoshopped in. A few more adjustments were made in photoshop to clean up stray marks. I wish I could have made Mary's halo smaller, but it turned out to be too time-consuming and frustrating a task to complete.

Mary and the Man-Child

This week in XX/XY, we had to make an illustration based on either lactation or testosterone. It was pretty open ended, really, and we were encouraged to draw from cultural perceptions, history, science, etc. I was pretty psyched up on the article we were assigned to read about lactation, which among other things brought up the many depictions of Mary nursing the baby Jesus (a few examples below).

I love this Hans Baldung engraving (or woodcut?). Why is there a man in the moon? What are all those clouds about? Who knows?

A classic example of the tendency of artists to show Mary's breast as a sort of water balloon or globe shape by Bernardino Luini. Also, what a weird garment!

Quite a coy little christ

Mary's milk is essentially seen as the purest and strongest of any human excretion, for it both symbolically and physically sustained Jesus. I also wanted to touch on maternal guilt in past and present society and the ridiculous amount of pressure and judgement that mothers face. This guilt often manifests in over-sheltering and coddling a child in order to shield them from physical/psychological/emotional harm. And thus, we have the "man-child."

A common animal in my experience at college, the man-child is a male, usually white, who has been sheltered so much by his loving mother (and father, perhaps) to the extent that he is unwilling and incapable of taking care of himself. He may be in college or living at home, but in any case he is still suckling at the metaphorical teat, while he depends on others to perform basic tasks of adult life for him: laundry, cooking meals, paying bills, cleaning his residence...The man-child is immature and greedy, after being indulged for far too many years by a well-meaning family. Stunted, he will continue to depend on others until forcibly weaned.

So I guess what we have here is a juxtaposition of the man-child and classic Christian imagery. The mother's care (milk) is powerful nourishment, the most formative of a child's early experiences. But like all mammals, the young must eventually be weaned, or it will become a gluttonous and helpless mess - a man-child.

Oh, and have some sketchbook pages to make up for the slow post rate.

"Mary and the Man-Child" 

Two pages, two days

I got to stop by open figure drawing for a bit today, something I would never have time/energy for during the normal schoolyear. 

Sex Ed!

This week for XX/XY brought a "sex ed" assignment - to create a two page spread (implied that it is in a sex ed book for a chosen audience) or an instructive toy/game/object. The interpretation, audience, medium, etc. were all up to us. I made these two pages with the imagined audience of a fairly young girl, perhaps age seven. This was kind of about exploring a new process for me as well - I started with an ink drawing and tried to develop it to finish in Photoshop. It took longer for me to figure things out than a traditional process would have, which was very frustrating. I'm not 100% happy with it, but I feel like I learned a few things during this project in regards to brushes & workflow that may come in use in the future.

Hidden

Below you'll find my second assignment for XX/XY. The prompt was to make an illustration which applies to one of the following topics: transgender, intersex, or androgyny. I chose transgender, and I owe a lot of my inspiration to the French movie Tomboy (which is great, by the way. See it!). The comic is pretty bittersweet, I suppose, but in the context of how most transgender people are perceived by the world at large, this is a pretty optimistic take. Both pages are approximately 8.5"x11" watercolor, with some minor revisions in photoshop. I don't usually tool around with stuff in Ps  save for contrast, value range, color vibrance, and the like...but seeing how other artists use digital media to make changes quickly and efficiently or even work solely in digital has changed my mind. I'm an amateur when it comes to imitating or improving  upon my traditional stuff in Ps,  If you look closely, you'll definitely be able to see a couple places where it's clearly touched up. Yikes! I suppose I must start somewhere, though.

XX/XY

Below you'll find my first assignment for XX/XY - a diptych. I'd rather not say too much about the pieces, save that I'm much happier with the first one than the second. Both are opaque watercolor and ink on my favorite ridiculously heavy watercolor paper.

Still Alive, Just on Break

Well, my break is just ending in a couple days, but here are a few things I managed to make while not stuffing my face with home-cooked meals and staring at the computer screen...

Advanced Drawing Final

My Advanced Drawing final was supposed to be a series of paintings, made into a book, but at the end instead of a book I made a comic page...whoops. All the paintings are based off of a jumble of WWII reference images of American planes, mechanics, and factory workers. Anyway, here's what I made: