First SPX!

This past weekend I went to SPX for the first time, and it was so great. I came back with a bunch of great comics and about 400% more psyched than I was going in. Below you'll find a silly sketchbook comic I made to document the event as well as some photos of *part* of my haul (Includes a signature from Chris ware on the copy of Lint I brought along from home).

 

Salty n' Fresh Cork Nuts For Sale

Hey! Remember when I was all like "I'm making this thing called Cork Nut!" a while ago? Well I did make it, quelle suprise. Cork Nut #1 is a weird little 24-pager zine which is 75% comics, 15% drawings, 10% monosodium glutamate. It includes all of Bagel as well as other drawings and sketchbook comics from my stay in Montréal. A sort of documentation of a time period, I guess.

WANT ONE? You can get your very own copy on my bigcartel RIGHT HERE!!!

Anyway, pix below...

Lovingly Hand-Bound

Endpaper madness

sketchbook inclusion

Not part of the zine, but a drawing I made on my way to YUL. 

Human Assembly

En bas, you'll see Human Assembly, my submission for Lodacal Comix #7. NSFW, hide the children. Actually don't, it's nothing they haven't seen before.

Also included in this post are some sketches from coffee shops (Olimpico, Club Social) of late. I'm struggling with a recent addiction to the iced soy lattes from Club Social. They're a reasonable size (unlike any American drink) but very sugary, and they emerge from some sort of sweetened coffee slushie machine. I gotta get back to my black allongés, it's far more respectable.

Sitting around with Bagels

You'll find below:
-Page four of the bagel comic. I decided to change a few things about how I approach the story/the drawing for the next few pages after this one so I'm no longer sure how long it will be. Planning's for squares and successful people!
-Some little watercolours I made on the paper that my parents were so kind as to mail to me all the way from the PacNW. The first couple were scanned but the others were just captured with my crappy digital camera so they are a little dark/weird.

Enjoy & Fullview xoxoxox

A Warm Week

It's been pretty hot recently, a trend which I expect to continue for the remainder of my stay. Time seems to be passing all too quickly. Anyway, here's some more sketchbook documentation, chronologically. As always, things look much better if you fullview for some reason.

S'more draws

A few more random drawings from the weekend. I've been thinking about the whole "sell drawings" thing and I realized that I'll have to invest money in thick paper to draw on (or at least a separate sketchbook) before I can start making them to sell. A bit of backwards progress in an endeavor that is not even certain to make me a single loonie. Bleh.

On the plus side, I finished one page for my newest 10 page project. I'd been procrastinating/dreading that first page for a while because I was treating the comic like a school assignment. If I was working on something serious I'd have to draw out all 10 pages first before inking. But since inking is fun, I'm impatient, and this is just for kicks, I'm drawing/inking each page sequentially (after doing all thumbnails of course). Psyched but I need to work faster.


(Embiggen these)

Fairmount Bagel, my muse and a main feature in my next comic. Bagels here are lighter and more delicious than the new york variety. Sesame is king. Supposedly St. Viateur is also good, but they have eggs in them :(

Tam Tams! It was the first time I even stopped by tam tams and I was not disappointed. The vendors are not of much interest to me (seems very tourist-oriented...I saw a man giving a white girl dreads which was pretty symbolic of the whole sale) but the actual drumming part is really cool. They go on FOREVER.

Places I've Sat

I've never been one for drawing environments too much, I'm much more of a figure person, but lately I've been enjoying sitting in one spot for a while and just drawing my immediate surroundings. It's kind of like a puzzle - trying to make all the perspective and proportions line up on the fly in pen.

I'm hoping to get a little faster at these and maybe try to sell some drawings in my free time (while making other drawings?) to tourists, since my internship is sadly unpaid.

(embiggen em)

Park St. Viateur...there is a very shallow moat sort of thing that creates a small island in the center (this is where I am sitting)

looking out the door at Le Cagibi, my favourite cafe so far.

Rue saint viateur and avenue de l'esplanade, not far from my apartment. Behind me is a cafe/bar where all the italians hang out to argue and watch football

Note taking

I thought I would share a little of my sketchbook today, since working in it is such an essential part of my creative process. My sketchbook is essentially a record of all the stupid/genius ideas I come up with as well as a receptacle for random bits of paper, images, doodles, class notes. I know a lot of other artists use several sketchbooks or have one reserved for "good" stuff, but for me it makes the most sense to cram everything together as a sort of comprehensive record of my brain.

Anyway, here is the current cover of my sketchbook as well as a few pages that combine classwork or class notes with whatever my hand feels like drawing at the moment.

It's hard to tell, but this book is about the size of a math textbook. Perfect!

Left - studies of the Brian Chippendale piece 'home on the run' as a part of a comics assignment. Right - some quick figure drawings...and other stuff. 

Left - Psychology of gender notes. Right - first page of art history notes.

Continuation of art history notes - this part of class was a very fast slide lecture.

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.

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.