The IKEA guide to solar food dryers.

Some diagrams I made for some of the grad students I went to Madagascar with! We had to avoid using text. Like an IKEA construction manual. The woman in the first diagram was referenced from a photo taken by Trish Previte. I should probably let her know that.

Also here's your random, everyday fantasy painting in progress. This is going well, and I'm glad- I have started a million of these fully-rendered photoshop painting type deals and have never been happy with any of them.

There are obvious problems with anatomy....pshh. Also, drawing chub is hard. Hard! but I really wanted her to have big thighs and a belly. Boop boop. By the way do not do NOT type "chubby belly" into a google image search. I am a moron.

Roosts

Illustrator, I am sick to death of you!

I have been sitting in front of a computer since 1:30pm. I busted my ass at work, and then I ate a burger, and then I busted my ass on this. Movies watched today: Julie & Julia, About a Boy, Space Cowboys, and G-Force. And I really mean it-after sitting for this long, my ass literally feels busted.

Birds are really boring. Who knew? But they're full of shapes and little graphic splotches, so that was kind of nice.

Here is the story I got the idea for this illustration from. My mom shared it with me over break.

I left 4 birds out because of time. And because I was darn sick of 'em. There shold have been 2 more mockingbirds (very far left bird, second branch) a blue jay, and a wood thrush. Oh well, sorry Zach Brockhouse.

They definitely work better as a set. Ghost birds don't look very finished. Don't you think?

I'm going to lay off the paper texture for a while. Yeah.

Halp

EE Thank-you card

Here is what I made for the sponsor of the Eco-Explorers trip.

Ringtailed lemurs aren't my favorite but besides being really iconic, they are sooo shapes.

Renter Character Concepts.

Janice and her Landlord.

She is too cartoony and he is not cartoony enough!

Her hands are like "Derp! Hand! Derpy derp!"

Experimenting

HI, does anyone know why my images don't get bigger when you click on 'em? They sure used to!

Saturday night I spilled wine on Katie.

I texted her on Sunday to apologize.

She said we should maybe get me a cone.

I said it would probably be a good idea if we also filled it with cereal.

Thusly:

I thought I'd take a break from IP to experiment with illustrator a bit. I learned a lot. But photoshop is still king around here. Also I just downloaded ART RAAAAAGE and I'm really excited to play with it.

Also I am aping pretty much everything in this image so juuuuuuuust shut your mouth. LisaDuBoisMikeKrahulik

But I like Katie's hair. And signature earrings, and legwarmers. And pocket skirt.

But that stool needs to be less of an afterthought.

Biestley

I'm always mentioning Stephen Biesty and his cross sections. I need to get more of his books. I only have "Incredible Cross Sections" I don't think this one is in there:

Homeboy doesn't use a ruler. Like whaaaaat

EDIT: weird, it won't get bigger. Well, here it is elsewhere.

And we're done

Sommin' from werk.

I never show people what I do at work. Here's what I did all day today.

Farts.

Works in progress

I didnt want to post these until they were finished, but I guess I should prove that I've been doing something. First image is Katie Eberts in a dream I recently had. I started doodling it as a small joke, but it is becoming more and more serious. Jesus I mean I spent a whole weekend on it and then several evenings after that. And the whole time I'm like...what does this have to do with anything? I guess we'll see when it's done.

Next is something I started yesterday while watching Legion on Netflix watch instantly. That movie made me want to give up watching movies forever. What a piece of garbage. A while ago I bought a comic with the same name and thought maybe that this was the same deal, because that was also about the apocalypse. Oh my god, that comic- it was so good. Think of the most violent, gory thing you've ever seen and triple its effect. It was about a musician who played a certain song, an artist who made a certain color and...seriously, I just tried finding it online and I cant, which worries me, because my copy has disappeared. Anyway these 3 creative people make 3 things in their own respective media and it brings about the apocalypse. Which is the scariest apocalypse I've ever read. Towers made out of body parts, etc. Auuuughhh I wish I could find it, it was so great. Anyway, futuristic girl in her underpants, smoking a cigarette, pretty classsic...cigarettes are like the only props I can ever come up with, besides guns, and I only vaguely know what guns look like.

But this illustration, and others of its type that I have seen, have really got me thinking about digital inks again. I had recently become something of a brush purist...for some reason? Even though I would probably pick Darrow over Smith in the battle of Geofs/Jeffs. I can't really say why I got so into it. It's like I read Bone and got too obsessed, so when I had independent study with Joe I brought the whole damn book in and said "I want to do this!" Then of course Blankets is great...but both those comics are black and white, and I am so obsessed with color, and a lot of the time I just don't think color looks that great with brushed ink.

Plus Brush-inks make me so nervous sometimes I stop working for days and days at a time...because, you know, if I don't start working I can't possibly screw up. That is never my attitude towards digital media. I dive right in, sometimes stupidly, and became really engrossed right away. Also I find scanning ink really stressful. Also I may be getting my hands on a cintiq soon, thanks to a very special client. And that would change everything, wouldn't it? I dont know. I always feel like being extremely prolific when I sit in front of a cintiq. But I am worried that if I did get one I would never leave my apartment again.

Digital ink? Real ink? What do you think?

Nomnomnom

Some inspiration.

BBC WAT IS IT WIT U AND UR MINISERIES THEY DRIVE ME NUTS WITH GLEE

List of story ideas.

Oh hello there.

Fall break was pretty perfect, even if I did end up with an oozy knee wound. I wasn't running or performing any kind of physically complex maneuver, just walking, and I fell over. On my knee. Good news! I didn't cry. And now I have a pair of tights with some legitimate battle damage. I wonder if I get marked down for talking about things like this on my blog. But in all seriousness- oozy.

So a little while ago Erica brought up a good point- what's so wrong with autobiographical stories? I guess I don't want to talk about myself and get credit for it, yo know? I do it enough already. And so many people do it. So many boring boring people. But oh well. It's easy, and I have loads I could say.

So here are my ideas as far as fictional stories go:

1. The Renter- Which I did last year, and I plan on re-doing. It's about a girl who has to move out of her house due to her landlord's wishes, and while she's packing and stuff she encounters this little creature. And she tries to kill it but then doesn't. Yeah it works better as a comic than it does as a summary.

2. Untitled snow castle project- This is also a story I did earlier but never finished and I want to re-do. It's about a woman who lives across an alleyway from an empty lot. In the wintertime, two awful children build an impenetrable snow castle and constantly attack the woman with snowballs anytime she passes. In the end she melts the snow castle with her hair dryer. And then something else happens- I don't want to ruin it.

3. Backwards story- I really want to do a story that runs backwards. And while I was thinking about this, I decided it would be fun it it happened on a train. I keep randomly developing this one, bit by bit. I think it's going to be the most fantastical- Like, the train is the only way to get to this small village in the mountains where a masquerade is held annually, and people are allowed to come by special invitation only. Fun, right? It would be set in the fall. Honestly every time I think of a crazy fun fantastic story like this it is always always set in the fall. I love fall.

Nonfiction. Well, semi-non-fiction.

1. Googling Your Name- a story about the dangers of girlish obsession. This won't be exactly true-to-life, but it will be derived from real elements...

2. Another untitled project. This one is going to be about artistic frustration. Much along the lines of Adaptation, except for comics. How art just isn't a fun time for some people, but we have to do it anyway.

3. I'm not so sure about this last one. I thought I would tell this story about a really bad night I had after eating too many mushrooms. Uh....but that's kind of annoying, isn't it? The thing is, I think my reaction to them really says something about me. I don't know, I might change this.

Pshhh.

I just watched The Ring for the zillionth time. I really want to write horror comics someday.

EDIT: I just remembered Jenny asked me why I don't like manga. Well, I do. I mean, some of it I do. I've had a rough relationship with manga and anime, we'll say. I think there's a lot of good stuff out there. Everyone knows that. (That's right, everyone.) But for a period of my creative life I got really sucked into not only drawing in a manga/anime style, but writing in that style. Really melodramatic stuff. Emo kids that could turn into giant animals. Oh my God, I shouldn't say things like that in a public space.

I think I maybe gave anime and manga up because I was sick of being so weird, and I never wanted to look back. I just have bad associations with it, it's nothing personal. (It's not you, anime/manga, it's me) And now if I try to watch it or get into it I can't. anime tends to be really poorly produced. Oh, what about Miyazaki movies, they say. The only thing that makes a Miyazaki movie "anime" is its being made in Japan. Did that sentence make sense? Plus when I spent all that time drawing girls who were also part...dragon and had huge eyes and tiny noses and big old boobies, I was ignoring what people actually look like. Which a mistake a lot of kids who want to go around drawing anime make. Actual anime makers don't start out their art careers drawing cartoons. They start by drawing real people.

Illustrators build success on having a distinct style. Is anime-style distinct to me? Uh, no. I don't care how popular drawing anime fart porn would make me among the plebs of deviantart. I want an actual sort of career. Can you name a lot of American cartoonists who are making bank on drawing in a manga style? Fred Gallagher doesn't count. (What a fucker.)

Speaking of American anime, I do love love love Avatar. I don't know what to say about that.

Best song ever?

We used to listen to this in Polish class. I haven't heard it in foreeeeevvverrr. Try not to get overwhelmed by its greatness. LOLZ

The last three pages.

Last page is my favorite of the whole buncherooooo. I colored these alllll today and then printed and turned it in.

Lessons learned:

1. more care must be given to word bubbles.

2. lightboxes are amazing, draw everything 2 or 3 times.

3. my handwriting is awful but not as awful as doing text in illustrator. barf!

4. Be loose.

5. Black is your friend.

6. So are gloves, even if you look tooootttallly stupid.

7. Pelikan drawing ink ftw.

Page three

Yeah whatever

Friday post

So I recolored it and I like it much better. But there is pretty much nothing that will make me like the second page! Arrrgghh! I got too excited to do the inks so i got lazy with the pencils. I wont make that mistake again.

First page of the Madagascar comic.

Well here it is. Tell me what you think. It's the first of 6 pages I'm submitting to the international show.

Dove Blood

Okay

So things have changed. Instead of doing one long story, I'm doing an anthology of short ones. I have two ideas so far, the first being re-doing the renter because i just hate hate hate how that turned out, but I like the idea. The second idea I'm riding on is a story that goes backwards... Do you remember the episode of Seinfeld that went backwards? Always been my favorite. Anyway, it's going to be about a family reunion that takes place on a fancy train. Fun, huh? Story goes backwards, train goes forwards. It's like a physical timeline. Except I just realized that family reunion+fancy train= darjeeling limited. So maybe I'll make it about a wedding. Or something else. I literally came up with family reunion this morning.

In other news, I finished the ink for the first page of my international show submission. Here's the raw scan....(except tiny) with absolutely no editing, text, or color. I was really stressing out about scanning using denril since it hasn't been working well on my personal machine, but I think this worked out nicely. I need to add some more shadows. I chickened out a little with those.

Want to know something really embarrassing? Despite the fact that I work at the hospital, I had to ask someone how to spell "medicine".

Mandatory Friday blog post

EDIT: Okay here's a thing. First page of my international exhibition submission. I finished the pencils yesterday morning and got started on the inks, but I ran into several problems.

1. Although I tried my best to not touch it, the denril seems to have been soiled in a few places. This of course means that ink won't stick to it. So I ordered some drafting powder on the interbutt. Also some thin cotton gloves so i don't have to tape paper to my hands.

2. My ink is garbage. I ordered some pelikan drawing ink on the interbutt.

3. Actually those are the only problems.

I expedited the packages so hopefully they'll get to me before tuesday...but probably not. So until them I'm just working on the pencils. I laid out and sketched a bit of the second page, but I'm getting antsy and bored now so I think I'll go for a run. I think it's good that I got these issues sorted out right now.

This is actually a mirrored image. And its blurry.

Also I loved the season premiere of Grey's.

Hey world. This is a stand in to say, hay, I have nothing to show right now and probably won't by noon tomorrow. I am going to the studio (i accidently typed stupid more than once there...hmm.) in the afternoon sometime probably after i have my gym time and breakfast and coffee and sort myself into a real person again. Augh I'm tired.

Inspiraitchun

So my fancy, aluminum, super-sleek keyboard for my new-ish imac lost its ability to properly express the "u". Hmmm yes. So I'm on my more-than-four-years old Macbook Pro, which is sans battery, has an itty-bitty screen, and is covered in stickers that thoroughly define my identity. I was full of woe until I was reminded of the desktop image I left it with months and months ago:

As you've already assumed, I am now delighted.

Sooo....inspira-tron. I guess, since I'm writing and illustrating a comic, I should start with some of those.

It is likely that Bone will always be on the top of my list as far as comics go. There is so much to love- The black and white, the mastery of line, the characters, the setting. It is exciting, suspenseful, funny, and...I guess I'll say it...heartwarming. It is not all I aspire to be, but it's a lot. I owned it for a long time before I cracked it open and spent one glorious weekend with it. It's one of those books I wish I hadn't read, so I could read it again.

Oh it's so obvious that I would pick Blankets, isn't it. But you know, I had avoided reading it for something like 6 years because its cover makes it look like namby-pamby-lovey indie garbage. But I was at the library the other week, and thought, oh well, it's not going to kill me. And then I loved it. Definitely not because of the story. I think that's for two reasons...one, I'm tired of the inevitable incident of molestation I will encounter in an autobiographical comic. Two, I've never suffered a crisis of faith. But the gestures are beautiful. Every page is perfect and inventive. I ate this one right up because of that, even though the story made me go "Ack."

Okay yeah I know I talked a ton about Asterios already. But seriously, look at this page. It is undeniably beautiful, inventive, and funny! This comic is so darn complete. The colors are all incredible, the character design is clean and specific, and, oh, they act like real people. Which is almost unheard of in comics. If. you. ask. me. The only thing it's lacking is real... entertainment value for us youngins. It's hard to get excited about a story involving an old asshole and his nigh-submissive ex-wife. But it's really beautifully told, all the same.

Next subject...the cinema! Mostly I want to talk about strong, interesting, realistic(which typically means completely unlikeable) characters, tension, and time travel!

Characters first. Here are my favorites, all of them taken from movies written by Charlie Kaufman...

Oh my God, I love Nicolas Cage. Please don't tell anyone. In Adaptation he plays Charlie Kaufman and Charlie Kaufman's fictional twin brother Donald. Obviously as far as character realism goes, Kaufman is cheating a little by basing him on a real...himself. But...he's still my favorite fictional person ever. He is fat and awful and just so totally wrapped up in his own integrity. I mean, he's indescribable. And I've never felt such a kinship with anyone, real or imagined...or both, in this case, I guess. I just want to write people like Kaufman can. Flawed and awkward and selfish...John Cusack in Being John Malkovich.

Oh just watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkNJU77eglo

Oh, and I've never found a more realistic depiction of a long term relationship than Joel and Clementine's in Eternal Sunshine. Just everything. They don't have clever, bouncy, funny dialogue. They interrupt each other, they say things they don't mean, they start fights with each other over the dumbest things. Clementine is just...so obnoxious, Joel blah blah blah you get my point, I'm tired. Moving on.

Tension. I dig it. I wish I could come up with a more clever example than The Prestige but I can't right now and don't especially feel like it.

Time Travel!! Here are my favorite time travel movies:

Oh My God this poster, what a mess. You can't read the text in the middle at all..and what is this movie about? You guessed it...whales. I'm not kidding.

Despite these two gems being my favorites, I wouldn't model my story after anything from either of them. Now, here is a movie that does time travel right:

Somehow it manages to be a completely realistic depiction of two friends that build time machines and then use them to win money during March Madness. I THINK. They don't exactly hand the plot right over to you. You have to watch this movie several times and then wikipedia it to figure out what really happened. But it's quiet and lovely and twisted. Made for $7k! So yeah, if there's anything that inspires the time-travel aspect of my story, it's this.

Well, that's all.

IP Blog post 2

Interesting title, I know. I don't have many images to put here this week, but let the record show I did write an outline and a little bit of dialogue. It's tougher than I thought it would be.

I also made the decision to go with pure black and white, inserting color strategically...

Anyway, here's some inks I did. Jane was with a #2 brush, Martina was in photoshop (yuck)

Mmmmmm deliciously low-res. Sorry people.

I have a huge urge to do a bunch of random drawings of these two, but at the same time I feel like my creativity needs to be concentrated on more important aspects...Maybe I'll get around to it anyway.

This week I'm working on more character designs, more dialogue, and improving the structure of the story. The story I'm not going to post here for the public to see, because I don't want to ruin it for anybody. I want this blog to be for the visuals of the story only.

First Post of the New Year

So how great was Temple Grandin, right? I wish my mom coulda come.

So I talked a bunch in class, as I like to do...about my project. And I have a bunch of character sketches already. There are 2 central characters, and when I started talking about the project, I randomly started calling them "Martina" and "Jane". The names really stuck, and now I'm keeping them.

I have been drawing Martina a lot, mostly just to see if I can get her look down with real consistency. I think I'm having a lot of luck doing so. She has a really plushy, round chin and messed up teeth and a sharply angled upper lip. I wanted her to look relatively attractive, but not perfect-comic book-female-attractive. I drew a million faces with all different mouths and noses and eyes and head shapes before I arrived at hers. Here's a few(I had to crop some out because my sketchbook is a little damaged from too much love)

So the one I picked is on the top right. I have been simplifying it since I drew this, to make my own life easier and for a more efficient comic output. Since Martina is obsessed with TV and movies, I gave her the Amelie haircut.. because, I mean, what girl doesn't want to be Amelie?

Living in a huge apartment in Monmarte with her waitressing money? Preposterous.

I have 10 minutes to finish this post, so I'm going to stop rambling. Here's Martina in a few random poses:

And here's Jane...she's a masculine dresser.
I am basing her on Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is the shit.

Seriously. Watch Antichrist.

I think for tuesday I'm gonna do some inked and colored character designs, and maybe some colored backgrounds. Yes?

Oh, and, last but not least, here's me and the love of my life:

EDIT 09/9/10: I abandoned this story ages ago. But I like the picture!

Hi there. I'm starting my IP blog early. Maybe you should, too? I have lots of ideas knocking around in my head.


Here is a concept from one of them. This is Sarah, looking worried, in her pretty house that she shares with her husband and daughter. She is part of one of the stories I have layed out so far for IP.

She's pretty obviously based on Lindsey Marshall, one of my favorite actresses.

Work in progress.