So it’s been awhile since the last update– sorry. My old computer of 7 years bought the farm last month and I’ve been trying to get all my data back from it; some of that includes passwords and what not for the site. That’s it for excuses though– I’ve got a shiny new Macbook! Consider me back, swinging in the swing of things, with all of you!

I think I’m finally biting the bullet and cranking down on really experimenting with my process, after thinking and talking about doing so for awhile. I don’t know why, but I’ve been kind of scared to really experiment– part of that is because when you’re on a deadline, you want to have a process that you know (the end visual, the time it takes, the tools you need) and can depend on. Your client also expects a certain product in return. Right now, unfortunately, I’ve got a lot of free time to make some new stuff, but I feel like it’s probably the right call in regards to my work. I’ve learned a lot of about illustration over the last year and I’m eager to put that knowledge to practice.

I also want to apologize in advance to all the artists whose styles I am going to bite in the coming months.

Our hero is shipwrecked? Abandoned on a graveyard beach? You can see how loose my original sketch for the final was. I purposely didn’t keep the sketch (or even the final) that tight and went out of my way to throw the kitchen sink at the drawing, medium wise. There’s a lot of mistakes overall but I feel like the process demanded me to be more active every step of the way, instead of my more linear working method of: thumb-> sketch-> lines-> flats-> color-> post.
It was fun! Drawing (and painting) is fun. Lest we ever forget.

So I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted about these guys on here. You may have noticed (or not, since I never post) little sheep running rampant all over my sketchbook pages. I’ve been drawing them since elementary school, with a fervor forged by a high school Portfolio Day critique (”Forget the sheep. The sheep are nothing.”) How does that Mountain Goats song go? When you punish a person for dreaming their dream, don’t expect them to thank or forgive you? My dream, in this case, is homicidal, dough-headed cartoon sheep.

For Christmas this year, I made little gilded patron saint sheep caricatures of my family, replete with gold enamel– they were a big hit, so I think I’m going to start posting more of these guys on here and may attach a little separate comic section to the site.

Got some cool projects coming down the pipe pike, along with more experimental things and sketches, so hopefully my updates will be more frequent. I’m looking into redesigning the site and perhaps separating the blog section out, but that’s probably a ways off.

I recently went up to New York City to visit some friends and do some illustration-related forays — specifically, attempting to do some old school portfolio drop-offs, checking out SVA’s masters program and hitting up the Society of Illustrators secret HQ as well as the Met. I tried to hit the ground running and get as much done in the short time that I had up there, but my notion of cardinal directions failed me with disturbing regularity (barely made my first drop-off time by a matter of minutes) as did the soles of my feet (dogs, barking, etc.)

Drop-offs were fun to do, even if they were just a physical manifestation of what an illustrator does already: sending your work out (almost) blindly and hoping for a response. Beating feet with a box under your arm and getting from A to B feels a lot better than sending out an e-mail though. If a publication had me drop-off at a mail room, I noticed that my booklet looked a lot different than any of the other ones that I saw — theirs were armor-clad in black leather cases, while my wire bound booklet flopped about unashamedly naked. Next time I’ll design it differently, but at the time I pulled a Rumsfeld and went to war with the army I had.

That’s kind of the crux of my illustration experience thus far: lots of guess-work. Having little to no illustration instruction in school, I’ve tried to piece together what I think being a successful illustrator and small business owner means, to varying degrees of success. In short: being an illustrator is a very mysterious concept to me.

However, I managed to snag a bit of Marshall Arisman’s time and visited the Illustration as Visual Essay MFA program at SVA. It’s located on the top floor of one of their buildings and visiting it was a really cool experience — a lot of what I’ve done as an illustrator, aka imitating facets of others practices, was done while looking at the careers of SVA graduates, so seeing all the spaces and student work was exciting. It was kind of like visiting the kung fu enclave nestled away on the mountaintop, except there was an elevator.

Marshall was very generous and forthcoming with his experience and the program. He emphasized being true to your drawing and storytelling intuitions; not drawing what you think people want to see, or to match some preconceived notion of what you think illustration looks like. His descriptions of the scale to which students promote themselves makes my own efforts look minuscule (collective mailing lists of thousands of publications vs. me at a book store) and his critiques of my work were accurate and informative. I came away excited about illustration, as if a lot of the “mystery” was lifted, and eager to draw. I’m still undecided as to whether or not it’s the right time to apply to the school (although I would love going there immediately, I’m going to have to scare up a great deal more money.)

The Spectrum show was up at the Society building when I visited. The video interviews with illustrators echoed Marshall’s sentiments: you don’t want to be the best at what you do, you want to be the only one who does what you do; be honest and don’t worry about it so much. The highlight of the show for me was seeing an actual James Gurney Dinotopia painting; stumbling across a giant James Thurber cartoon while looking for the bathroom was a nice surprise as well.

Back in Memphis, I’ve been trying to keep up the figure drawing regimen. However in these past two weeks I’ve been swamped with storyboarding work –it was an awesome gig, but also a lot of late nights. I’ll probably do another post about storyboarding in the near future.

This week, I’m heading up to Kansas City for a workshop with Chris Ying and Jordan Bass. Very, very excited.

All in all, it was a great trip to New York and I’m looking forward to going back. In the meantime I’ve got to, you know, totally retool how I think about illustration.

Thanks to Craig and Mike for the pics and Leath for putting me up.

Settling into a figure drawing routine here in Memphis: On Mondays, MCA has a semi-formal 2-3 hour session for 10$. It’s got charcoal-smeared drawing benches, cheap props and awkward silences — the works! On Thursdays at 10, the Cove puts on “Art Night” which usually amounts to me drinking Fat Tires and being the only one drawing. Come on down to either, or both, sessions if you can. Bring friends. All of them.

10.5.09– Hey, more figure drawing! Instead of doing a new post, I thought I might tack these onto here. Through the grape (kudzu) vine, I discovered a couple more little sessions that happen here and there; the sum of those efforts so far has added up to 4 straight days of figure drawing. With repetition, there is always the risk of complacency, but I’m trying to push myself each time I go out (looking, more looking, interpreting what I’m seeing; I think after a good observational drawing session, your brain should hurt a bit). My hand is starting to loosen up a bit too, which is nice — finally starting to reconcile my obsessive mark making without sacrificing structure and form.

Or something.

Back in Memphis, TN. The home of the best barbecue on the planet and consequently, a high percentage of expanding waistlines. Also: southern hospitality, high murder rates, and a transit area for some of my favorite people.

The first drawing is another quick one for Lawrence; it deals with social networking sites and how they have replaced older forms of “social networking.” The last thing I wanted to draw was some schmuck at a laptop, so I pitched the idea of a Jane Austen-esque Victorian ball paired with the accessibility of social networking websites. No one has to put on their full dress uniforms, epaulets etc., or evening gowns anymore. We can all stalk in whatever we want to now!

I was pretty happy with how it turned out, considering the short turnaround. It was also a test run for my new studio space, which has a little bit more room to spread out than my old space.

In the process of setting up the space, I gutted and threw out a lot of old stuff, furniture, etc. and I found some old etchings that I had done sophomore year of She-Curl running amok, much to pre-programmed chagrin of a cadre of robots. I don’t know why I stopped drawing her, but regardless it was fun to revisit. I just hunkered down and cranked it out in one sitting.

Sometimes I forget that drawing can be really fun.

These are some quick editorial illustrations that I’ve been doing for Lawrence.com and it’s new print equivalent inside the Lawrence Journal World; I rarely see them, but they look something like this when all is said and done.

I like doing these kind of drawings because they are almost completely random in their subject matter, yet also minutely specific. Requested subject matter might include: a scrumptious chocolate chip cookie, Katherine Hepburn, The Old Vinland Church. The turnaround for these are pretty short too, so it’s a challenge to meet the specificity requirements, whether that’s a particular likeness or a recognizable landmark, etc.

I’m featured in this little art blog called AField Magazine. Cool!

Also, the new issue of the Moon is up. The theme is centered around the radio and the amount of content in it is staggering. There’s creepy, oracle-esque Twitter Radio, fake movie soundtracks (with accompanying posters,) and articles across the spectrum about, well, spectrums.

The coming months are going to be kind of ridiculous for me; I’ve got a couple of really awesome comics projects that I’m going to be cranking on and hopefully I can share some of that on here soon. In addition, I’ll probably be moving back to Memphis and going through a fair share of other tectonic shifts. Fingers crossed please.

The Brain in the Jar over at The New York Moon, the lofty Zack Sultan, asked if I wanted to accompany a piece on sci-fi/futurist/fetishist short fiction writer J.G. Ballard. The article itself is a careening car wreck with heels on, filled with sound waves and Italians, so I had to say yes. Zack sent me an amazing little doodle of Tintin-Ballard as an oscilloscope readout and I took it from there.

The machine is total fiction, used perhaps on an old Star Trek set to serve as a facsimile of science; one raises and lowers energy shields by twisting a few knobs and pulling some levers. New quarks are named by flipping a few switches. The labeling on this abomination comes from a Ballard interview about airports:

“Together they constitute the reality of our lives, rather than some mythical domain of village greens, cathedral closes and manorial vistas. Much as I admire, say, Syon House, now home to a huge garden centre and a venue for business entertaining, I feel more at home driving through an office park like the New Square complex at Bedfont, its hi-tech corporate hangars only a javelin’s throw from the Heathrow perimeter road, and surely influenced by the proximity of all those 747 tailplanes that cruise the tarmac like the fins of amiable sharks.”

My gaudy color schemes wouldn’t really fit in this drawing, so I tried to make it cool to the touch, slightly halated, with some panic-button red thrown in as visual anchors. The large diagonal cast shadow is supposed to appear as if it’s crawling across the panel, in motion because we are perhaps in a spaceship spinning like a bullet while orbiting the bright side of the moon.

Likenesses are hard for me, so I also wanted to create a kind of narrative space around him as a context to augment the portrait. For the portrait itself, I looked at the way Andrew Jackson was engraved from the back of a twenty (that I scanned a long time ago. I don’t have any money laying around. Imagine that. By the way, did you know that Photoshop won’t accept scanned images of money? It brings up a dialog box slapping your wrist for attempting to counter-fit.)

After I finished it, I drew this cookie for Lawrence.com:

This guy was a really quick cover for Lawrence, about, you guessed it, BMX racing! No heady conceptual or narrative structures here folks, just some practice in shape welding and color balance. The original brief called for an 80s design to suggest the time period in which BMX got popular, ie. when kids would take their bikes out and imitate their favorite motorcross moves.

I’m going to try and implement a section for prints and stuff to buy soon. Right now, I’m trying to design some small booklets for the Liberal Arts seniors at the Art Institute. I think that I’m not quite cut out for straight up book design; I keep thinking about drawing robots and hands and things while kerning.

I am back, after a long dry spell, with a couple of illustrations; one for Lawrence, and the other for Memphis Magazine. The former was a cover about “urban gardening” and the latter was a spot to accompany a piece about returning home, and how places are defined by people as much as location.

These fell back to back in the span of a week, so it was an exercise in realizing ideas quickly and finding an appropriate way to render them just as hastily. I’ve finally broken my habit of using the tablet to draw my lines, and did these with brush and ink, and blue line pencil, respectively. The effect on my line work wasn’t as drastic as I had thought, but I guess it’s because I’m drawing the same way regardless of media.

I worked with the inimitable Phil at Lawrence again, and as always his editorial sense is spot on. He’s pretty adept at drawing the line when my ideas get too verbose or oblique, and making sure I focus on those first few seconds when a viewer is browsing over the magazine; the image has to be appealing yet communicate clearly. The first few sketches didn’t inform the article succinctly enough (would someone who gardens, ergo someone who would read the article, be interested or “get” the image on first glance?)

The tiger paste-up was used in this sense to denote an urban space, as well as suggesting that by going “green” people are doing their part to be ecologically responsible. Tigers happen to also be quite handsome and visually compelling creatures.

Next, I worked with Hannah and a new client, Memphis Magazine, to make this little spot to accompany a short memoir piece; in it, the author describes playing baseball by himself against the back of his grandparents’ house, and using the trees in the back yard as bases. He also describes visiting the house years later, after his grandparents’ deaths, and noticing how overgrown the magnolia tree in the front yard had become.

While the piece is ultimately about how places lose their meaning (to us) without people to inhabit them, I didn’t want to just focus in on a singular emotion of loss or nostalgia. I took a lot of short fiction classes in school and during the process of paring down stories, one of the suggestions that was brought up over and over again was to focus on objects rather than abstractions. Objects can be scrutinized for symbolism, describe context, be infused with emotional content, so on and so forth, while general ideas, when simply written about or said aloud, are vague and inherently meaningless.

I chose to focus on the act of playing baseball alone, using “ghost runners” as proxy teammates (my brother and I used ghost runners a lot, but more due to the fact that we were huge nerds that no one wanted to play with) as well as to foreshadow loss to our young narrator. The magnolia tree, to me, was a really interesting detail because it described the place so well (the South) but also because the flowers on a magnolia tree are similar in appearance to Japanese cherry blossom petals. And maybe I’ve watched too many samurai films, but when I see pink petals falling, I know someone is going to bite it soon.

Adam from Dog Horn Publishing (who puts out Polluto) contacted me to see if I would want to work on a book cover; I bit and jumped off the deep end, proposing a front and back as well as doing the design. I’m not really a great designer by any stretch, but if I was going to do the spread already, so I thought that I might as well try and control the whole thing. This kind of project is really nice as it affords a lot of freedom and plenty of room for interpretation.

The book, A History of Sarcasm by UK-based poet Frank Burton, involves a great deal about transformations. The story in particular that Frank wanted to focus on has people getting into a fight and then literally changing matter states and flowing down the street.

At first, we were kicking around an idea of a “sea of humanity”, which was the top right sketch. I thought that the visual metaphor was too literal and the sketch was weirdly erotic, which would skew the feel. I don’t know about you, but I actually judge books by their covers like, all the time. And I didn’t think I would like to pick up a human soup book.

I ended up separating the various elements so that the viewer could make the connections themselves. I wanted to draw a reality like the reality in the book; one where there exists certain strange laws of physics that just trigger occasionally, and everyone is cool with it.

PS. My issue of Midfinger Mag is up!

These are for some shirts that Muddy’s is putting out in limited numbers. I’m always looking to inject narrative into things, like some kind of literary pastry chef, so I made a little wonder-band led by our hero, Ms. Curl, whose age and occupation seem to change daily. On trumpet, Louis Armstrong, who you may have heard of. On violin, Chester Cricket from New York, and on lute, Kostas, a Cretan war veteran.

I tried to keep the technicality of the figures to a minimum to increase the readability of each character’s silhouette, especially since I figured that I would drop the lines to get more colors while keeping price and process down. It’s easy to get carried away with mark making though, at least for me.

I promise to post more. Seriously. There is so much to do it’s paralyzing. However, the year of the Ox is rolling around in a few days (aka my jams) so I’m going to keep my head up.

Around the same time Chinese people world-wide are finally making a racket after sitting timidly in cubicles and offices all year, I’ll be featured in a hip, new Italian rag called Midfinger. Little do they know, my levels of anti-hip have risen to toxic new levels and everyone in a one block radius of my house now wears fleece lined hunting pants when they go bowling. Regardless, the magazine itself has enough cool to muscle past this, so check it out Feb. 1. And bring a translator!