365 days. (Finishing 2010. Looking at 2011)

On Christmas day while hanging out with family, I gathered a bunch of little pieces of scrap paper and spun out a whole bunch of small doodles. For fun. But more especially, to finally wrap up my 2010 draw365 project.

This has been a formative little project for me, begun mostly on a whim back at the beginning of January this year and becoming a pretty important part of my artistic development and artistic opportunity. It's also fascinating to look at a couple of posts I wrote during the year as the project progressed: early on at 31 days in, then at 65 days, and again at 276 days.... Mostly it's a fascinating awareness that I am a much more experienced artist now than I was 365 days ago.

So now I am looking at 2011 and thinking about what sort of 365 project I can do for this year; originally I was thinking that I might change up the emphasis; concentrate specifically on a certain medium, or a certain method, or weak area, etc. but at this exact moment, what I really want to make sure I focus on, is doing something every day. I think it was that sort of flexibility that helped me get through 365 drawings this last year: whether it was a small mixed media painting, or an almost completely digitally created illustration, or pen and pencil wordless comics, or a tiny doodle the size of a postage stamp, or a piece of a larger project, or a drawing on a piece of tea-bag wrapper, or even an experiment in using stuff from my surroundings... I was at least doing something artistically. (Here is the whole set of 365 drawings for 2010.)

I'd like to keep that kind of momentum.

I am excited to see what I can do and where I will go with my art-making over the course of these next 365 days.

Meanwhile, that page that has those 15 little doodles on scrap paper... I am enjoying filling in and around and under with even more doodling and drawing (mildly nsfw). I am really liking how these pages are turning out.
#amdrawing

MORE thoughts on Audience

I'm in the middle of a project that has me feeling my identity crisis and noticing how weak my commercial-art muscles are.

I am supposed to be creating playfully titillating images and instead keep veering off into obscurely disturbing images. (BTW, yes, Matthew Barney is one of my inspirations and don't click on that link unless you are prepared to be a bit disturbed.)

But I'm trying to rein that tendency in. Drawing lots of studies of how other artists do "fun" and "playful" (and, yes, "titillating", Woohoo.) I've been delighted by Erika Moen's boobie drawings, and Jess Fink's dick doodles , and amazing 19th century ukiyo-e prints of Tanuki and their unusually large testicles.

For this particular project, I am also trying to take inspiration from the art of Katsushika Hokusai, Hayao Miyazaki, and Dr Seuss.

(To top it off I have been revisiting various artists from my beloved Anthology of Swedish Alternative Comics, but most of them lean towards disturbing, so it's a really back and forth battle.)

Mostly, I'm trying to keep in mind who the particular audience for this project will be, balance that against what I would do with it if it was purely for my own entertainment, (and meanwhile figure out who the hell my audience is anyways.)

Anyhow. I just had to get that out of my system. Now back to drawing.

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(by way of example and for your viewing entertainment....)
here's a recent page full of sketches as I try to nail anime facial features (fun? Playful?):



and then here's a recent personal piece (obscurely disturbing?):

splashy big paint

Finally got around to watching Pollock.
Loving the movie on many levels.
But the various painting scenes throughout are really stroking a need for big surfaces and splashy messy creating. (I've mentioned that need before)
It may be a while before I ever do anything big or messy again. But the thought of it is still thrilling.

surgery in my sketchbook

Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. I keep mine in my sketchbook.
And sometimes, I perform surgery on it. Just because.
A spontaneous mixed media personal project this week. On a whim, I documented the work-in-progress. Tearing, making marks, gluing, cutting, destroying, putting back together,


I need to paint more often.

Cell by Cell [animation]

I've previously mentioned movies that make me tick.
Here's a few animated films that just take my breath away, make my fingers tingle, drive my urge to create.

From Ireland: The Secret of Kells.


From Japan: Princess Mononoke


And from France/[Iran]: Persepolis


enjoy!

promoting un-dead love

November was whirlwind back-to-back Rigor Amortis promotional events. Crazy, exhausting, and so very fun. Just had to share the highlights:

Andrew Penn Romine and John Nakamura Remy drove to Tucson to join me at Tucson's Comic Con.

John took a bit of video of us setting up:


He also was the only one of us to photo-document the event. (thanks John!)
(BTW... we sold EVERY book we brought,)

The day after the Comic Con we did a Rigor Amortis reading at the coolest little Coffee shop= Revolutionary Grounds. (Zombie erotica at a Marxist Coffee shop? Yes indeed :D).

Tucson Weekly showed up to record the reading: Yep, here is John and Andy saying things like 'penis' and 'vuvla' (and a whole lot more) ON VIDEO!

John:


Andy:


The next weekend I headed to LA, to join the Rigor Amortis group signing books at Dark Delicacies. It was awesome to finally meet fellow Rigor Amortis contributors Kaolin Fire, Lucia Starky, and Pete "Patch" Alberti, as well as online writer friends Adam Israel, Jenn Reese, and Chris East (AND just pure amazing folks Carol Penn-Romine, and Isaac.) (/whew!\)

Blessed Carol documented that event. (Did we really break your camera? Sry!)

Then I came home and prepped for a 109 mile bike ride. That's why it's taken so long to get this up :P

Here and here are Andy's blog posts on the subject (in case I missed anything).
Go team Rigor Amortis! Woot :)

Make Me F*cking Care

[warning. this post contains expletives.]

From the Good Fucking Design Advice Store:

"Believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night. Work outside of your fucking habits. Know when to fucking speak up. Fucking collaborate. Don't fucking procrastinate. Get over your fucking self. Keep fucking learning. Form follows fucking function. A computer is a Lite-Brite for bad fucking ideas. Find fucking inspiration everywhere. Fucking network. Educate your fucking client. Trust your fucking gut. Ask for fucking help. Make it fucking sustainable. Question fucking everything. Have a fucking concept. Learn to take some fucking criticism. Make me fucking care. Use fucking spell check. Do your fucking research. Sketch more fucking ideas. The Problem contains the fucking solution. Think about all the fucking possibilities."

yah... I pretty much fucking suck at every point on this list. (Except staying up all night. I actually do that quite a bit.)

therefore...
gonna try to care more, collaborate more, procrastinate less, have a concept, Etc...

it's called NaNoMangO (Plus Sunstoned!)

After my previous post,where I mentioned doing my own personal NaGraDraMo next month, someone drew my attention (/snicker) to NaNoMangO; the OFFICIAL art/comic-drawing alternative to NaNoWriMo.

Sweetness. I just joined the group.

(Disclaimer: yes, I have a bunch of unfinished art commitments I gotta tie up before I put another time-consuming project on the table.. but really, I am really getting excited about this!)

The tagline of NaNoMangO is "30 pages in 30 days", which is more pages than I was originally thinking... but here's how they broke it down.

Either: 1) 30 pages penciled. OR 2) 15 pages inked OR 3) 10 pages "finished"

Thinking I'll aim for the long distance endurance version of 30 rough penciled pages, for the "wow-do-I-have-that-many-pages-of-story-in-me?" experiment.

In other news, guess what came in the mail today??!!!

Zot! Pow! Sunstone!

Nestled in this edition (an amazing collection of LDS comic artists and comic aficionados) is the little comic I drew up; Being Born. My first ever published comic (not counting Bloody Eve ). AND, I get a mention in the intro! Noting the breadth of style, the vastly different kinds of comics Mormons are making, guest editor Theric Jepson queries:

"Look at Galen Dara's earthy mysticism (pg 60). Witness Nick Perkin's bobble-headed National Treasure (pg 84). Then ask yourself: How could they be more different?"

Thanks Theric. :)

It really is a stunning and eye-opening collection, chock full not only with a vast array of Sequential art by folks w/ ties to Mormonism, but also with multiple insightful essays about appreciating comics, Mormon artists, the new Wonder Woman, Crumb's Illustrated Bible, how it all ties into the Mormon experience, etc.

It was a pleasure to be a part of it.

Murals, Comics, NaGraDraMo, etc.

Just a few things of note:

1) Yesterday, just for kicks, I pulled out some house paint and doodled on my studio wall. I have been doing so many small, controlled illustrations and thumbnails lately, I really just needed to do something large, messy, spontaneous, and unplanned. It was VERY therapeutic, and I liked how it turned out too:

2) I'm in the process of hammering out specifics on a graphic novel I'm working on with a friend... and realizing that it's high time I brush up on my Illustrator and InDesign know-how. Especially when it comes to adding word-bubbles etc. My patchy Photoshop skillz just aren't going to cut it for the current project. Here's a quick glimpse at a quick (VERY rough) page study w/ my very insufficient dialogue and word-bubble additions:

3) Which leads me to my next personal project... In solidarity with my writer friends who are participating in NaNoWriMo next month, I'm planning on doing a second attempt at NaGraDraMo. This is dependent on if I can wrap up the current projects I am committed to, but I am hopeful and excited to give this another go around. I only have a vague idea of a cast and story line; but my idea is to aim for 18 to 24 pages, B&W, low-tech, and probably pretty wordless. (I will be using Tyler Stafford and Noah Van Sciver as inspirations for low-budget-but-way-cool comic making.) /Fingers Crossed!

okay, that's all.

on this, the 276th day of 2010 (a #draw365 post)

I just drew no.237 of my draw365 project.

As you may have noticed, I'm behind by 39 drawings. But here's the thing, as this year has progressed, I have been picking up work as an artist. It started with getting a slot in a comic edition of Sunstone, from there it was a chance to do some illustrating for Rigor Amortis, which segued nicely to doing some illustrations for Cthulhurotica, cover art for Little Death of Crossed Genres and working on a graphic novel with a friend. Plus a few more things coming up on the horizon.

So while I am behind on the official "draw365" projects, I have actually been putting out hundreds of drawings/sketches/studies lately that haven't lent themselves to uploading and sharing as such....

I had an epiphany late Friday night as I was drawing like a madwoman, rushing towards a midnight deadline: what I was doing right then, that evening in my studio, I would not have been capable of 276 days ago.

(Here's the post I wrote when I was only about 30 days in, and then later at 65 days.)

Draw365 has been a pretty formative little project for me.
Now, I AM still planning on getting 365 drawings uploaded as such. On principle. Meanwhile, I"m going back to my sketchbooks to keep working on early Mormon apostates, Japanese bathhouses, shinto temples, Ninja Monkeys, tentacles, zombies, etc...

#amdrawing!

Rigor Amortis Rising

Seriously... "SQUEEEEE!!!"
Remember that zombie erotica book I decided to get involved with so many months ago? Well, Yesterday was the official Launch of Rigor Amortis and thanks to the hard work of Erika Holt and Jaym Gates at creating some buzz about the book, within just a few hours it had risen to #30 on Amazon's Horror list! (Just above Pride and Predjudice and Zombies, just beneath Bram Stokers Dracula.)

(As I write this, it is sitting at #52, just underneath Stephen King's The Waist Lands & Stephanie Meyer's Eclipse, just above Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.)

BTW, Bitten By Books hosted a release party and Jaym had this to say about us artists:

"Each section has a beautiful, full-page illustration from artist Galen Dara. More illustrations fill the book, the surreal, grotesquely-beautiful things from Galen Dara’s pen, and the dark, strong art from Miranda Jean. Rigor Amortis wouldn’t half of what it is without the hard work of our artists."

Gotta love those who appreciate the arts :)
(Oh! thrilled and flattered that a print of one of my illustrations is the take-home prize for the winner of the Zombie Recipe contest. More info here.)

It's been a serious fun ride and this whole week is Zombie Week, dedicated to continuing the buzz on facebook and twitter. Join the Rigor Amortis Facebook group, and/or follow the twitter hashtag #rigoramortis or #zombieweek for more updates, story-line teasers, plus me and Miranda tweeting illustrations.
Oh.. and go buy the book!! :)

just for kicks.. here's the trailer, featuring artwork by Miranda and myself:

comic panels and pages (mining for favorites)

The other evening I took my sketchbook and went to the graphic novel section of my bookstore and just started looking. Looking for ideas and inspirations for a comic project I have undertaken with a friend. I did a lot of rough sketches, snapped a few captures.

At the end of this evening when I took stock of what I had collected, I found a unifying theme: Everyone of them was mixed in their media and short in their words.

Guess I'm predictable that way.

Here's a brief run down:

~Totally completely in love with artist Catia Chien, subtle, simple, profound and so very sensitive. I found two of her stories (Tumble weed, and Fall) in the (seriously amazing) comic anthology Flight.
















~Quite taken with the gritty, dark, painterly work of Ashley Woods (SFW wiki article, NSFW artist blog). This image is from his work in Metal Gear Solid

~Another lucky find from that anthology Flight, was the mixed media collage Dummy Brother, a mind-tripping, surreal visual journey by Jacob Magraw-Mickelson.












~Then, going back to the gritty side, I stumbled upon the magna BioMega, by Tsutomu Nihei. (A great review here.) The silence, the stunning layouts, the crazy, painfully beautiful handling of his forms (not to mention really liked the combination of organic + mechanical)... It really had me.












Now hoping a bit of it all rubs of on me as I start laying out our panels and pages.

last page/first page

Yep, at the beginning of this month, I was on the last pages of my book, it took me until yesterday to finally finish off that last page. I did it with this drawing. (Which I toyed with in photoshop to create this).

This book spans over three years!! I have NEVER made a book last that long (at least, not without misplacing it, which happened only once).

But anyhow, I start to get funny when I come down to the last page... what to put/draw/write on that page??? I get sort of hung up on the momentous-ness of it, assign all sorts of weird meaning, and even superstition to it. (Wtf?? I'm a skeptic!! But still... yah.) Eventually, I get over that and just fill it with whatever.

So now, I've done that last drawing on that last page... And now, laying on the table before me is a pristine, crisp, virgin moleskin sketchbook, with these gorgeous blank cream-colored pages.....
And I'm getting a similar funny make-it-MEAN-something feeling about making this first mark on this first page. But whatever. Here I go. I #amdrawing.

Btw, here's my journals and sketchbooks set.
And here's a few pages BEFORE the last page of the last book:

to do list (art projects)

1) finish up the few remaining illustrations for Rigoramortis (deadline aug 1).
2) draw up my contribution to the Little Death of Crossed Genres (deadline, aug 10).
3) draw up illustrations submissions for Cthulhurotica (deadline sept 15).
4) draw up illustration submissions for Monsters and Mormons (deadline oct 1).
5) draw up illustrations submissions for Scape e-zine.
6) start creating panels for the webcomic. (shhh, it's a secret)
7) catch-up on my draw 365 project (I'm about thirty drawings behind).
8) get serious (AGAIN) about creating a painting a week. (/sigh).

This list is hugely weighted towards speculative fiction illustration, which is fun; it's me getting back to my roots (as a kid, I cut my drawing teeth on dragons and demons.) But I also want to pursue the fine art side as well; to continue painting and creating mixed media assemblages etc. Hoping that I can find the time and the balance to do both. Or create a sort of funky middle way. Or.. something.

dreams, demons, fairy tales...

Dreams, demons, and fairy tales: that's the kind of stuff that makes me tick. Especially as they are rendered upon the silver screen.
Some of my favorites, from off the top of my head:

Mirrormask


Labrinth (more jim henson! plus David Bowie. /swoon)


Jan Svankmejer's Alice


Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind


Pan's Labyrinth


and finally, the truly horrific, Jacob's Ladder

Ernesto Neto

I think I have mentioned before that I like organic internal-organ-like type stuff. So of course, Ernesto Neto's installations have a very special place in my heart.

From this article:
"...his materials are gossamer-thin, light,
stretchable fabrics in nylon or cotton. like fine membranes fixed to the ceiling by stretched threads his works hang down into the room and create shapes that are almost organic. sometimes they are filled with scented spices and hang in tear-shaped forms like gigantic mushrooms or huge stockings,sometimes he creates peculiar soft sculptures which the visitor is allowed to feel through small openings in the surface.... Neto’s art is an experience which creates associations with the body and with something organic. he describes his works as an exploration and a representation of the body’s landscape from within."

His work reminds me a bit of Louise Bourgeuois's work. Also that of Magdalena Abakanowicz (w0w, I can't believe I haven't done a post dedicated to her yet. ) And reminds me how much I used to love hanging things from strings, making installations, etc...

For more images of Neto's work, see here, here, and here.

Daniel Dos Santos (and Silvia Moreno-Garcia too)

The current issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine has a great article on artist Daniel Dos Santos who specializes in painting tough girls. Well, I like tough girls too. And the whole article had some great bits about his process, his inspirations, his evolution as an artist, his book covers, etc. For purposes of brevity though, I just wanted to mention his thoughts on the push-pull between digital art vs hand skills, because it's something I've been grappling with myself:

"It's this constant inner battle, and skills versus digital. I think that the love affair with digital is a fad. In twenty years time people are going to miss analog skills. The're going to want to see painting."

Dos Santos uses photoshop for prelim sketches etc.. but for the final product, it's traditional oils that are his medium of choice. I am still in the experimental part of finding the right balance between my hand- crafted works and my digital works. It was interesting to get his opinion on the subject.

Btw, want to see him in action at his easel? Wow. And he puts out one of these every two weeks:

"It takes me two weeks to do a painting, including reading the manuscript, model shoots, and so on. I wish I had three weeks for each painting, but I don't. I have to paint two a month to make a living."

Yes, I have envy. And awe.


Now, random, but speaking of tough girls, I just listened to a wonderfully intense and raw short story, Jaguar Woman, (not for the faint of heart) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I will definitely be looking out for more of her work.

(image source)

bleeding it out in ink

Sometimes, I get anxiety (sometimes I get depressed). During a particularly trying evening full of tension I found myself drawing line after line in my book and was surprised at how successful it was at drawing out the toxins. (...the violent creative act of sharp object marring pristine blank surface...).

It's good to be reminded of this very easy and accessible coping mechanism. In my mind, I see a tiny similarity to the ritual nature of the sand mandalas created by Buddhist monks (that link is to a fascinating video, you really should watch it) but that's mostly my ignorance showing about said mandalas and monks. An atheist, I think that art making is one of the only forms of ritual or worship I currently practice. And, I guess, it's also frequently my therapy.

So, on a recent weekend, during an extended family gathering for the holidays, as the emotional wear and tear took it's toll, I retreated quite a bit into my book. And it worked. (Well, I survived anyhow).

Here's a glimpse at some of what I scratched out:

Big Bang Big Boom (by Blu)

just.. wow. Have I mentioned I like stop-motion animation? And street art? Here both are used to make "a short [9 min] unscientific story about evolution and it's consequences" (see website)

Josh Howard's take on Eve, plus thoughts on audience

image source

Well, it's old news now, but here's Josh Howard's spin on Eve:

"Journey back to a time when magic still thrived, dragons and fallen gods roamed the earth, and man was just a myth. The Garden of Eden was a place of perfect peace and tranquility. That is, until its keeper, Adam, went missing. Now, his newly created wife, Eve, must venture outside the safety of the Garden for the first time to go in search of her husband, all the while battling monsters,beast men, wizards, demons, and even the gods themselves. It's the fun and adventure of Samurai Jack mixed with the epic scope of Lord of the Rings." (more, plus preview here)

Just ordered my copy, interested to see his take on it.

Now I just need to get back to work on my own version; it's been on the back burner while I negotiate kids during summer vacation, working more hours, and taking on fun little side projects.

Meanwhile, something on my mind is how to successfully reconcile (or successfully split) my various artistic persona's. Those persona's being connected to divergent and fairly incompatible audiences, I'm starting to feel the push/pull more and more, the distressing tension that lies between the work that gets exposure & recognition among the intellectual/feminist/LDS community, vs the work that gets exposure & recognition among the speculative fiction/horror/graphic novel community. There is some overlap, but not much.

Option B: find contentment dwelling in that tiny niche where they DO overlap, but that seems to be a marketing dead-end and I AM trying to think of that part it too. (BTW, existing in a small isolated niche = story of my life. x_X )

Anyhooo, to end, one of my own Eve studies:

pages 3 and 4 (Being Born)

I really do like how these two pages, in particular, turned out. (If you click on the image, you can see it larger.) (Here's more about the story.)

a painting a week (take 2)

Heheheh, I just realized it was almost a year ago that I decided to try making a painting a week. It didn't go so well (life gets busy) but I did do a few paintings . Anyhow, going to try it again. Starting now. This will sort of go hand in hand (hopefully) with the Drawing a Day I am doing. These will mostly be smallish paintings (11x14 inches or smaller), mixed media, revisiting ideas and images I am already working on.

We'll see how it goes this time around.

Feeling a bit ambitious this week, I have already done TWO paintings! and here they are:
and:

rigoramortis

zombie erotica anyone?
heheh, eeeEEEEwwwww!!!!!

I'm Doing some illustrations along that line, but here's my conflict: to lean more explicit R-rated gore/sex? Or lean more towards pg-13 dark humor.

Probably a nice middle ground between the two will suffice. I'll have to a bit of drawing around that question.

And now, a few of my undead love roughs:
(and yes, I suck at text. I know)



(Just for kicks, here's a sampling of various ways Zombie Jesus has been done. I'll start there for inspiration.)

Keith Haring, Cecily Brown, and Wombat pOrn

Here's two of my favorite artists: Keith Haring and Cecily Brown. You don't get much different than them, Keith having a strong graphic, pop-art comic style, and Cecily displaying amazing painterly expressionism.

I guess this pretty much sums up my own pull between the two styles (sometimes swinging towards the graphic, sometimes swinging towards the painterly). It probably also sums up my own proclivity towards explicit subject matter: Here's Keith's Bathroom, and Here's Cecily's Hard Fast and Beautiful. (WARNING, Explicit!)

I was thinking of both these artists when I drew up this quick sketch on a dare: Wombat p0rn (WARNING, Explicit!)

It isn't a very good tribute to either of them, but at least it put them back to the front of my mind again.

Two things:
1) work to reconcile my 'style'
2)work to uncover the reasons behind my proclivity towards the explicit, so that it's not just a shock-and-awe gimmick.

One more thing: tonight I spent an hour or so painting, and it was wonderful.

angels.

So the character that didn't make it into my last comic was The Angel (not enough room, story-line went a different direction, etc). Now feeling the need to revisit and explore Eve's encounter with him. Previously, I have had her tie him up and cut off his head, beat him to a bloody pulp, or just do a little wrestling (taking a page from Alexander Louis Leloir).

Why all the violence?

Well,the angel is guarding the tree and it's fruit so, he's in her way . But also he's got this special sword (a flaming sword!) that she needs. Why? Well... I think she is going to kill God and needs that sword to do it. (Just a guess you understand, I'm still figuring that part out.)

So Angels will be on my mind and in my sketchbook/paintings for the next little bit as I work it all out.

For your entertainment (and for my inspiration) some fallen angels :Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as murderous angels in Dogma, and the most amazing Tilda Swinton as Gabriel in Constantine.

RIP louise Bourgeouis (who died yesterday at age 98)

“I have a religious temperament, I have not been educated to use it. I’m afraid of power. It makes me nervous. In real life, I identify with the victim. That’s why I went into art.”
~Louise Borgeois (a professed atheist)

to quote directly from the NYTimes eulogy: "it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable.... Fragility and fierceness were, in fact, the twin poles of Ms. Bourgeois’s art."

some glimpses of her art:
-a ginormous spider
-a whole room full of her drawings and sulptures (LOVE her fabric creations)
-a bed full of..? (more about that show here)
-the ever graphic fillette (and the mapplethorpe portrait of her carrying it under her arm)
-matching parts for parts w/ fillette, Janus Fleuri, also hanging by a wire.

And here's a video: Louise Bourgeouis, The Spider, the Mistress, and The Tangerine.

lazy artist.

I'm a lazy artist.

My usual MO is to just sit down and dig in to a piece with only a little bit of forethought or planning. Sort of making it up as I go along. "Opps, I didn't plan that... ah well, it works, won't bother changing it". That sort of thing.

Well, for the project I am working on now, I can't get away with that kinda shit. It must be planned. Constructed. Carefully put together with forethought and intention. And this process is exhausting creative muscles I didn't even know I had!! Whew I'm tired, every day from it!

But it's good tired.
Guess I needed a little exercise.

sunstone comic! (being born)

In case you didn't know, Sunstone is doing an issue for Mormon Comic Artists. (Woot!)

The deadline is coming up and I am getting serious with the pages allotted to me.

So, after months of drawing around the images/concepts, playing with style, taking them off into all sorts of random directions, I am now bringing it all together; taking all the loose ends and trying to coax them together (sometimes with gentleness, sometime with bailing wire), filling in the gaps that I've neglected up until now, ironing out the awkward transitions, etc.

For your entertainment, here's my written synopses (complete with links to the various images/ideas/concepts that haves been my studies for the past year. Warning, a good number of the images are fairly graphic.)

What I'm working on in particular:

~making the shocking imagery more subtle, finding the fine line between challenging and outright offensive and off-putting.

~balancing the gender aspect of it.

~finding the gaps that leave the reader/viewer confused.

~making it sequential (I am better at single panels but need sequence to tell this story)

~ etc

***************

Anyhow, feedback, thoughts, (constructive) criticisms are suggestions are welcome :)

#draw365 (now 65 days in)

I am now 65 days into my #draw365 experiment.

A couple of items of interest:

~I discovered a vibrant and active community of other #draw365-ers on Twitter and that creative interchange has been extraordinarily stimulating.

~Right around day 52 I really started to feel like I was making some break throughs in my method and process.

~The past couple of days, I have spent quite a bit of time polishing and cleaning up and editing the 'sketches' (digital illustrations, really.)

~I miss charcoal and paint and fast sketching. I mean, I am really liking the drawings I am doing right now, but when I look at some of the pieces being produced by other #draw365-ers, it makes me want to pull back a bit from photoshop, and take a detour back into some hands-getting-messy materials.

~I think I need to set a time limit. A friend recommended this and it really resonated. One obvious plug for a time limit is that I'm busy with lots of other things on my plate... but that's not the real reason. I am remembering exercises we did in an illustration class where we had 30 min to quick-draw out some concept and discovering that I did really good work when I couldn't afford to over-work/over-think it.

So there you go.
I have another 300 drawings to go.
We'll see where this takes us.

dirty sex

[Warning, this post contains disturbing content.
View at your discretion.]
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So, Nancy Elliott recently went off
on a graphic and explicit rant about
gay sex.
Makes me wonder
what her thoughts are about
lesbian sex.

365 sketches

If nothing else, I am hoping to accomplish at least that this year. A drawing a day. A sketch rather, usually done quite quickly, then scanned in and clean up in Ps. I've been doing them at the end of the day and while I usually have an idea what the sketch will be, I find that most times it takes on it's own life and mind as I move the pen across the page.

I'm also finding that I do not have that knack for knowing when to stop: I frequently over-work the sketch.

Also, I am discovering a tendency for disturbing imagery to emerge. I have a sketch for every day, but several of them I have on private simply because they are fairly graphic. (I blame it on that whole "mind of it's own" thing. It's not me. Really.)

There's a lot of other goals I have for this year as well (things like brushing up on my digital art skills, getting some computer programing knowledge, launching my web-comic, doing a painting a week, doing more with my etsy account, etc.) But we're already a month into 2010 and so far, I'm doing good to just put out a sketch a day.
(Interesting note: it was only last spring that I started drawing again. I had been on artistic sabbatical for quite a while before that. So, at least it's something.)

published

Bloody Eve is in print.
Well, one copy anyways, self-published.
To hand over to my instructor so I can get a final grade on the course I signed up for last year.
It has A LOT of mistakes: In the writing, in the style, in the flow, in the medium, in the editing, processing, formatting (etc etc etc). But they were good mistakes, the 'learning-from-them' kind, and since this is my first time, I'm okay with them (well, I can tolerate them, for now, at least. As long as next time is better. Yah.)

But here you go, if you want to see a preview of what it looks like in book form (it doesn't show the last few pages, but those are only a collection of sketches and paintings anyways; a sort of last minute add-on appendices I used to pad the page count)

Here's the final images:

Starting with the cover, front and back

Then the inside pages:Then there's this other two page spread that I ended up taking out of the story line, adding it at the end as part of the appendices (with the some of the other Eve vs the Angel images):

So there you go.
Be gentle, I'm new at this.

pgs 9 - 12

So, it took me months and months to do the first 6 pgs, but now in less than a week I have started burning through the last 6 with a good deal of ease and excitment. Yay for the holidays being over!! (Yes, I blame it all on xmas.) And also, Yay for neighbors who watch my son in the afternoons so I can get a few more hours up to my elbows in paint. (And too, I should credit the decision to remove almost ALL of the text/diologue. That has really helped me out. Words are so not my thing.)
(These are not finished, by any means, and two pages are on another panel that I neglected to photograph, but I thought I'd throw this up here anyways.)

Note to self:

don't quit your day job.
(or.... um, find a day job.)