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: