Gallery 1988's Required Reading goes live. Local man has tea and uses internet.

Greetings from the coffee shop down the street from my apartment! I've just been handed my Earl Grey tea, and it has some sort of metal lid and a timer on top of it. I'm not familiar with this custom, but I sort of enjoy it. I speculate the timer is to indicate when the tea has steeped. I also like that they have soy milk next to the sugar and dairy milk. Not that I would add soy milk to a black tea (Can you do that? Would that be appropriate?).
Anyhow, I'm here writing this blog post because I've been without internet at my apartment for a couple of days, and it has been a bit too long since I've updated here.
To the left is my print in Gallery 1988's Required Reading. For this show, each artist picked a classic book about which to do either a poster or art print. I did an art print for Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. I chose to illustrate a passage in the book in which the character Dwayne Hoover is standing on top of the Holiday Inn he owns, staring out at the city and thinking, "Where Am I?" as he thinks of the many ways he is connected to this place and wonders how his life ended up as it has. The fact that Dwayne's mental state is beginning to deteriorate at this point makes this passage interesting, as well.
I think asking "Where am I?" of oneself in this context (minus the impending madness) is a pretty universal experience; to think of past events and experiences that lead you to the moment you have a bizarre but obvious re-realization that this is my life. Reflection of the self and one's surroundings sometimes occurs so infrequently in daily life that when it finally happens, it feels like it's been a few years and you're left wondering exactly when it was you moved into the apartment you're currently occupying (or the Holiday Inn on which you're currently standing).
Required Reading was curated by Mitch Putnam of OMGPosters! and poster artist, Rob Jones. There is a ton of excellent work in the show, which you can check out and/or purchase here. My print, pictured above/left is currently available here. Below are some detail shots.

This was probably the most involved print I've done so far, with the drawing alone taking somewhere in the 16-20 hour area. I completed the full composition in pencil, and I inked the drawing in four separate sections, so I could have four separate key line films (this was how I printed different parts of the city in different colors). The print ended up being nine screens, the final being a transparent layer of white for the glow around the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts (a stilted, spherical structure described in the book that I couldn't resist drawing).

In other news, Poster Cabaret's annual Bicycle Print Show opens May 5th in Austin, Texas. I just finished my print for the show last week and subsequently shipped it off to the gallery. Other upcoming poster fun will include work for Ween, James Blake, and a tour poster for Iron & Wine. Plus a whole slough of paintings later this year, but more on that later.