Quality of Armor

Just a quick heads up before I finally eat some breakfast and start drawing elephants, bicycles, and various buildings: The Spring Mystery Tube is now on sale. There was a mistake in the store that has been rectified. If you tried to get one earlier and were unable to, it works now. These are going quickly.

Also available on my site is what's left of my Rural Alberta Advantage posters. The venue has informed me that these sold out at the show, so the last of these prints are up on my site now.

More to come!

Honey Badger Don't Care

Just a quick update here. The blog has taken a serious back seat as I attempt to move without interrupting things too much on the art and freelance front. I've been living in Joliet, a city about thirty miles from Chicago, renting a portion of my friend's house. I've also been working here, having converted most of the basement into a home studio. I pulled the last screen here yesterday (the ninth and final color on a new art print for an upcoming group show at Gallery 1988). Today was spent taking things down, packing up prints, and preparing to move to Chicago. To the left is my homemade washout booth (thoroughly stained with lots of reclaimed QTX) as I began to disassemble it.

Going through stacks and stacks of printed paper, I've come across a whole slough of misprints, test prints, and forgotten line variants, along with original drawings and sketches while cleaning out my office area. This means a spring mystery tube is most certainly coming in the next few days. Check back soon for on sale information; these are going to be some really good mystery tubes. For reals.

I'm really excited to finally be living in Chicago proper. I've got a ton of stuff to get right to work on, as well as an essay I've been meaning to write and post on here, so you can expect to see more frequent updates very soon. I'm also looking forward to the (eventually) impending nice weather the resultant bicycle use.

Can I Ride

Hi! Sorry for not being terribly bloggish as of late. I've been incredibly busy with a whole mess of other fun things, however. I put in between nine and ten hours of just drawing today. Below is my cramping hand as I rest it and apply ice. I'm not sure if ice actually helps this, but it certainly feels good. More to come!

Postcard process photos

I was recently commissioned to design and print a small run of postcards for a German company. After getting the artwork approved, I inked two color separations on additional sheets of paper and headed off to the copy shop. I reduced each drawn layer to 50% of the original size and xeroxed them onto film. I decided to only print two to a sheet, as I knew the films would need some minor touching up and because the run size was small enough that I didn't need to print six or eight cards at a time. Below is the first color on the drying rack.
Then I put the film for the second two colors down on the first color to make sure everything would register and make any necessary touch ups.
The second color was a transparent peach sort of color. I used this only for the two figures.
And below, we have the finished product. After printing the keyline, I headed over to a local printing company to have them cut down to size. Tomorrow, I pack these up and send them out to Germany.

Today!

Breakfast: a shake made of spinach, a banana, an apple, half a mango, grapes, blueberries, hemp seeds, and ice of course. Delicious.
Weapons of choice today:

Rubylith, cameras, drafting pencils, Germany, and an old bass guitar

Hello! I spent a small chunk of this afternoon out in the cold taking reference photos for a poster I am working on. I enjoy setting out on small photo adventures, and I often end up collecting images that aren't necessarily related to the primary composition for which I'm taking pictures. I rarely ever get rid of reference photos like the one the sketch at the left is based on (I took a bunch of liberties with drawing that building, though). Something I used to always emphasize to students when I student taught high school art was to draw what you see, not what you think you see. I would sometime catch myself breaking my own rules, but I've found that having several visual reference sources are immeasurably helpful. When drawing, I often combine various elements from the different visual sources and/or add invented elements.
Okay! Other than some new illustration/poster/art print things, I will be participating in some group print shows (more info soon). There is some other really rad stuff in the works, too. Quite a bit to do!

Lastly, some remaining work from the Comb The Field show at Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art is available for sale through their website. And! In Print opens this Saturday, February 19th at People's Art of Portland.

Playtime For Democracy

I've been watching/listening to streaming coverage in Cairo today. A three-decade-long dictatorship has come to an end under the pressure of eighteen days of peaceful protest. Such a powerful mass display of authentic democracy is a truly awesome thing to behold, even if just modestly doing so through live streaming coverage on my small laptop screen. The battle is far from over for democracy in Egypt, but it's most certainly an exciting time.
A couple of quick sketches come to you via the print screen function and Al-Jazeera news this afternoon.