fan farts and space bros

After all these years, I think drawing fanart is still my favorite game. Pretty much all of my warm ups before getting to work are devoted to drawing characters from different series that I have loved. It's also a lot of fun to look at series like Gundam Wing, which I have loved utterly since it's 1995 American debut. Looking at my GW stuff, I can see how I drew it then and how I draw it now. I can lay out a definitive map of the development of my skill over time by looking back at my fanart, and for me that is so much fun. Fanart is fun. The most important part about drawing fanart is that you think about how you enjoyed that series, and then find a way to convey that pleasure into a piece. I feel like certain characters are my property by this point, to some extent. Characters I've drawn so many times, I'm pretty sure I can see inside their minds. Inside their twisted, fictional minds. You know? YOU KNOW? YOU KNOW RIGHT

I feel like anybody who has ever drawn fanart is with me here.

SPERA's She Saw it Then

Check out "She Saw It Then", my most recent contribution to Josh Tierney's SPERA universe. Scope my pages here, and make sure to go back to the beginning to get the original story if you ain't already caught up.

RVA Mag

Huzzah, RVA Magazine interview!

Check the website version of the article at this link, and check out the print version in the full size issue #6.

reflections on anime and time travel

Time traveling plot devices, secondarily to amnesia, are some of my favorites. Trunks, therefore, is clearly one of my favorite characters in Dragonball Z. His relationship with his fake dad Gohan is strange, and I can't imagine traveling back in time to see your super tough fake dad as some weird overly muscled cabbage patch kid that gets shrieked at about studying all the time can be very easy. I'm surprised not more characters just go insane. This excluding Vegeta, who I'm pretty sure everybody suspects was insane from the beginning.

I think I read on a forum once, some nerd making the comment "Dragonball Z isn't about fighting. It's about never giving up!" Often times I find myself mumbling this sentiment over and over, and humming the Bruce Falconer theme songs while I power walk with my coffee to work. Nerd zen.

static colors

CANNOT STOP USING HASHY STATIC COLORS FOR EVEEEERYYTHINGGG

D:

Warhol and Basquiat

Weirdest best friends ever.

I've been looking at a lot of Basquiat recently to help get the creative juices churning for a self-portrait class I'll be teaching over the summer. I still can't stop kicking myself in the pants for not seeing the giant Basquiat retrospective in Paris last year, but the more I think about it, the more I justify it by thinking he probably wouldn't have agreed with his work being displayed alongside the art he spent so much of his time mocking. I guess we'll never know. He's off with Andy up there in the sky somewhere, peeing on the clouds. Geniusly.

ROTA Race to Purgatory III

See you there, maybe!

BULLY (Canis Canem Edit) Zine

OH SNAP WHAT IS THIS
Gosh, I better go to MoCCA to find out.

Telepath Generation

OH, what's this? Could it be a newly unveiled comic project with Spera creator Josh Tierney and company? WHY YES, I BELIEVE IT IS. Will the first issue be printed some time late this summer? WHY YES, I BELIEVE IT WILL BE.

hoh hoh hoh!

BORFDAEEE

Birthday card for the boss man's lady. It's 3am, there's no food in my house, and the smell of maple syrup is being carried around on the wind. :(

EDIT:
A secondary version which is less cute and more badass. In other news I still have no food, but now my house just smells like cat pee. :( :( :(

Akira is so awesome

I'm in kind of a slump tonight. I drew all weekend and didn't really get enough work done as I would have liked. I am pretty tired of working like a maniac and being really poor. Isn't there some kind of instant good luck slot machine I can play and win every time? Can it shower me with gold coins too?

I love Akira. I love it so much. I'm using that movie to attempt to kickstart my brain again. Drawing Banzai!

madatoms article sampler

Some recent samples of work for a few madatoms.com articles. A couple of these are already up, so check out the website to see them in their full glory, accompanied by humorous articles!

fantasy movie night

I wish I had...

I wish I had the time and equipment to pursue animated project ideas. :(
I think I know what to ask Santa for next Christmas.

sketching, postcards & process, oh my!

half done projects have a really good way of stacking up on my desktop. From time to time, I get to dig through them and figure out which ones I still have an invested interest in, and which ones I can just trash. Recently, though, I've been having a nearly impossible time of it trashing anything! So all my for fun projects, in the exception of the rare three or so things, remain the same and yet go for the most part untouched. One day, I will get to these fun diamonds.



On the work side of things, I designed a postcard for Yours Truly. There is another one in the set done by someone else, but they share the same back. I've decided that I love pink. I used to be afraid of it, I think. Now all I want to do is mash my face into giant swathes of magenta and fuchsia.
I went for a similar feel to the ad I drew for us recently for RVA magazine in an attempt to give the people in our tiny city some sort of familiar visual cues. Pink. leaves. feathers. Greens and blues. decorative texture.




Here, I think is probably as close to a tutorial as I'm going to ever get. My coloring process takes much longer than the initial inking process. I try many different color combos before I get to something I like. From every version I create that appeals to me, I take maybe one color, or one piece of contrast, and bring it to the next level. Thus I obnoxiously birth art. But I think coloring is the most enjoyable part of the process for me, who feels a bit like a wizard putting together a complicated jigsaw puzzle.




until next time!

RVAnthology site launch!

Yes, it's true. Now you are free to purchase your copy of the RVAnthology online! For a mere pittance, you get five excellent and beautiful stories about love, fear, homelessness, death, sex, and cats! What more could you ask for? Check it out immediately! RVANTHOLOGY.COM

I want to go to there!