Month: April 2011

Main

Baggywrinkles #2 Inks

Hey, y’all remember when I was doing that nautical comic thing way back in the day? The one I said would be finished “in a few days” about 6 months ago? (At least, that’s what it feels like…) Well, hopefully I can make good on the promise soon, but just to prove I haven’t utterly forgotten: some inks! Half of them, even! (Easy to say when your story’s 8 pages long.)

There are technical tweaks left to be done on the blackboards, since I need to make them, well, black. But apart from that they’re pretty well finished. I’m trying to move beyond straight “line art” into something that’s a little more dimensional, so critiques are welcome. The latter 4 pages are more complex, so I’ve been procrastinating on them for some time, but the plunge will come sooner rather than later, I assure you.

Shutting up now so I can get on with the last few projects of the semester.

SO CLOSE, YOU GUYS. SO CLOSE I CAN TASTE IT.

Art, Main

More Wherefore Stuff

(Because I love you.)

Essentially, these are preliminary images from the project I’ll be doing over the summer with this here (not really very) hefty (but still insanely and awesomely useful) scholarship. I tried to take climactic or iconic moments from throughout the storyline and give them a bit of illustrative weight. Numbers 4 and 5 appeared in a previous post, but I’ve added them again here for the sake of continuity.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!

Art

Reactionary Figure Drawin’

Splitting this update into two posts, ’cause image gallery settings in WordPress are silly and I can’t display things the way I want unless they’re in separate posts. SO.

The greatest (and most stressful) part of the qual was getting to focus on nothing else for 10 days. Unfortunately, having missed a huge amount of class in the preceding weeks due to being deathly ill, this left me pretty screwed over after I turned in my materials on Monday. With a large-scale figure drawing project due the next morning at 9, I loaded my thermos with coffee and trekked into the studio at 10:30pm. Fortunately, I was home by 3am, which I consider a miracle — and even more miraculous was the fact that said project wasn’t a pile of poo! Isn’t it great when a plan comes together?

“Gettin’ Outta Dodge,” as it was ultimately titled, involved large rolls of craft paper, black and white charcoal, and a very sharp box cutter. Oh, and some strategically-placed scissors installed by Russian studio stylist D. Lemeshchenko. Brilliant man, but his prices are astronomical…

Enjoy the boobs!

Art

Secrets Revealed

So, apropos of my previous post, here’s the skinny on what I’ve been working on for the past week.

All students at Reed need to complete a Junior qualifying exam (commonly known as a “qual”) to prove that they’ve got the chops to complete a Senior thesis and haven’t just been, well, dicking about for the last three years. For Art majors, this means a 10 day process involving the creation of 10 preliminary studies, one finished piece, two papers discussing one’s artistic practice and previous works, a showing of the qual work and previous pieces, and a 45 minute oral examination. It’s hefty, but also a whole lot of fun. We’re given an essay to respond to at the start of the week, which can (loosely or otherwise) inform the final piece. Susan Stewart’s On the Art of the Future proved dense and somewhat infuriating in its unnecessary intellectualism, but was ultimately fruitful and thought provoking (and surprisingly relevant to comics).

Anyway, no time to discuss that here. ON WITH THE PRETTY PICTURES!

[slideshow]

(Things the photos don’t quite do justice to: the incredible, deep sea sheen of the book cloth, the veins of shimmery gold in the marbled paper, and the delicious, physical sensation of playing with this thing. Bookmaking is so satisfying to me because you get to handle and interact with the product in a way that’s totally different from our standard approach to artworks. Mm, tactility.)

The OTHER exciting news is that I was recently selected as a recipient of the Kaspar T. Locher Summer Creative Scholarship, a $1750 prize designed to fund independent art/dance/music/theater/writing projects over the summer. I’ll be using the money to back a longer comic (tentatively titled “Wherefore”) based around my youthful days and the strange sense of misplaced identity that comes from being raised between cultures and continents. Terrifying, but thrilling. There will, of course, be copious documentation for you all to enjoy throughout the process SO HOORAY FOR THAT.

(Part two of this post appears separately because WordPress image display options are icky.)