this is the first panel of a one-page gag strip i’m running in my friend morgan’s comic zine, presented here in colour. the comic was all drawn and lettered by hand on vellum or tracing paper, though i did the balloons, assembly, and colour digitally. i plan to build a lightbox this term, since i use tracing to tighten up my linework pretty frequently. for the less nerdy among us, from l-r: a random rodian, figrin d’an and the modal nodes (the mos eisley cantina band), ponda baba and dr. evazan (although he looks more like chalmun from that side). and baba is aqualish, but i had to take a dig at his walrus butt face.
work is coming along gradually. trying to keep myself busy while i don’t have class in session.
whoa, whoa, what’s the hold-up?
i haven’t posted anything in a while because the power’s out in my apartment. when i can get on the computer in my office, there will be a thorough post of my recent work. more news coming soon. in the meantime, check out the show-off, the annual OCAD retrospective show all over my school on the evening of may fifth.
community
finishing up some of my final final projects. in about a week there will be a lot more prints and artworks documented here. the main impetus for this post was to comment quickly on the subject of community. i participated in my first print exchange, having been previously very reticent to show work or contribute to projects like that. it was a wonderful first experience and i’m very grateful to the people who made it happen. almost out of the woods now.
two text & image responses
pent-up, trapped, locked, on fire. documentation of micro-installation. matches, tobacco, tealights, w/ hot glue and thread. another text and image response.
i also began a micro-performance today, fs: teenage mutant ninja turtles action figures, priced by sentimental value, which can be found here. i anticipate that someone will flag it or respond to it — anything but the senescence of eventual expiration will be documented on this blog.
experiments
my work has had something of an experimental bent this year. i’d like to ease into a more cogent (if possible) body of work, though one that’s still interdisciplinary, for next year, but that meant getting a lot of stuff out of my system this year. last semester, i made a piece that dealt with my feelings of inadequacy as a printer. forgive the bad cell phone photos.
it’s a 3D work i made using screenprint, including water-soluble crayon monoprinting, reproducing an actual-size litho stone and roller. i wanted to use a naive aesthetic, because the medium makes me feel like a child.. crayons seemed appropriate. i’ve done lithography before and since, but failing to fully understand the science behind it makes it a little mystifying and alienating. it’s made out of paper and whatever support materials i could get to work (a styrofoam dowel, plastic container lids). here’s a detail of the text:
it should be noted that the antagonist of the text is not a real person. lithographers are some of the nicest people i’ve ever met.
full text:
HEY, DUMMY. WHAT’S THE MATTER? TOO STUPID TO TELL ACETIC FROM NITRIC? ARE YOUR PUNY ARMS TOO WEAK TO GRAIN, WUSSY? WHAT A WIMP. YOU’RE NOT FOOLING ANYONE. THEY ALL KNOW THAT IT’S TRUE: YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR LITHO.
another experimental work i did this year was a site-specific piece for OCAD’s yellow stairwell. the only real guideline was that it needed to be a print medium. i took it as an opportunity to try something out. the piece was, ultimately, a failure, but the process was interesting.
the image is a borrowed jack kirby panel from one of the first issues of fantastic four. first i laid down a rectangular substrate of gesso, hoping to work on a less saturated area than the yellow of the walls. i applied what was supposed to be an aged newsprint colour (it turned out a little pink) of acrylic screen ink. the colour areas (the C, M, Y, and K) were prepared as hand-cut vellum stencils. i attempted to mimic the look of offset printing by pushing my ink through a coarse wire frame with a sponge. the colours were applied using period-correct screen angles, by rotating the screen mesh with a protractor.
the end result was too saturated, and too uneven. my ink was too opaque for the amount of colour that made it through the screen. it did, however, produce interesting shapes and patterns, as seen in this detail. there was a chunk missing out of the wall, which created an unsightly and undesired big black blob. while it was an unwelcome addition to the piece, using an uneven surface, one that resists uniform applications of ink, or has hidden recesses and texture, is a tool i’d like to consciously revisit later.
text and image blog
i’m in a very inspiring class at school called text & image, taught by the inimitable shannon gerard. she’s just started a class blog for myself and my classmates, which will be posted there as a sort of retrospective of our work. just a few things have been posted so far, including my friend natalie’s incredible interactive print-sculptures (above), one of which adorns my mantle, and a wonderful song by my friend kyle.
check it out at http://thismachinekillsfashionistas.tumblr.com!
some recent work
this blog has been neglected lately. while the semester’s nearing its end, the amount of work i have left to do is astonishing.
so here are a few pieces that i’ve finished in the last two semesters, in my second third year of OCAD print.
a juggernaut of regression. 8×10″ digital print.
self-portrait w/ problems. approx 3×4″ three colour mini-screenprint on aged newsprint. enlarged to show detail.
numero uno. staged photo w/ screenprinted t-shirts, photography by kaelan.
pardon the bad cell phone photos of these next things.
big naturals. three-colour reduction linocut.
decision-making machine. black monoprint w/ watercolour & pen. rolled dice to determine numbers.
you can’t put anti-gravity discs on friends you don’t have. 11×17″ three-colour screenprint.
mother box. 18×24″ digital print, with collaged spreads from jack kirby’s mister miracle.
this is just a sampling.. there are more works that haven’t been photographed (some are 3D) and i’ll be sure to share them when i’m in the position to do so.
some new-ish work
my first assignment for alternative media this year was meant to be a locker-size installation piece. rather than cut holes in a rectangular composition, i made a triptych to avoid the locker’s protuberances. printed digitally and stacked vertically, total height around six and a half feet, about seven inches wide at the widest. used a rotring fountain pen, ink blots & drybrushing for the background elements, copic brush pens for the objects, coloured digitally.
it’s called archaeology. would it be too pretentious to italicize that? click through for less fuzzy, less tiny versions.
and i drew a doodle of man-thing tonight while watching tv, after ploog or whoever did the marvel encyclopedia entry. fountain pen, sharpie, photoscharp.
bronze age worship (colan)
gene “the dean” colan wasn’t strictly a bronze age talent, but from what i’ve seen so far, it’s where he shone brightest. after succeeding stand-up artists like bill everett, jack kirby (golden-age creator of namor and his silver-age re-invigorator, respectively) & steve ditko (in all likelihood the sole creator of doctor strange) on their signature characters, he put his swashbuckling mark on daredevil, an everett co-creation. he went on to show his versatility on steve gerber’s howard the duck, and his manic energy on the downright frenzied tomb of dracula with marv wolfman. colan’s painterly pencil style is translated to ink seamlessly by tom palmer on their run together. having seen colan’s pencils, i don’t know how they could be translated to stark blacks and whites and retain such energy, but that’s part of the magic of the collaboration. i’ve now scanned through the entire pamphlet run & marvel magazine, and i’m going back to soak it in, and this is some wonderful stuff. colan has a great grasp on anatomy, mood, setting, continuity, and storytelling. i notice a lot of long, lean, vertical panels, often in six-panel or nine-panel grids. the flexible but unpretentious layouts are a breeze to read through, and are excellent at providing a narrow, tense thrust into the narrative. smoke and fog fill what little negative space is left, but the framing is so tight, any number of things could be lurking in the gutters.
this is half of what’s probably going to be a diptych. just thinking about presentation and choosing a second image. this was recreated by blowing up a scan of the issue (tomb of dracula, vol. 1, #3), tracing it with a sharpie, re-scanning, and digitally colouring it, using my four-colour palette. something else that didn’t get mentioned yet in this or the previous entry is that i’ve been reading a lot about colour printing processes in comics, and their role in the assembly line system, and i find the separation process very fascinating. recently, david brothers at comics alliance picked dave stewart’s brain about colouring, and the article linked to a great frank santoro article on steve oliff.. and i love hand-lettering. i find colouring and hand-lettering really rewarding.. when i had the opportunity to talk to jim rugg at TCAF this year, he said something to the same effect. it’s part of the love of the package.
incidentally, this series is brutal as all-get-out.
quick catch-up
greetings, readers. not much to report. not doing thesis until next year. i could call what i’m doing now a sort of pre-emptive, preliminary thesis research period.. trying to develop the visual tools for that body of work. i’ve got the conceptual stuff in the bag.. now i just need to back up my lofty talk with some draw-rings. i imagine that a lot of work i do this year will be in advance of later studies, both in honing the technical & developing my own unique approach to markmaking.
my nanopublishing class (this was months ago now) put on a small show at a secondhand boutique called 69 vintage. i designed patterns for 3D letters to be used as decorations, in collaboration with andrew bailey (bitmap patterns) and jim brannen (printing&colour), which were assembled by myself and samantha ross.
i’ve been doing a lot of reading.. i’ve realized that OCAD and TPL will let you take out, like, enormous stacks of books, and i’ve just been ploughing through. what have i been reading, you ask? taxonomies of reptiles, histories & analyses of underground and overground comics, essays on narcissism, cruelty, war, & ethnic conflict, bronze-age exploitation comics (lots of tomb of dracula and man-thing.. “for school”), alternative/literary comics of varying degrees of quality, my first foray into canonical or well-recommended bandes-dessinées & manga.. and some of my first 2000AD.
a lot of people are rocking my world right now, which is difficult, because it inspires me more to create, and mortifies me at the disparity in quality. hopefully i’ll have some new work to put up soon.
