leaving for FanExpo Canada tonight!

doldrums

digging up bones

i just recently saw Labyrinth, and i really liked it, but i'm glad i didn't see it as a kid. it probably would have freaked me out as much as the Dark Crystal, heh. of course i really liked Jareth the best.

watching Predator 2!

giving up the ghost

*edit* here's a link to the whole 90-minute movie without any breaks: Requiem for Detroit?

an artful, sad documentary on the rise and fall of Detroit. this pretty well outlines all the reasons why i have such a fascination with Detroit. every city has its stories, but Detroit is such an interesting beast. totally a soiled dove. once the fourth biggest city in America, now the blueprint for economic disaster and a ghost town. the apocalypse is already here.

"Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes ... the volatile result of the change of eras and the fall of empires. This fragility leads us to watch them one very last time: to be dismayed, or to admire, it makes us wonder about the permanence of things." - Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

project basement

check it out! i was featured in Nick Marino's Project Basement on Audio Shocker!

i did Dazzler. i plan on doing a finished version of the sketch, but my tabletlessness has made digital work indefinitely delayed.

in other news...the Scott Pilgrim movie totally fucking rules and you should see it many times!

artifacts of a misspent life

just about everybody seems to be doing these old art posts, and while at first i was hesitant to join in, i guess i might as well join in the humiliation. they're just drawings. and at one point i thought they all looked good. in a few more years i'll probably hate everything i'm doing now, heh.

going back as far as i can manage. in first through fourth grade we had to keep little journals to practice writing in. i didn't like writing much, but my teacher let me get away with just writing a few words then filling up the page with illustrations sometimes. looking back, i have a new found respect for teachers because if a kid handed me this stuff, i'd have no idea what to make of it. it also makes me wonder...people had been telling me i had a talent for drawing since kindergarten, but how were they sure of this? is this considered good art for a 7-year-old? how can people tell one kid can draw better than another? it all looks the same to me. i also like that i didn't figure in any of the other prominent features of the ice cream truck, but i remembered the gas tank, right in the middle of the side of the truck, where it should be.


most of my later elementary school-middle school art is lost because it was before i had a scanner, and most of it was in notebooks i'm not sure what happened to. the early stuff was pretty bland, a comic about stick people, and a series about talking dogs (i was pretty much only into drawing animals as a kid). later i worked on an epic comic called the Crown about a princess with a sentient crown that protected her and gave her super powers for a few years. i also did one that was very anime/manga-influenced parody of folklore and mythology where i basically took parts of it i liked and changed them around however i wanted.  and the heroes of the comic were an ineffectual pagan goddess who got kicked out of olympus and a guy who could change sex at will because it turned out he was the son of a demon and a valkyrie (how typical).

in high school i started a web comic starring these guys, a foppish guy with a skull for a head for no reason and a gay guy who always wore pigtails. i later re-vamped the comic with the skull-headed guy as a normal guy (below) and started to redo the series with a more cohesive storyline, but after working on it in some form or another for like ten years, i just got tired of it.

back to the old stuff. this is yet another comic i briefly worked on right after graduating high school i think. around that time i was really into victorian stuff and ghost stories, so...it's a post-apocalyptic victorian ghost story XD most people i showed it to liked it, but someone i admired who was also a comic artist said it took too long to get going and i couldn't figure out how to re-work it, so i eventually just dropped it. still had the anime-ish influence thing going on, obviously.

around the height of my zombie obsession, heh. probably 2001-2003?

zombie studies from my sketchbook. i think i paused the romero movies and drew from them. XD

my first-ever completely digital artwork, haha. i was really into the mixing cute shit with gore thing right after i discovered junko mizuno.

circa 2004, i think? during this time i was trying to figure out my "signature style" or whatever, so i was copying the styles of a lot of artists i liked. right here i was really into foo swee chin.

super old eve. she's the love interest of the straight guy from the pair of guys above.

for a little while i was really into doing these shitty, crude, vector-shape drawing things. 2005 probably?

this is an actual album cover i did for my friends' band in like 2003-2004. i'm so shocked that they actually paid me and told me i was a good artist. at the time i was really into old black and white cartoons and thought they were kind of creepy.

imitating mizna wada here.

i drew cutesy shit like this for a while, mainly because girls really liked it and it was marketable.

sketching from life. that lady was really wearing that shirt.

cave girl stuff. this is what basically lead to Nyla, a character that hasn't been in anything yet but i plan to use her one day.

first sketches of Sidney.

that's about all worth looking at i guess (or not looking at). one thing that kinda bums me out about looking back on this is how much more prolific i was when i was younger even though i sucked. guess i have a lot to work on.

in over my head

watched Willow for the first time since i was like 10. it's weird; i tend to have a pretty good memory and retain lots of useless trivia, but when it comes to movies, i seem to have short-term memory loss or something. i'll forget everything that happens in a movie just a few weeks after seeing it, unless it's a movie i liked when i was younger and had a more obsessive personality, in which case i more than likely watched a favorite movie many hundred times and it is now permanently committed to memory, ingrained into my gray matter. Willow is one such movie. watching it, i was delighted and surprised by all the memories forgotten that were re-awakened. it was like being reunited with old friends after decades of being apart. i'm sort of going through this awkward, quarter-life crisis thing right now where i don't really feel like an adult but i'm too old to be acting like a child or teenager anymore, so i often seek comfort in nostalgia, which more often than not leads to the disappointing feeling of "this just can't be recreated," or "this isn't as good as i remember it." it's nice that, at least with Willow, it was something that i enjoyed just as much, if not more so, than when i was a child.

also watched Breakfast on Pluto. nice, quirky, sweet-without-being-too-precious bit of queer cinema. although i like that unlike a lot of queer films, it isn't about trying to "fit in" or searching for an identity, when it comes to sexuality and gender roles, anyway. though everyone else may have their own ideas about her, from the very earliest stages in her life Kitten knows what she is -- a girl-- and never once falters from that assertion. she instead is looking to discover herself in a different sense, through finding long-lost family. i really liked it. and not just because of Cillian Murphy in drag (though that certainly didn't hurt. ;) )

hubba-hubba.

i tried drawing him (Cillian Murphy...shut up, I'M NOT OBSESSED, LEAVE ME ALONE D:), but i hate drawing real people. at least in non-caricature ways.

it seems to me there's a certain presence that certain people's features have that can't be expressed in drawings unless you're willing to go overboard and get a little cartoony with it. it's like the idea of a set of eyes, or the idea of the nose rather than what they actually look like. does this make sense? i don't know.

cramps

stop drop and roll

fun with hair.