Crystal Concert

Hey, listen. I'm going to be reading Go Down again, at the Burlington, on the 12th of July (a Thursday). The show starts at 9:00pm sharp, and there's a suggested donation of $7. It's gonna be real good and if you're in Chicago you should go. Seriously, this is a great line up. It's a new environment for me; aside from the CAKE benefit at Mortville, I've never been the one performance artist in an otherwise musical revue. Hopefully people will dig it. I think they will.

Xina Xurner make "noise diva drag dance-anthems that ooze sex, death, and decay," Night Terror makes delicious, creepy electronic dance-prog that you can't dance to because it's melting your bones and in a really upsetting time signature, and Gel Set makes "dark electro-pop" with a seductive voice and a morbid sense of humor. Sign up on Facebook here.

I challenged myself to design this poster in under an hour, and succeeded. The actual Photoshopping and printing took several hours more, but on the whole, this flier was a remarkably simple effort for an impressive payoff. Each color is a different color separation layer. In the original file, they all line up perfectly. I wanted them to misregister, however, for perhaps obvious reasons: the computer text at the bottom fragments, and the overlapping facets combine to form really nice new tones.

Dork Photobooth

Drunk art: I say, "Hey, let's go in the photo booth!" and then I say, "we have to plan it first" because I like making everything difficult for everyone. This is a page of my sketchbook with the organizational sketch and the resultant composition; I'm in the middle, with Melissa on the left and AJ on the right. We got everything right except for Melissa forgetting to take off her sunglasses in the last frame. Yes, this post is worthy of my blog; it's my blog and I say so.

Ladydrawers

I recently finished a collaborative comic with Anne Elizabeth Moore for her Ladydrawers series on Truthout. You can go read the full comic, as well as the reactionary comments, here.

Ladydrawers is a series of strips, each drawn by a different female artist, about female artists in the comics industry. Anne Moore and her team collect statistics from a variety of women and transpeople in the biz. My comic focuses on gender and sexuality-based harassment, and features personal stories collected by the ladydrawers and Janelle Asselin.

I drew this strip while I was vacationing with Tyson in Utah. The comic has nothing to do with Utah. I made a cake in Utah and we ate it all weekend, and went on some hikes and to a drive-in movie.

WHAT ELSE?

CAKE was the best goddamned comics convention I've ever attended in my whole fuckerfucking life. I met so many amazing people and had endless exciting conversations. If you saw/talked to/yelled at/listened to me during CAKE, thank you for existing. CAKE, thank you for existing. I'm verklemmt.

Brain Trubble

This upcoming weekend, the 16th and 17th of June, is the first annual Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE). I'll be tabling with Lale Westvind, Ian McDuffie, and Ben Bertin, right next to the Trubble Club table... wait, did I just mention Trubble Club?! It just so happens that Brain Frame and Trubble Club are joining forces to hold the opening night party for CAKE, a special edition Brain Frame featuring all Trubble Club comics, all Trubble Club members, all the time! How serendipitous! You'd think that we're all friends who live in the same city or something, and respect each others' considerable and multi-varied talents. Or something.

I'm the official host of this event, along with Sackley, the lovable dog with unfortunate testes, appearing in puppet form with great effort from Bernie MacGovern and Jeremy Tinder (it takes two men to drag that sack). Gabrielle Bell, Leslie Stein, and Mike Taylor will also be coming on stage to do live drawings during the event. Jeremy Tinder, Aaron Renier, and Grant Reynolds drew the poster. Attend: Friday, June 15th, 9:00pm, at 1542 N Milwaukee, 2nd floor. Free, donations suggested.

OTHER NEWS:

1) Brain Frame got reviewed on Make Space! Thanks Kelly Parsell!

2) I have a small gallery wall goin' on at the Gene Siskel Film Center, in association with the Chicago Underground Film Festival (CUFF). My CUFF poster and the original drawings are on display, as well as some other family-friendly screen prints and the front and back cover of Compiled. The Film Center is open starting at 2pm on weekends, and 5pm on weekdays. I look pretty happy, right?

Sketch Blech

I'm one of those people who gets really possessive and twitchy when you try to look at their sketchbook. It's a personal document and full of unpolished, half-baked ideas - even if you're an artist who is confident in your abilities, it can be painful to reveal the murky pathway to the final show. I've always been jealous of people who fill dozens of quaint, dog-eared volumes with effortless and beautiful doodles. I will never be one of those people.

I was looking through my sketchbook the other day and thinking about this when I started laughing because what I saw was so awful. My sketches are pure strategy, intended only as analytic tools for making something actually artful. As an example, I present my only full diagram of what would become the CUFF poster:

Do you see anything in that drawing? No. It looks like shit. But it was immensely useful in figuring out where in the back of the cave it would recede to nothingness, what the overall shape would be, and the proportion of the crystal in relation to the cavern and the text.

Yes, there are some cool sketches up on this blog, and yes, that sketch at the top looks pretty awesome - I'm being unfair to myself - but if you were to look through my ratty notebooks you'd see a lot more half-assed shit than impressive drafts. Sketch pages like the one at the top of this post are practice for drawing more complex details of unfamiliar textures or forms. I also have pages of transitional sketches. These are drawings that morph as I fill in the details over the body of the subject. For example, this preliminary drawing for the Brain Frame 5 poster:

You can see that I didn't know how to place the monster's legs, or communicate that the eyes were eyes as well as letters. And you can see the rejected mouth idea in the left jowl, which was ditched for the second idea that emerged when drawing the right jowl. I only needed to ink a fraction of this drawing to know how I intended to ink the entirety of the finished monster. And I make a lot of critical notes to myself like that one in the corner - in the end I decided I didn't need iris lines at all.

Brain Frame 6

BRAIN FRAME BRAIN FRAME BRAIN FRAME BRAIN FRAME BRAIN FRAME BRAIN FRAME BRAIN FRAME BRAIN FRAME

Krystal DiFronzo and I gave birth to this poster. In the screen printed version, the corn kernels are metallic gold. I drew that text by hand. I only drew one of each letter, which is why it looks so regular; that is also why the post-production Photoshop process took me 12 hours. I used a ruler and round things (fun fact - I did it at work, so the round things I used were a nut for a 35mm projector and a 16mm core) but the round things were too big to ink around so, listen up, those curves were freehand. I'm real good at freehanding curves. If you know what I mean.

Anyway, come to the show! It's this Friday, the 18th, at 8:00pm, at 1542 N Milwaukee, on the 2nd floor. Reading will be:

Krystal Difronzo
Ian Endsley
Beth Hetland and Kyle O'Connell
Carter Lodwick
Eric Rivera
Sam Sharpe

It's gonna be fuuuuuuuun!

Little Max Fauntleroy

I go to this great coffee shop to draw all the time because I'm a poor, young, hip artist without any tables in her studio apartment. Naturally, my coffee shop is sprawling and a little bit run down, with recycled, mismatched furniture and exposed brick walls. There is a British barista who works there named Max, and he sometimes comes by to look at my drawings and sass me, as per the requirements of this enacted suite of cliches.

He asked me once to draw a portrait of him as Little Lord Fauntleroy in exchange for a gift card. I agreed, but it took me a while to get around to drawing this. I left a space for Max's face, but every time I've been in recently he's been missing. I'm afraid he doesn't work there anymore. My alternative paradise is incomplete.

Text Assistance

 

Has anyone noticed that I've been making a lot less of my own stuff recently? Is that true? Or am I just restless because I have so many ideas building up, in this short time of being busy with hired work? I can't tell, since I never feel like I'm doing enough; I am proud of my recent work for and with others.

 

I can't believe I haven't mentioned the werewolf movie Ross and I have been shooting. It's called, obviously, The Beast Within, and it's a period piece in the medium of experimental-narrative, 16mm, low-budget filmmaking.

There are four characters: The Scientist/Werewolf (Ross), the Love Interest (Alison), the Priest (Matt), and the Evil Nun (Bethany). Ross wrote the script and we've planned it together - you could call me the assistant director, and the director of photography, if you want to get fancy (and we will, in the credits). I shot everything. We're almost done with production, and then the cross-dissolve transformation scenes will be optically printed, and the full moon above a loping silhouette, and a psychedelic horror trip with flashing colored lights and Ross, foaming on the floor.

Here's the trailer:

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I'd also like to draw your attention to Night Terror, the new solo act from Tyson Torstensen, who is in Magical Beautiful and Ga'an, and a very important person in my life. I drew these preliminary logos for Night Terror a few months ago - I plan on expanding and slick-ening them into a few new varietals - but for now I'm proud of this delicate and drippy thing. I've been drawing with Rapidographs on tracing paper a lot recently, I like it.

Tyson plays a lot of instruments, but in Night Terror it's all synths (and, you know, terror) and good for listening to with headphones or in loud stereo-equipped environments. Here are some demos:

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Ben Russell and Ben Rivers are two contemporary experimental filmmakers whom I greatly admire. So when Ben, who is also a friend of mine (ha ha! which one?) asked me to draw titles for the trailer of his and Ben's new collaborative, feature length experimental film set in Scandanavia, with vikings and a commune and a burning house, I was honored and excited to help. Here are the titles, (although the ampersand was rejected) and here is the trailer:

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Lest ye think no projects of mine own be in the works, know ye that House Fuck just got picked up to screen at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival next weekend. If you're in Milwaukee on Saturday, May 5th, at 5pm, come to the Walker Arts Center and check it out.

CUFF 2012 Poster

I was asked last fall to make the art for this year's Chicago Underground Film Festival. At the time, I was drawing Go Down, so anaglyphic crystals were really important to me. You could consider this mother-crystal to be the original psychedelic meteorite which yielded the chip the girl eats in Go Down. Or at least, that's how I think of it.

This design is already up on the CUFF Facebook page (like it!) and will be on the website soon. It will become a digitally printed poster, a postcard, a button, and a t-shirt, as well as a run of nice big screen prints.

CUFF is a fantastic festival and an important cultural institution. This year, there's a Kickstarter to help the festival make its budget. If you're interested in helping out, and you should be, do what this video says.

Brooklyn Zine Fest

If you happen to be based in (or imminently visiting) the NYC area, and you're reading this sentence before Sunday, April 15th, you've been chosen to win a $500 gift certificate! Just kidding. But you are in luck: This weekend I'll be visiting New York to table at the Brooklyn Zine Fest. The fest is at Public Assembly, at 70 North 6th St in Williamsburg, and it runs Sunday only from 11am to 6pm. I'll be tabling with Lale Westvind, who will have plenty of copies of Chromazoid to sell. I'll be selling Dock Ellis, Compiled, and my last (!) copies of Are You Lonesome Tonight. In addition, I'll have Motion Sickness posters, Brain Frame 5 posters, and two brand new screenprints, of Mr. Square at the Pit of Despair and this page from Go Down.

The Brooklyn Zine Fest has been posting interviews with every exhibitor. You can read my interview here. Please, if you're able, stop by this weekend to say hello!