MASSIVE ART ATTACK!

It's an entry that will put you in a karmic coma ala Massive Attack!

I finally gained access to the scanners on the third floor after a good deal of slacking off on Monday and having a drawing session at my friend Ben Z's house and I've pretty much scanned in everything that I've been doing for the past few weeks, so you're getting the newest and best flavors as of this entry.

Let's get started shall we?

Here are some sketchbook entries from Ben Z's last drawing session from Monday night. Some of you might recognize who these people are and I'm not going to bother telling you who is who! Why? Anonymity of course!







Up next are random studies and observational drawing! Not much to say, but they are pretty nifty!








The small images on the side here are concepts from when I was really depressed earlier this summer due to isolation and a lack of social interaction... Just so you know. I may finish one of them in the near future, but we'll see.



And finally move onto concept/idea sketches, some are really rough, so you might want to enlarge them before viewing.



This might turn into a screen print that I'm doing for my girlfriend, Gillian. It's a massive reference to the Fountain since we seem to have running inside jokes with that film... Or references if you will. (Man, I need to watch that again.)



This last series of sketches involves girls with tattoos, piercings or body modification! The first one is a sketch I'm going to give someone as a present in the near future for hooking me up with screen printing ink at a party I went to involving a floral design become a garden, the second is a girl in a scarf, a belt and underwear and not much else... Oh yeah and she has tattoos. The third is of a girl with piercings, reading a book on a bed with a halter top and jeans on and finally, a girl with piercings listening to an iPod. Isn't this fun, kids?

And on the last image of the night, here's something I drew today based on a photo by my friend Victoria taken at her farewell party on Saturday! I'm already redoing this one since it was just a study from reference.



There's a photo that was taken of me that I might do a portrait of because it's rather classy. But we'll see about that in the future.

Since this is technically the post for Wednesday, I think this is pretty fulfilling. You think I can do the same for Friday? If you say no, then you may be correct but let's see how this goes first.

Enjoy! Also, repeat viewers may want to become followers.

Mini-date!

WELL IT'S ABOUT GOD DAMN TIME I PUT THIS UP.

This is a little one page comic that I wrote back in sophomore year after my friend Sherrie and I went off to New York City with my school and I stupidly used the subway map for a road map. It wasn't a pleasant experience but it actually made for a slightly decent idea for a comic.

I'm not particularly proud of the execution of this comic. The hand letter is utter crap (I should be digitally doing this instead of doing it all by hand) and there are some panels that aren't that great but I guess it's a start when it comes to doing weekly comics. I'm not sure what I'm going to do after this because I have a few options, I can do a comic about my girlfriend next or I could do something else... A "mystery" if you will in one page installments. The only question would be, what part of the story do YOU think is true?

And now, the usual post some old sketches nonsense I usually do. (Luckily by tomorrow I'll have new content for the next update. It'll also contain girls with tattoos, piercings and possibly even some suicide girls type nudity!)



Study of a scooter that hangs out outside the school during the semester.



Study of my friend Jerimiah for my linocut series I did for my three best friends. I need to redo all of them really.

LIKE A BEAVER

I've been quite busy the past few days! It seems I've been too busy to post as well.

Anyway, let this count for the past two missed updates and for Friday as well. I know it's not what some of you want to see, but that's just gonna have to be the way it is for this week.

To catch you up to speed, not a whole lot has really been going on aside from me constantly working on art for my silk screening course and the fact I made a really nifty acrylic painting in my Painting for Illustrator's class. I haven't finished my little one page comic because I've been so concerned with getting other artwork done and I did get started on one of the paintings (the one of the laughing princess) but I may scrap it and paint something else entirely.

I told you not much was going on! But settle for some good old fashioned artwork instead!



Starting off with a little sketch of my girlfriend... All done with an eyedropper too!



Then an exercise from printmaking involving paper cut stencils... with freezer paper.

Oh wait no, I do have something interesting to say... MIA's instrumental for Paper Planes? Yeah, it turns out it's a remixed version of the instrumentals for The Clash's Straight to Hell. I'm not sure what to think about it, really.

I'm Getting Bad At This!

And once again, I'm a wee bit late with my update. I'm seriously getting bad at this.

Not much of an update this week I'm afraid! The only big news that's gone down is that I'm almost done with the comic I was working on this week and that I officially know how to do real hardcore photo emulsion with photographs and drawings! I just learned how to do it this evening in my silkscreening class and the silkscreens look excellent! Once a few prints get made I'll put them up in an update but this is wicked important for me right now because now I can do more with my silkscreens than I ever could before!

That and I can teach two of my friends how to do really slick silkscreening now that goes beyond paper stencils! Also really cool art pieces to help me kick Illustration's ass up and down the block!

I've also been on a small horror media stint right now reading World War Z and I'm really getting into stories about towns with dark pasts that come back to haunt them or where bad things happen actively. I'm trying to find more stories like this but I was wondering if anyone could give me some suggestions? It can be a TV show, movie or book, doesn't matter. I'm just really fascinated by this right now. (Just so you know, I've read It, Uzumaki, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Lottery.)

Again, I don't have much to show right now since most of it's old but here's some sketches that are new and are related to my silk screening course and my first real photo emulsion piece! Check it out!





Also, here's some Junior year sketchbook work! Two from the second part of Mister Reusch's Monster Draw's at MassArt and one of a girl from one of my classes.







There may be an update on Friday but I'm not sure since I'm heading home in the evening to go see "No Doubt" with my sister and my girlfriend in Mansfield, Massachusetts. I'll probably be able to do it but let's see what happens first.

See you tomorrow or Monday!

Sometimes I find it terrifying how quickly the time passes these days. One day it's Friday and I'm putting up a new entry and the next, well it's Monday and it's time to put up a brand new entry. But anyway, I'm sticking to my word and providing you guys with the ground work for my two new paintings!

Check them out!





I haven't done the color studies for the second painting just yet, but I did a color study previously for the first one in markers in the last post, which still needs to be fixed from a CMYK to RGB to show the colors properly, but so far they look pretty good and they'll look pretty good when they're done. What do you guys think of these pieces so far?

I'm also working on a one page comic involving a time I travelled to New York City with my friend Sherrie and I stupidly tried to use a subway map as a road map. I'm afraid there isn't that much left to say than that I gave blood and I got some inspiration from sitting in a chair giving blood, so I need to start thumbnailing that.

Check out these sketches to end on a positive note.

Three Months Off - Three Weeks In

It's official! I've been out of school for about three weeks now - currently going on four - and I've been working at my job while attending two different summer continuing education courses at the Massachusetts College of Art to keep me busy and to further my education while I'm still there.

The two course I've been taking are Silkscreen Printing and Painting for Illustrators. The former has been making a good deal of progress over the latter, next week we're going to learn how to do photo emulsion. Unfortunately, I haven't scanned in any of the work I've done yet so those are being saved for a later posting (most likely by Monday or Wednesday, so not to keep you waiting of course!) Painting hasn't turned out any terrible interesting artwork yet, but I've been planning to do outside painting since I got out of school to improve my painting skills.

Since I got out of school, I've had a few interesting non-art related adventures including visiting my girlfriend up in New Hampshire and discovered that I liked canoeing and one psuedo-art related adventure in New York City last weekend when I went to the MoCCA Comic Festival which I'm going to briefly cover here.

MoCCA happened last weekend and has so far proven that I'm having a rather interesting summer vacation. The purpose of MoCCA is that appears as a simple comic convention. That's not to say that it isn't because it is, but it serves a higher purpose than being a place for people who love comics to get together.

Instead it serves as a fundraiser for the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art so that they can continue to have really nifty exhibits. I didn't get to see it personally, but they had an "Art of the Watchmen" exhibit to go along with the release of the film, for example. There were a LOT of people there too, ranging from professional artists and writers to independent artists and writers all of them selling their wares or promoting themselves in some way shape or form.

I went with an ulterior motive aside from supporting the Museum, I had wanted to go to the festival since last year mostly because I would be able to meet a lot of artists and writers I had a good deal of respect for. Also, I wanted to get some advice on the creative process on writing from some people that I respected.

And meet them and get advice I did! Within thirty minutes of getting into the convention, I ran into Brian Wood! The author of Local, DMZ, Demo, Fight for Tomorrow, Northlanders and other awesome comics. He signed the books I brought with me and he gave me some good advice about the writing and planning process. Within a few minutes after meeting Brian Wood, I ran into Rick Spears (author of Teenagers from Mars, Repo and The Pirates of Coney Island) and he signed the books I brought with me and gave me sound advice that I had never heard before! Then I met Becky Cloonan, one of my favorite artists of all time and she helped to give me some good advice as well. I also met Hope Larson, but I'm only familiar with her work more than anything else so I didn't ask her any questions about writing.

I also bought a lot of really nice swag from them too. I bought Brian Wood's limited edition artbook Public Domain 2, Rick Spear's Repo and he gave me a preview of his new book Die Pumpkin Die and I bought a print from Becky Cloonan and her self published graphic novel Minis, which collects her early comics from two-thousand to two-thousand and two.

I even picked up a few comics from indepedent artists including this rather funny book called "Things I've Seen At Shows" and "Harvest is When I Need You Most" which was published by artist I've met a few times that tributes the original Star Wars films.

Here are some pictures from the event:



Brian Wood



Becky Cloonan



Rick Spears





In regards to art, however. Not a whole lot has been going on since I haven't really sat down and really "made" something outside of class but I've been trying to draw a lot more frequently in my sketchbooks but I'm starting to grow rather bored with the subject matter I've been drawing, which is anything. I plan on fixing this soon, so at least I won't run out of things to show you all.

In other news, here's some more artwork! Three more pieces to be exact!







This last piece is a color study for an upcoming painting that I'm going to be working on. That's going to be posted next update, so get ready!

See you Monday!

Day Late, Dollar Short

I'm rather late on this one. I need to get a better handle on this and write this early the day before... How about the week before rather?

Here's five works of art to tide you over, a real written update will be posted tomorrow.