I happened to go in to Fireflies for dinner yesterday and managed to get everything straightened out with the Painting Show that was supposed to start this summer.
Koi Paintings will be going up Labor Day and be there for a currently undetermined amount of time. I'm guessing a month, but I'm not sure.
So, to summarize:
Koi Paintings!
Fireflies!
Starting September 1!
This is for the next issue of Fray. The story it's paired with is about a 6th grader's obsession with his fish (Ironic right?). This pretty much poured out after PBS Parents launched.
Today marked the launch of the New PBS Parents.
We re-did the entire site, from front to back, along with the help of The Incredible Pear. We integrated Movable Type, cleaned up the XHTML and the CSS, and brought a new brand look to the whole sha-bang.
Now for most folks this is just another day on the job, but for us? It was the work of 3 regular regular staff members, one contractor, two interns, and two part time temps... for a 1900 page site. And for me, it's the reason for a very long summer and many late nights.
We're really proud of it. Stop by and say hello: http://www.pbsparents.org
Taurus, the villain of Card Cheat is the leader of a small gang that hounds our Hero.
"Too much mouth" was the feedback on this one. Marc's keeping me on task by not letting me get away with overly simple faces. That's not say there won't be style to the book, but I want to tighten up my drawing a bit.
This might be the worst I've ever done.
Much better.
Taurus! We wanted to avoid pure black/traditional villain colors, so we just stayed in the darker hues.
I'm doing lots of design work and model designs (and bitching about it the whole time) for Card Cheat. It's good process and will help me keep consistent character designs through out the book (which is looking to be six issues long).
Here's the Gid Webb Process:
He started a bit rounder, a bit of sloth. He has a couple of nasty habits that wouldn't let this happen though, and he's too vain to let himself really go.
I stepped back and focused on his face.
I refined his face a bit and drew a horse. Cause it's a western and has horses. Plus, drawing characters standing around for design sheets bores the crap out of me, so I try to do various stances and situations when I can.
Standard model sheet with a straight ahead view, a profile and a close up. The hair color was way wrong though. As Marc said "I don't think they had peroxide hair bleach back then."
And through the magic of Photoshop, Presto! Gideon Webb: All ready to get in to all sorts of trouble.
Working on some new pieces for the Fireflies show in July.
Yes, I work flat on the floor. Yes, I got the idea from watching Pollock.
Just a quick heads up. I'll be showing some Swim Paintings at Fireflies in Alexandria, VA next month. No opening or anything this time around, but stop by and check them out when you get a chance.
One of my "attempt to return to comics" projects this year is The Card Cheat with my constant comics partner Marc Bryant (he wrote Overtime and the Passenger, my past two forays in to major comic work). It's a western, and going to be color when we pitch it, so it takes advantage of you know, the fact that I've gotten better after 4 years, can actually draw things like horses and hands, and don't walk around with my feathers all showing like I used too. Or at least not as much.
It's been about 4 years since I've had a big comic project out there, so it's nice to be working on this and Sam Koi with Rhiannon at the same time.
Anyway Marc and I have been going back and forth about story structure and beats, so I'm turning to character design over the next few weeks.
Stab one at Taurus, a villain.
Got some feedback from Marc, so it's on to sketch two.
Sorting through some pictures, I found this one I took of the next batch of Sam Koi pages. 7 pages this time around, and a whole hell of a lot of fish.
Next post will be fish free. Honest.
My friend Lacey told me that Servathon DC was looking for mural artists, and being that I hadn't ever done mural work (outside of Artomatic last year) I signed right up.
The project took place at Sharpe Health School on 13th street NW. They take care of students with a range of learning, physical, and mental disabilities, so giving them some fish on their walls was the least I could do.
Click on any of the pictures below to see large versions.
Part 1:
I had gone in the day before to the actual event to sketch in the fish with a super sweet large Sharpie. The next morning I started adding coats of orange.
Part 2:
After the first coat was done I was joined by a couple of volunteers and we did the second coat.
Part 3:
Once that dried (which was pretty much instantaneous cause it was about 85 degrees in that room), I went back and did all the detail work.
So all said and done, it was just about 7 hours of work. Good Karma all around. Apparently they're going to get a fish tank for the room now.
(Thanks Flickr for shrinking my 3000 pixel wide images down to 1/2 their size when I uploaded them... what the heck?)
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