The Shelton Diagram Factory

Stuff I made at work that was fun.

2010-03-05T15:33:00.000-08:00

We made these large blow-up Papertoy Monsters for Toy Fair in NYC a few weeks ago. They're about double the size of the original ones in the book.

Bedbugs suck, but I think this guy's pretty fun.

Dispatches from the bottom rung.

2010-01-08T17:06:00.001-08:00

I got a lot of awesome stuff for Christmas from my family and friends, but here's something I got for myself. I only realized that Jeff Vandermeer had published a third (and I suppose final) Ambergris novel when Amazon.com suggested it to me. But I immediately ordered Finch and loved it. So, naturally, when I got to the end and found out Underland Press had two special edition versions available with a lot of extras I was a big enough nerd with enough disposable income to get it.

Here's a view of the Heretic edition packed and sealed in its shipping box. It's wrapped in cloth and closed with a wax seal.

Underland Press gets an A+ for presentation. It really felt like I was getting something special: I even pulled the books out of the package carefully to preserve the wax seal.

Finch started as an earlier, unpublished manuscript that the author explained in his recent AV Club interview was somewhat cannibalized as he wrote the other Ambergris novels (City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword). So the special edition is signed with an excerpt from that novel. It's a big, heavy book in contrast to the slimmer paperback. I haven't even taken it from its prophylactic coating yet.
With the special edition is the "Smashing Todd's Wartime Stout" label, a remnant from the war with the Kalif, the instrumental album that accompanies the book by Murder By Death, a letter from Victoria, the publisher, on Hoegbotton & Sons stationary and a copy of the unfinished first manuscript. It's awesome and I'm glad I got a copy. Even at $110; keeping in mind that it's going to a small publisher (you get a personal email from the publisher when it ships, which is one thing that I like about small businesses).

With the new year and all, I've had occasion to look at how I'm doing lately from a professional standpoint and as a (relatively) new graduate from SVA- it'll be three years since I graduated once May rolls around- I feel pretty good about how I've done so far. That's not to say that I couldn't do better, but I feel like my work has improved a lot since graduating and I'm heading in a more comfortable direction than I was when I left. If the standard you're looking at is some of my most successful peers and mentors, then I'm not doing great: I have a day job, I'm certainly not doing book covers and making a living at it and I haven't won any awards. But when I look at some of my other former classmates there are the people that are struggling to find a day job, those that have a day job but don't make art anymore and those that do both. I think, given how things are right now, it's good that I'm in the third category. I don't love the job, but I've been able to get a relatively consistent stream of work for small publishers in the last few months and this has lead me to feel optimistic about my prospects. It may well dry up after this month and I'll be back to square one, but that's why I work a 9-5 right?

The unfortunate decision that I've had to make, though, is that I can't really volunteer any more. By "volunteer" I mean I can't work for free any more. Namely because I've noticed that after volunteering my work, even if I got some good pieces out of it, I didn't get any new clients. The people I'm working for now are the people I had before I started the uncompensated projects. So, from a practical standpoint, I'm not getting much out of the arrangement; even the promise of exposure isn't enough for me any more. That's not to say that I expect to make the Graphic Artist Guild industry standard for every job; if I make enough to pay for my materials, I'll take the job. I'm not working for Wizards of the Coast or White Wolf or any of the other large gaming companies; most of my clients are very small in the industry, people publishing from their home computers. So I can't expect $200 for a black and white quarter page. It's not going to happen yet. But if I can get $30 or so to cover watercolor paper, ink, carbon and tracing paper and maybe a new brush and the hope of having it at least seen by someone, it's worth my while. You have to take what you can get.

But that's part of why I feel guilty about turning down volunteer work. I'm in the same boat as some of the people asking me to work gratis: we have 9-5s, we have bills to pay and just the hope of scratching our creative itches in our own time. It's tough to come to someone hat in hand and ask them to work for you purely out of enthusiasm for the project with no compensation. Everyone wants the best possible product for the least possible cost. But I have to start being pragmatic. Time spent on a freebie is time I'm not working on a project of my own or a paying job.

And it is sort of depressing looking at what you're "supposed to make" vs. what you actually bring in with the stuff you spent 4 years and so many hours in college learning. The reasons for publishing's decline are many and I won't reiterate but especially for a niche market like fantasy/sci-fi/horror, there's a ton of competition and just the reality that with the internet around, profit margins dwindle and dwindle for publishers. And by extension, those that rely on publishers. Printing is expensive, distribution is expensive. There's someone on the internet willing to give it to you for free, too. It's depressing, but more and more I realize that I may need to rely on having a 9-5 for a very long time, if not forever.

Don't misunderstand me; I'm glad I'm doing what I'm doing and that I am seeing progress. They tell you it's going to be tough in college, they tell you most of your peers won't be doing art 10 years after graduation. Sometimes it's difficult to ignore that elephant in the room, though. The fact that what you do isn't highly valued in the slightest, that even your best efforts can't make up for the fact that only a tiny percentage of an ever expanding pool of people ever really "make it" and that for the rest of us, it's going to stay a hobby, if that.

Sorry, I'm not often that bleak. Well, not as often as I used to be. If that makes sense.

Mummy Fingers for the World

2009-12-17T16:21:00.000-08:00

Last week I cut off the tip of my left index finger at work. It sucked. This is old news if you're friends with me on Facebook. So my finger was a mummy.

And then it was a Pharaoh.

And then I cut my thumb real bad. Last week wasn't fun.

But now I have an awesome mustache, so it's cool.

Working up illustrations for Kobold Quarterly pdfs on monster ecology; I'd show you stuff, but it isn't published yet. Next week is Christmas and I'm excited even though holiday trains suck.

Shhh! Don't tell anyone.

2009-11-15T09:33:00.001-08:00

... but here are some sketches for my next illustrations.
You can see the finals in the next issue of KQ magazine.

Rejoice in the flavors of man's demise.

2009-11-01T13:14:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Brandon Bird's excellent website, I made a Christopher Walken mask instead of a Groundskeeper Willy ensemble. Couldn't find the time to run out for some overalls, a fake unibrow and a rake but I always have time to construct a Walken mask complete with 3d glasses-style supports. It's so intense, like the man himself.

And here's the incredible vegan Cthulu cake that Meaghan and I have been hyping since May. We're not pastry chefs, so we had to constrain our ambitions (he looks a little more like Azathoth than Cthulu, if you catch my drift). But he was delicious. Orange and chocolate cake with vanilla-orange and chocolate frosting and orange pudding for the extra dimensional goop.

The octopus Cthulu head fell apart, so we made a second one... then ruined it by trying to level out the bottom. But it's okay! It looks better with all the tentacles we salvaged and the orange cake it's made from is totally delicious.

Good news for the future in James:

- Reworking my website to maximize my potential.

- More work for Kobold Quarterly! This time: elves!

- I got Borderlands and it's awesome and my pre-order copy of Dragon Age should be here soon. But I have to put my commissions for KQ first, of course.

Each day we shovel fuel! Each day we work in silence!

2009-10-24T11:53:00.001-07:00

Kobold Quarterly #11 is out! Pick it up, it's excellent!

And now that it's hit the streets, I can share a brief look at how my illustration got from concept to finish. The first concept was "dwarf working at a forge". It's an iconic fantasy image, so I thought I would start with exactly what had been seen before- a dwarf working at an anvil and then come up with another part of the process that maybe we don't see as often: using the tongs to heat the spearhead he's working on.

My client chose the second one (with good reason) and from there I took reference photos and prepared the full sketch on tracing paper so I could give him another look:

Everything was cool, especially the braid in his beard to hold it back (I think it's called a "dwarven hair net" now) but taking layout into consideration, my client suggested it would be easier to set text against a black background. So, I lost the brick wall part of the hearth on the right side before proceeding to the final.

After transferring the piece to watercolor paper and getting in there with a Rapidograph pen and just a few ink washes, here's the result. The ultimate goal that we had in mind was greater contrast from previous work I had done so that it would show up better on the page and I think we accomplished it. And once again: researching reference and shooting it yourself really pays off, in my opinion. I couldn't have made up that lighting myself.

Moving on to the second piece, my client wanted a dwarf on a journey or migration, carrying some great burden (dwarves love work like Homer Simpson loves donuts).

This one went through a few changes in the thumbnail stage before we got to the sketch. At first I thought dwarves = subterranean, so I put him in a hallway. But my client pointed out that the text put them on an overland journey, so I tried to reposition him outside, going up a path. From there, he thought maybe it would be better to wrap text around it, so I erased most of the background in Photoshop but left the rocks in the front. That was the winner. The sketch stage is where I get more use out of Photoshop and digital tools: it's handy for bouncing ideas around and doing quick editing. I want to integrate it more into the final product, eventually, but for right now I mostly use it for tinkering to iron out the concept.

Reference photos in hand, I put together the sketch. This one was a bit more difficult, since he's somewhat in perspective but also doesn't adhere to normal human proportions. We took a lot of shots for this one and I ultimately mixed and matched where I could until it felt about right.

And here he is finished. Again, I went for contrast as much as I could and tried to use the black to lend more weight to that big statue on his back, trying to make that visual weight indicate actual weight if that makes sense. Still working out the balance between hatching with the pen and solid areas of tone with the washes. I like the results and I think I'm getting somewhere with it.

I remember in art school that sometimes fellow students wouldn't listen to teachers' critiques either because of disagreement or some sense that they felt the ultimate decision was really theirs or just plain stubbornness. While I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing sometimes (it's good to stand by your own judgement), as an illustrator that has to work with a client your ultimate goal is to make sure they're happy and want to work with you again while producing something that you can use to promote yourself in the future.

From the experience I've had making these dwarves for Kobold Quarterly I've realized just how important it is to be mindful of your client's input; after all, they have a clearer idea of the finished product than you may have and they know what is going to suit their needs best. In this case, I really feel like that back and forth interaction and revision was a big benefit to the finished pieces: the finished illustrations seem much stronger to me than the initial sketches and I'm glad they came together this way.

Jane! Get me off this crazy thing... called love.

2009-10-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

Long time without updating. I would like to apologize to the three of you that read this for my long absence from the blogosphere.

News in James: Keep an eye out for Kobold Quarterly #11, where I have two illustrations of dwarves. I think they're pretty good, even if they both look a little too much like me. One has probably the best lighting I've managed to pull off. As if I needed to say it again: lighting real people is the way to go. I'd love to be able to fabricate the whole thing from my head like Burne Hogarth, but the hassle of getting models and setting things up is totally worth it. The proof is in the pudding, the sweet sweet pudding. I can't post them up yet, since it's only polite to wait until they're published (I want to maintain a good working relationship, since I'm not great at networking to begin with and KQ is a top-notch magazine).

Got an iPhone. It's pretty rad, but also expensive. I can swing it, though, because I'm making a dollar more per hour at work now. Haven't been drawing like I should; work's gotten busy and I've gotten lazy with my off hours. But I did this sketch and plan on doing more and then finals:

It's already been up on Facebook, but whatever. The idea is that this girl touches the lion skin rug and it comes back to life a little. "Juno" from Tokyo Police Club's Elephant Shell album is the inspiration: "All of the lions in your bedroom, all of the tigers we ignore". I guess the underlying concept is that passions that you thought were dealt with or dead have a way of re-igniting and taking on some semblance of their former importance. Deep thoughts, man.

Future plans:

- Portfolio of black and white illustrations targeted at White Wolf games and Chaosium's "Call of Cthulu". Vampires, werewolves, changelings, mi-go, elder things and flappers, oh my! Better work on my Charleston...

- Return to comics either writing or drawing-- I have to write up a script for a story I've been refining called "The Weaver and the White Hound"; not sure if I'm going to draw it or ask my good friend Hilary to draw it. Also want to finally get that adaptation of "Detectives and Cadavers" going.

-Of course, more fantasy drawings.

- Cthulu cake for Halloween! IT WILL HAPPEN!!

I'd better get busy.

Do you know the way to the Icecapades?

2009-08-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

Final piece for the fourth cycle for Nevermet Press: Neirave, the Sleepless Drift. Again, extra super major thanks to Meaghan for posing for me and to Thomas for his lighting expertise.
I'm trying to figure out the best middle ground between over-worked and under-worked; this one kind of falls into the under-worked area, but I'm fairly happy with it. I'm trying to get more ambitious with these things, with more attention to background, taking or researching photo reference. "Researching" is a nice way of saying "swiping from Flickr and google images". This one is much larger than the previous ones, too: 15 x 16, not counting the half inch border.

I have a paying commission from the award-winning Kobold Quarterly, but unless the contract has changed (yeah, this one actually has a contract! Binding!) I won't be able to put it up for three months or so after the date of publication.

Tracing paper pals

2009-08-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

Tracing paper sketch for the next NMP villain. My friend Meaghan posed for the character while her boyfriend Thomas helped me out a lot with his lighting expertise. It's due very soon and I should have started it earlier. Oh well. So check out my weekend plans! Hooray! Wolves make anyone into a badass, just so you know.

This week was New York Gift Show preparations. I made about six giant foamcore books and a bunch of signs and dummies; I plan to take photos during the week so stay tuned to the same James time, same James channel.

I'm a fright with my tombstone smile, all the children run away from me.

2009-08-09T12:03:00.001-07:00

Thumbnails for the next villain portrait: The Sleepless Drift. Vengeful ice queen type. I like the one on the left, author likes the one on the right. Perfectly understandishable, since I kind of like it too. Trying to get reference together, since I have a week to make it.
Moving on to larger stuff. This is a developed sketch of Isaac, my internet Planescape character. He looks like Phil because Phil modeled for a lot of random poses for me a while ago and I'm still using them. But that's okay, he looks close to how I imagined him. Drawn on tracing paper. I'm hoping to ink this and a bunch more and then learn to color digitally, keeping the line work intact. Yes, indeed, that Isaac's a pretty trig cutter.

Who wears short-shorts?

2009-08-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

The new cleric, that's who! I had some extra space, so I sketched out the new cleric in the group. The fun thing about Planescape from back in 2nd edition D&D was that you could have characters from any setting, so Ekuur over there is from the world of Athas of the Dark Sun setting. Loincloths are for priests too, you know.

Boys and Girls! Action! Action!

2009-08-01T17:37:00.001-07:00

I have my hands in many sinister soups. Here's an in-progress drawing of a villain for Nevermet Press. I missed the deadline horribly, so an even less finished version wound up on the website. I want to finish him, I really do. Just got frustrated. It's getting there, very slowly.
I like making rough little sketches like these. Two characters from the internet Planescape game I'm in: on the left is Bethany, a harpy bard and on the right in Nari, a timid elven psionicist.

Rough ideas for items for NMP. Hooray!

A Cavalcade of Cowls

2009-07-13T18:24:00.001-07:00

Four masks for the next NMP article. They were pretty fun to work on and went surprisingly quick.

I had a facepalm moment when my boss was talking about why the early Star Wars movies were so much better than the new ones: they were full of stuff 10 year old boys liked. Pirates, sword fights, monsters, magic powers, swinging over things. Even stuff for 13 year olds, like Princess Leia in a belly dancer-esque outfit. Stuff that I'm mostly lacking in my portfolio, so I need to start appealing more to the 10-13 year old boys (and maybe girls) laying dormant in my audience. That's when I'll start bringing in actual money.

Eat it up, motherfuckers!!

2009-07-05T11:45:00.001-07:00

The Desire is the first villain featured on the pen and paper RPG internet publishing collective Nevermet Press. To read the entire feature on her as well as to get stats to use in your own games, encounters, items and organizations to plug into your own campaign (regardless of what system you use), you should go down there and subscribe. I get payed for this out of subscriptions, so pay up!!

I like how it turned out. I kind of wish I could have made the peacock feather a little more prominent, since it's a nod to her angle (preying on rich/aristocratic men). Her armbands also have bees on them. Pointless symbolism that you will not notice, but it's there. The whole thing is an "homage" (a fancy French word to mean that I stole it!) to John Singer Sargent.

Next week, I'll have illustrations up there for a bunch of items and organizations and then the week after that will be a new villain that I am also illustrating. So I'd best get cracking.

This is also the 100th blog post here; likely only the 12th where I'm not complaining about something. Yay!!

Don't Tell the Horses the Stable's on Fire.

2009-06-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

Here are some thumbnails for a set of articles about Succubus themed villains, items and encounters from Nevermet Press (the gentlemen behind Open Game Table and the villain-a-week blog project).

For the Mask of Truth; looking through the mask reveals the presence of shapeshifting demons out to tempt humans to do the stuff that they probably would have done without prompting. Got to adjust the eyehole effect.
A mancatcher and an amulet.
I'm filling in on the first week's villain portrait for The Desire. I'll readily admit that I ripped off Sargent completely, but it's bound to change before the final. And, hey, I gave her a different dress and jewelry and a peacock feather. And an indication of drapery in the background. Plus, he's dead. So he can't sue.

Been hitting a wall with drawing. Over and over. Making excuses for too long, not being ambitious enough. Only solution is more drawing.

I got some how-to books on figure drawing and painting, but I honestly don't know how to learn from them. Do I copy what's in there? Just read it like a lesson plan? Who knows? I don't.

(And this has nothing to do with Bear Vs. Shark, I just couldn't think of a good title so I put in the current iTunes track.)

Adventures in internet geekery

2009-06-07T13:48:00.001-07:00

Four characters from the internet Planescape D&D game I play in (not run; I had to drop that one just because I've been trying to focus more on drawing and less time on the internet, which is an aspiration that isn't going so great right now...). There are like, seven to nine of us, though, so I haven't gotten everyone yet. There are a few characters that are unique enough (like a harpy and a cat-woman) that they would likely be good candidates for larger and more fleshed out things. Ideally, I wanted to do a height comparison but that kind of fell apart. I'm thinking that if I wanted to get really elaborate and do some sort of concept art thing, I could do a 360 degree drawing of a few characters and things like that. I really need to get more reference and get back to figure drawing.

I'm the guy with the spear on the left. He's a half-elf, named Isaac.

The thing I noticed recently is that when I play as a character (and it's usually over the internet, since I'm always the DM in real life) I tend to play as a certain type. If I'm not way over the top, my gut character, the archetype I'm associating with, is usually a confident leader-type (because I'm not confident and I don't like to talk) that tends to focus on fighting (maybe because I'm not athletic?). Armchair psychology is silly, though, so I'm going to say that it means absolutely nothing. Nothing to see here, move along.

There's always a trade-off as a young artist, fresh (okay, two years) out of school or wherever one's education came from. If you don't get a day job, you can put all of your focus on your work and develop your skills and ideas. But you'll also barely scrape by as far as money goes. With a day job, you don't worry so much about money (and in my case, I get an inside look at the publishing business) but your time and energy are limited by that. You have to be pretty disciplined to keep that constant balance and it's difficult to maintain it. Sometimes you're good and you're on it, with lots of momentum. Other times it's extremely frustrating, which is often where I find myself. I make stuff all day for someone else; when I go home, I usually don't feel like making more stuff. Sometimes I can make myself do it, other times I can't. I've never been great with patience, either, so it's very easy to get frustrated. There's no real way to "solve" the situation beyond figuring out a good middle path that leaves me producing work but also finding enough downtime so that I'm not pulling my hair out. It's always a balancing act, is what I'm saying.

Coming down the pike:
- Want to get back to doing comics.
- More work from Jonathan Jacobs and his partners in the RPG blog community under their new small-press publisher.
- COLOR
- PERSPECTIVE
- EXPLOSIVE FUCKING ACTION
- HUMMUS
- Start selling finished pieces on the internet.
- Develop my own setting for, you know, nerd stuff.

Unicorns have chosen sides in the Culture War.

2009-06-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

Even the birthday cards I make for my friends are full of my wacky New England Liberalism. Hooray!

I only love you for your Faulknerian prose.

2009-05-30T17:04:00.001-07:00

Two sketches for the last villain a week thing that I never wound up making because I got too busy with PaizoCon drawings and then preparing stuff at work for Book Expo of America. I feel bad.
This is a birthday card type thing for one of my roomates. I did it straight in pen, so it's a little wonky. Haven't done that in a while (or even worked in ink for a few months) and it was fun, because it forces you to deal with your mistakes rather than fuss over them. I need to work on my crosshatching and contrast if I keep working in ink at a later time.

I made a whole crapload of giant foamcore books for Workman's BEA booth this year. Normally we send out for them, but this time we got a huge printer and did it almost entirely in-house. So it was a hell of a two weeks. But everyone seemed happy with the booth and they like to make a big splash at the Expo. Probably won't be up there myself, but people seemed to like it. My boss and coworkers say I should get a raise (probably won't, but should) and that's always a nice feeling.

I found this under my bed and I thought I would put it up here.

2009-05-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

Last piece for the PaizoCon fanzine thingy. A gallery of stolen oddities thought up by Adam Daigle. I suck at perspective, so this was a bigger challenge than it looks like it should have been. But I'm fairly happy with it.

Harpies ride cowgirl, just so you know. Put it in your Kama Sutra Monster Manual.

I joined a Cthulu Cult on my vacation this year.

2009-05-16T07:51:00.000-07:00

This is a cloak for the PaizoCon fanzine this year. I didn't like drawing it that much, but it's the one everyone likes it seems.
Don't worry, it's only chocolate sauce.

I'm starting think I may rely too much on my reference. Maybe I need to stylize a little more or something.

Time to put a fork in the merciless socket of time.

2009-05-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

It seems like all of the commissions I get wait until around May to pop up. Last year I had Blood of the Gorgon drawings to do from the sublet I had from my sister's friend, this year I have work on a villain per week for Quinn Murphy's blog At-Will and the PaizoCon fanzine for my internet D&D buddies on the Paizo.com messageboards. So I've been busy. Here are two sketches for Savis Rayn, tiefling warlock and well-intentioned villain.
... and here's the final pencil drawing. Goat or ram horns are common, so I wanted to go for Ibex horns. Huge difference. I swear. The foreshortening is a little weird, but by and large I'm pretty satisfied.
The second week is Grebs Follyfoot, halfling mage and nihilistic villain (must...resist...Big Lebowski quote...). The right one was my first idea, more puckish than homicidal while the left is more homicidal and crazy looking. On the right there's a deck of cards flying about, many of them on fire. Tiny, infinitesimal detail: both have the image of a broken tower worked into them, either in a pendant or The Tower tarot card.
And here's the final for Follyfoot. I'll mention that both of these villains are my friend Phil. Yeah, I keep saying I'll use more models but, well, he does a good job on expressions. I'm trying to challenge myself more rather than playing it safe (I'm doing these for free, so I want to make sure they're entertaining to work on as well as good quality) so I've tried to do a high perspective on a character with different proportions from a normal human. It looks okay to me, but I'm open to criticism. I also wanted to do some bad-ass tattoos, until I realized how little time I had to work, so I just went with scales and stuff.
Two sketches for the Paizocon fanzine. Look close at the left one and you'll see that it's me for once. I'm most worried about the cloak on the right: I have to figure out how to give it form while not making the figure the star of the show.
My friend Adam wrote up a gallery/art thief ring with a lot of fun treasures and this is the sketch I came up with for that. It'll probably be a fun challenge, since I'm usually scared of perspective and things like that, but I think it looks good and there are a lot of interesting objects to work on.

It's going to be a really busy week. Friday is the absolute deadline for all of this stuff, including the last villain for Quinn ("The Summoner"). I'm hoping to get the raving guy in the desert and the cloak finished by tomorrow night along with a sketch for the last villain. But it's going to be tough. Plus, this is the start of book show season for Workman publishing which means a lot for me to do in the next two weeks or so. Oy.

My birthday was on Tuesday and I chose that horrible night (really, what idiot goes out on a Tuesday? This guy!) to have a great time. Dinner with some good friends at Soy and Sake (highly recommend it) and then a drink with my friend Hilary at Draft Barn. Good times, now I'm ancient. I'm pretty happy, all things considered: even if I'm always tired, I draw every night now. I feel like a crummy friend sometimes because I don't get out as often as I should to see people, but that will be remedied and then I won't feel bad about it.

Stay tuned for four more drawings by Friday!

It's all right, ma, I'm only... well, I guess I'm constantly bleeding, actually...

2009-04-13T19:17:00.000-07:00

Drawing from my sketchbook of Kabran Bloodeye, the resident crimelord and brutal pimp of Falcon's Hollow from Paizo's Darkmoon Vale adventures. His nose was cut off as punishment for his crimes in another town and he has a nosepiece to replace it; it constantly leaks blood and pus, which he has to mop up with a handkerchief.

I'm hoping to make my character drawings act more, rather than just standing around and he's kind of an attempt in that direction.

Holy Shit! Golf!

2009-04-09T18:05:00.000-07:00

I doodled these at work. Fried Day is Friday, when we often order unhealthy food. Or indian food, which at times is healthy. The hairy guy kind of became a self-portrait halfway through. I'm such a stud. If only I didn't smell like a dead moose...

I've been polishing my modron.

2009-04-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

He's done. Pencil rendering is boring, but I feel the most confident doing it. The design is based on drawings from the Planescape books by Tony Diterlizzi and from the cover of Dragon magazine number 354 by Andrew Hou. It'll go up on the website once I get my watermark thing figured out. I think I may need to go in and reorganize the stuff up there.

This whole "work during the day, make art all the rest of the time" thing is hard, but I'm sticking with it.

He's like a big square, this guy.

2009-03-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

Hey, assface! Check this out: Wired's Geekdad blog has reviewed the Open Game Table book that features some of my illustrations. Doesn't mention the artwork, though. Rats. Available now on Amazon.com!

I'm drawing a modron. Because I like those guys and my internet D&D friend Patrick is playing one. He's in progress, trying to figure out a background because I need to really add those more to my pictures. Sorry for the hideous URL in the bottom corner; I need to hand-letter an attractive one, still.

Hey! Kid! Buy this book!

2009-03-12T18:11:00.000-07:00

Hey, remember those illustrations I did? They're being published in a dead tree book format, not on the internet this time. Hell, Jonathan even managed to get it picked up for distribution and it's going to be sold on Amazon.com! Pretty darn fancy. There will be a cover image up soon and please note that the release date is March 23rd. Also: Wired magazine's Geek Dad blog will be doing a preview and later a review of the book when it's out. The time went so fast. First you're just messing around, throwing ideas out there and then it grows up into a book. Where does the time go? Sniffle.

Here are some sketchbook pages.

Wizard, stargazer thumb that didn't get taken for the final edition and some frustrated half-formed barbarians. I think the wizard's head is too small.
Half-formed mind flayer sketch, rough thumb for the Anthology cover illustration, a Jesus thumbnail that I abandoned because I was A) plagiarizing Moebius' incredible 40 Days Dans le Desert and B) I just can't draw Jesus and not feel weird about it. It was going to go for a book of Jesus drawings my friend Mike was putting together, but I just got stuck. He's been drawn so many times by so many people and there's only so much room to work with him. Plus, you have to try and be sincere for the book's parameters. Barbarian to the left of Jesus (Jesus + Barbarian = AWESOMEST SAVIOR EVER) and some guy in a cloak. I dunno, I just draw it.
This is the knife that cut off a piece of my finger. It's being haunted by the ghosts of other still life drawings.
Still life of my desk at work. Trying to do more observational drawings.

Things are good. I went a long time without reading Dune and then I settled down and just read it. It was good for world building and intrigue, bad for character development. I enjoyed it and I can kind of see why it's considered a classic (I think the things influenced by Dune ruined the actual thing for me) but I'm not especially interested in reading the rest. I want to see Andrew Bird and Calexico and The Decemberists when they're here in June, but I don't want to go alone and they're both pricey shows.

I plan to continue to draw more, even as I fritter away my extra time each day on nonsense. I get the odd urge to draw comics now and then. I haven't seen Watchmen yet, though I want to check it out. I may wait until next week or so so that I can avoid any kind of lines or what have you.

You've made my day, now you have to sleep in it.

2009-03-01T21:22:00.001-08:00

Illustrations for Jonathan Jacobs' RPG blog anthology. Finally added some kind of proprietary mark on each one. I'm not a fan of pre made fonts (Copperplate, for instance) but I'll have time to do some kooky hand lettering another day and go back and fix all of my images with it. For now, if you grab it on your desktop you'll at least know where to find more (once, of course, I update my damn website). I'm also thinking this will be the last time I work for free.

This is going on the cover, inside of a circular lens thing. I keep saying that I'll stop asking the same people to pose over and over, but I never follow through. Hey, he can pose well. It looks a little too much like the Silas and Armand picture I did for Blood of the Gorgon in May, though.

This guy made a deal for magical insights into the stars; so now he lives in eternal night. While it's day to everyone else, he perceives it as night so he can see constellations only visible in the day. So I thought I would make a halo of stars for him. I need to make my fantasy characters more fantasy like, but it seems I'm always getting more Steampunk stuff or things that aren't too gear or adventurer intensive.

This is one for a blog on "Gygaxian Naturalism", how the Monster Manual is more than just a bunch of combat statistics in older versions of the game: it gives info on non-combatants in a creatures' lair and things like that. I don't like this one; it's not nearly as good as the others and I'm glad I switched out of ink wash. I just didn't have the patience or the touch for it, I think. Much happier with pencil, though I still think I need to work on contrast and things.

Crazy week at work. Three days on my own, since we had two legitimate absences and one person flaked. It was rough, especially because I had to work on the top drawing at night, too. But everything got handled, I still have my job and what remains of my sanity. I've found living in Brooklyn agrees with me. It's not perfect, but there's a major psychological advantage to living in a separate house from your parents and doing everything yourself. And I'm walking more, eating more reasonable portions of food since I pay for it and prepare it now. Thinking about signing up for online dating or something, but I'm kind of wary. One thing at a time, though I think if I go in for that sort of thing just looking for someone to go on a few dates with, have a drink, see a film and work on being a bit more outgoing, then I'll do okay.

Coraline was amazing, go see it. Much better than Mirrormask, even though I sort of liked that one.

One small schlep for man...

2009-01-31T19:16:00.000-08:00

Another cover sketch, posted on Facebook about two weeks ago. A sculptor contemplates the world he's making, his previous creations adding their opinions from above. I haven't drawn anything else in a while. I keep saying I'll draw every day, that I'll take things beyond the sketch stage and then I don't. But I have a reason this time! This time is different!

I'm finally moving to Brooklyn. For a year I have bitched and moaned and made excuses and this will be the last time; no more 5 hours a day going one place to another. Half an hour to work, like a normal human being. I'll make more and better artwork, have time to play video games and do whatever the hell else it was that I did when I had a life (ship in a bottle building?). I keep blaming the commute for my lack of productivity and it is partly to blame (scroll down: I made the Starman and the dude with the axe while subletting my old school chum's [nom de guerre Cherry Grenade's] place) but I would be lying if I said that there weren't other contributing factors. And I realize this comes up under Google and that future clients may read this and get scared off of me, but, well, I can always take it down when I'm totally ready to be serious. Or I can decide to be honest.

I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm not convinced of where I'm going just yet and the fact that it's this late in the game scares me. I don't know if this fantasy art thing will ever be more than a hobby for me. Hell, I don't know if art in general will ever go beyond this. Sometimes I have to sit down and wonder if I really love it as much as I used to or else I wouldn't let this... fear overtake me. If I'm afraid enough that what I make won't make the grade, that I won't be able to put pencil to paper or ink to paper or paint to canvas or magic pen to wacom tablet, do I really want it enough? They tell you in art school, your parents tell you before you pursue this madness, but you never believe them: this is hard. I draw when I'm hot, I don't when I'm cold. That's not the way to do things if you're really obsessed, if you really want to make a career out of it. I make excuses, but that's all they are: excuses. "If you really wanted it,"part of me rebukes,"you would find time, you would find energy. But you haven't and you won't, so give up and let your ass grow and make the easy choice." And I don't want that to be true, I want to be successful and I don't want to stay at my job forever. So often I feel like I'm way behind and I'm swimming against the current. I didn't make good choices at school, I didn't stick to my game plan. I let other peoples' biases scare me off of why I really went to school. I didn't develop my technical skill set enough, I made good habits and then let them slacken back into bad ones (drawing every day being the major casualty).

But at the end of the day, I think my disappointment means more than just beating up on myself because I like it for some sick reason. I'm disappointed because I know I can do this, but I keep choosing not to. Because I don't want to make hard choices on what direction I want to take (illustration? comics? concept? each one is impractical but possible on its own, but it's tough to do all three at once and I'm pretty rusty to begin with). Because I'd rather choose failure than let someone reject me. I know a few things, like the fact that I never really liked painting but felt like I had to pursue it for some reason or that I always kind of felt like a fake with most of what I made in school, trying to please my instructors more than myself. As crowded as the field is, I could find a way if I got obsessed and started taking it seriously. And that's what I'll do when I move, cross my heart, hope to die. I want to take some night classes, at least a figure drawing course, do some more drawing from observation. I'll make more portfolio stuff that I'll like (still not happy yet), I'll actually advertise, I'll redo my website, learn the computer programs, sell originals online maybe. We'll see how long it lasts, but I'm going to at least try.

And people keep telling me I look like the guy from Mythbusters. I think I have to find a way to make that profitable. Publicity appearances? Underground science experiments? Discovery channel parody porn?

...

... maybe I should write a script.

An Open Letter to a Young Woman on the Subway, whose bag offended me.

2009-01-13T18:08:00.000-08:00

Dear Young Woman on the Subway,
In a sea of people with large, bulky bags I must say that your canvas carry-all with a skull and crossbones stood out to me. Not because of the emblem itself; I'm quite familiar with the Jolly Roger, as you will learn. No, because of what was written under it. "Rugby".

I won't say that I was incensed, because incensed is a bit too strong. But I was taken aback and perhaps a bit peeved. I believe, to put it plainly, that you are misrepresenting the sport of Rugby and its appeal to pirates.

If I were, say, press ganged from a shadowy alley in the bowels of some depressed port to ply the waters of the South Seas (this, you'll recall, is the sort of activity that turned exotic Shanghai from a noun to a verb) for a merciless privateer, I would be alarmed if I were to find rugby equipment in a routine ransacking of my bunkmate's possessions. You'll understand that, beyond looting and pillaging, we don't really do contact sports. So, nothing says Landlubber (I've been told that I need to be more P.C. and use the term,"Shore Rat", but old habits die hard) to me quite like rugby equipment. While the sport of rugby may be quite savage and lower class while played in its native British Isles, here in the New World it has a different connotation entirely.

Rugby, madame, is a frat jock sport. A sport adopted by the boys out in Greenwich, the pooka-shelled children of bankers and robber barons (nothing against robber barons, as I am a maritime entrepeneur myself) that needed a manly activity to get out their repressed sexual urges and aggression over comfortable lives with no real sense of risk or danger.

In other words, I would venture to say that soft-handed rugby enthusiasts do not seem like pirate material to me. And besides, where would we play? The deck is usually pretty wet and our schedules are quite full as it is. And with the number of peg legs and hooks bedecking our crew, it would be a very dangerous game, indeed, with unfair advantages all around.

Word of advice: let the rugby players stick to their Hollister catalogs and Abercrombie and Fitch bags and leave the real piracy to us.

Ahoy,
James M. Keegan, Captain
The Shelton Diagram Frigate

Canadian Arbor Day never felt so sweet.

2009-01-13T17:48:00.000-08:00

First page of my new sketchbook for 2009. Thumbnails and concepts and a bust of Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax as a Greek philosopher. The book is spiral bound on the left, but I edited that out because I felt it was "unseemly". It seems that I never finish anything anymore, just make preliminary stuff. That has to change this month with the blog project I've volunteered for.

I've got a fixation on trying to draw comics again. I produced one in the summer after my second year of art school for fun; just a bunch of little strips in a xeroxed book. I also made a wordless five page comic for an experimental narrative class during my last year there. (I accidentally assembled them upside down and then managed to pass it off as intentional with some quick thinking. Dishonest, perhaps, but I maintain that thinking on your feet and using a little b.s. when necessary is a practical part of education and will likely outlive some of the things I was taught there.)

I read Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff Vandermeer after loving City of Saints and Madmen and Veniss Underground (Shriek was very good) and it reminded me that I kicked around the idea of adapting "Detectives and Cadavers" from that second collection. So once the illustrations for the blog project are done I may put the glacial pace of working on my portfolio behind and start on that in February before I remember how much work comics require.

It's been hard to produce work lately; I don't know how much I should expect to get done with my schedule and living arrangements, but I feel like I should have more finished drawings made by now. I have a whole other sketchbook, after all, full of gestating ideas waiting for me to put skin and bones on them. Maybe I'm too tired or I don't love it like I used to; I'm probably just out of practice. I need to get myself to eat, breathe and sleep creativity again despite whatever else is going on. I do feel kind of embarrassed and ashamed of myself that I haven't been as disciplined as I would like.

And I still don't know what the goal of this silly blog is. Memoir? Public livejournal? Venue for work in progress? Desperate cry for attention? Who knows.

Handsome Orc/Ugly Orc

2009-01-05T18:31:00.000-08:00

This is the companion to the previous guy. I'm not sure how I feel about him just yet; I think his hands and feet need some work (larger) and I'm not satisfied with his legs. I feel like I'm ruining a tradition. Orcs are supposed to have huge shoulder plates and muscley arms and stuff. But he's a dwarf reincarnated as an orc and he's a ranger, not a loin cloth clad barbarian. I don't know if he's ugly enough yet, either. The character would literally die if he got any uglier, so I need to really make him spectacularly gross.

The Snuggy will lead you to a life of New Age religion.

2009-01-01T13:20:00.000-08:00

Sketch on tracing paper of my friend's half-orc paladin. Late Christmas present in the making. Not sure how I like the face tattoo. I'm planning to do my other friend's character as well; it will be like a handsome orc/ugly orc comparison thing.

I still need to sit down and watermark my stuff. So, technically I shouldn't put anything online until I learn how but nuts to that.

When the doctor said I didn't have worms anymore, that was the best Christmas ever.

2008-12-30T18:53:00.000-08:00

I'm finally buckling down and trying to learn some digital coloring techniques. This is a cover sketch I'm pitching for a collection of D&D blogs being published. It's taking some time and practice to get used to using the color picker to get precisely what I want; mixing on the palette still seems more direct and simple to me. I'm sure I'll get used to it. I don't know why I kept putting it off for so long, since it's pretty easy and simple to correct. Pretty typical of me, though.

Here's another cover concept I'm kicking around. I'm big on hardwood floors, going in to 2009. Hardwood floors will be the greatest contribution to fantasy art, I can feel it. Clockwork engineer working on a mechanical lobster creation.

This is a spot illustration/border I also pitched. Adventurer's backpack. Last page in my sketchbook that I started almost two years ago in art school. Time for a new one.

Christmas was good with the family, got some cool shit. Gave some cool shit out. Enjoyed the rare occurrence of having everyone together at one table, even if we drive each other nuts at times.

January is going to be a fun experiment in how much I can juggle at once. I have my day job, I'm slated to contribute illustrations to this project, I'm hoping to move at last to the city and I just bought an xbox 360 so I can play Fallout 3 and shoot super mutants in the face in slow motion in order to take their purified water. I think you can tell which I'm most enthused for, but I'm trying to have some self-discipline and buckle down.

Have a happy new year, buttface.

My dinner should have dinner with your dinner.

2008-12-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

Eli final ink drawing. I think I may have overworked him and gone too close in the values (as is my habit); not enough contrast. And he looks friendlier than in the sketch. I'm considering whether I want to stick with this ink wash thing or try something else; either with just pen and black ink or going back to pencil. Not entirely sure yet.

Nuclear Wombats from Mars!

2008-11-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

Sketch for another character on a white background, this one for a friend on the Paizo.com Dungeons&Dragons messageboards. The description noted that he was a Varisian (gypsy-like people in the company's setting), unusually tall, used a greataxe and a breastplate and had a drug problem in his past with the accompanying scars. So I tried to do something like that and make his face kind of haggard and weathered, like Iggy Pop or Keith Richards or something. It's about 11 inches by 15 inches, so you can tell where I tiled him together in Photoshop. I don't like the left foot and where it meets the axe head; I think the foot needs to be larger and go past the edge of the weapon.

I've never loved a mule as much as I love you right now.

2008-11-18T15:10:00.000-08:00

I made a Starman (of SNES Earthbound fame)for my friend Sean's birthday. It won't be much of a surprise since he asked for it months ago when I made Master Belch for the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School. I'm going to see if I can get a pre-made frame for it that fits well. Acrylic layered like watercolor is the medium. I need to paint more.

Another barely legible thumbnail sketch that I'll never get to actually make due to the piles of other little sketches I need to get to. It's based on one of the scenarios in the back of the Call of Cthulu RPG book where a bunch of 1920s pseudo-intellectuals summon some horrible elder thing in a cabin and then leave it there for years and years until the last guy that participated is on his deathbed and sends the players to get rid of it. Standard stuff, really. I want to kind of branch out a little from medieval fantasy stuff into Lovecraftian horror since I think there could be room for me there.

And this is a thumbnail for a commission I'm doing. Motley band of adventurers. Babes, axes, reptilian hobbits. Tavern. Eight figures. Should take a while but if I can pull it off it'll be a good challenge.

Updated the website recently: easier to navigate, dropped the stuff that sucked and consolidated. I need to figure out how to make watermarks on my images without going individually into each one and dropping in a layer.

Living in my dear, dear friend Cherry Grenade's old room on the Lower East Side for the last two weeks. And yes, that is her real name. Weird, right? It's been pretty great. I walk to work and back every day, get some exercise. Had time to paint Sean's gift up there and I'm going to start more stuff before I have to be packed up and moved out. I'm now cutting out die cut cards of bugs instead of Star Wars cards at work and I can add "able to carry over 40 pounds of salt" to my resume after working on the latest "kooky" promotion for next season. All in all it's good, though. Looking forward to Thanksgiving (four days off from work, though that includes the weekend). I may sign on to do storyboards for a friend's Nine Inch Nails video contest submission. Need to find a permanent place to live over here; I may just buck up and move in with a stranger that needs a roomate. Especially if those strangers are college girls that regularly have pillow fights in their underwear. Oh, wait. That's slasher movie potential. So I guess that's not a requirement any more.

Enjoy your pillow fight death trap, ladies.

Comic books: Hellboy: Chapel of Moloch was really good. Nice to see Mignola doing the book again, though I doubt it will last more than this one issue. Lame. Latest BPRD miniseries came to an end; I thought it was pretty good. I bought the hardcover of Heavy Liquid by Paul Pope because I didn't have the book yet. Pretty great. The Fables covers book by James Jean is also out and excellent. I like that there is a good amount of stage by stage process in it and good reproductions.

Books: Reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I was disappointed with The Gunslinger, the first one, but Drawing of the Three was pretty good. I'm surprised by how defensive King fans are about criticism, but saying that I didn't like "Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrel" met with similar results, so it isn't unique to his fans.

I've found 100 Ways to Create Fantasy Figures by Francis Tsai to be a pretty strong how-to book. Short on telling, big on showing. The Haunter In the Dark and Other Grotesque Visions by John Coulthart is pretty intense and I liked it. The later illustrations (well, the later HP Lovecraft Mythos illustrations) are pretty amazing, really different from the comics in the front of the book.

Music: The Decemberists "Always the Bridesmaid", Three Inches of Blood "Fire Up the Blades", various Bloc Party albums, Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos "Animal" and "Not Animal", The Anniversary "Devil on My Side: B sides and Rarities", Calexico "Carried to Dust".

Crazy Dead People Christmas

2008-10-17T17:10:00.000-07:00

This guy's a bariaur, a composite human/ram person from the plane of Ysgard. I'm not sure how I like the way he turned out but I'm pretty sure if I go back in I'll ruin him. So there he is. I need to make more scenes with backgrounds and stuff rather than just character designs. Lazy. I also want to try and broaden my black and white RPG market illustration portfolio with stuff targeted toward Call of Cthulu and White Wolf's World of Darkness (which I've grown to like a lot in the newest revision, though Vampire will always be stained with sulky gothic melodrama for me; Changeling on the other hand is both a beautifully designed/illustrated book and a cool premise, in my opinion). And then, of course, getting over that fear of color. Maybe making comics again. Lots to do.

Right now on the train I am reading Necronomicon: The Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft. I think it's most of his short stories (including the novella "At the Mountains of Madness") with maybe a few omissions here and there. No one has accused me of witchcraft yet on the way from the city and, to be honest, I'm kind of disappointed. This is a good edition, though, mostly for sheer volume (it's as thick as a brick, you can kill someone with this thing, even if it is a softcover) and completeness. I like the Penguin editions, too, though, for the helpful annotations and footnotes about his deep-seated and rampant racist undertones, biographical and anecdotal information and discussion of common themes (heredity being the big thing). Also, the most recent Modern Library edition of "At the Mountains of Madness" has a great introduction by China Mieville invoking the author's prejudices and how they shaped his concept of horror.

While cosmic horror is still very much his most innovative and enduring contribution to the genre, Lovecraft's brand of horror also has this deep-seated aversion to "the unwashed masses" and just about anyone of non-white descent. From "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" to "The Dunwich Horror" there's the recurring theme of not just man's insignificance, but also the idea that there's something "unclean" in the villain/protagonist's family tree. It would be easy to say that these undertones make his work's enduring popularity somehow suspect or indicative of a continuing, deep-seated racism in our culture (which, depending on your viewpoint, may be true) but I would argue that it isn't so much the fear that all of our apple-cheeked Aryan children will be sullied by barbaric foreign stock that makes his work so popular as it is the intimacy of the shock coming at the conclusion of many stories. It's one thing to face an external threat from the depths of the ocean or the void of distant space but to find out, ultimately, that you are descended from such horrific things brings a layer of horrible, personal dread and loathing that is completely inescapable for the protagonist. Which compounds with the next great theme of Lovecraft: you can't unlearn what you've learned, you can't "unsee" what you've seen. For the most part, the Lovecraftian protagonist must either go insane, kill himself or heed the call of his ancient blood and join that which he had once sought to fight/escape. Often the first and third go hand-in-hand. So, not only is the protagonist of a Lovecraft story often doomed for his own knowledge, gaining that knowledge in the first place will not contribute anything to the already insignificant human race. Hooray!

I've not dressed up for Halloween for several years (I think because they don't make Ninja Turtles costumes in my size anymore...) so I don't know what I'll do this year. I kind of just want to dress up nice and find a cool old-fashioned devil mask, with the long nose. I don't know. We'll see what happens.

Someday, we'll look back at this and laugh. Unnecessary surgeries and all.

2008-10-04T18:16:00.000-07:00

Just finished this guy today, up on the website. Rapidograph pen, Sumi Ink, white acrylic paint on cold press watercolor paper. I like him okay; maybe a little too dark in places and I'd like to try getting softer, like the juggling balls on the right (that's what those are supposed to be). My internet friend Mike came up with him for a game we're running; he's an immortal amnesiac with a black metal plate bolted over his mouth by capricious deities. Heavy shit.

I got yelled at for being depressed, so I'm going to try and stop. I have a new routine worked out that's treating me okay. I get home from work, eat dinner, shower, etc. and then I sit down, put in a dvd (right now I'm watching Firefly for the first time and liking it a lot; one or two episodes a night) and work on something. I started work on him on Monday and got the final touches done today, piecing it together in Photoshop because my scanner's too small. That doesn't mean anything, shut up! Lot's of men have small scanners!!

I'm gonna try and keep it going (the routine, not the... shut up) and contribute more to the old Correspondence School and my portfolio and stuff. I've been thinking about doing comics, lately. Maybe I'll start writing some ideas out and brain storming on the train or something. I need to do more scenes with backgrounds and things like that; single character drawings are fun but I don't think they'll really impress anyone.

I re-read K.J. Bishop's "The Etched City" on the train this week. Thinking about it, I don't know if I necessarily gave Bishop enough credit when I kind of reviewed the book a year ago. There's a lot of brilliance in this book and reading it for a second time may have actually been even better than the first. I also read Jeff VanderMeer's "City of Saints and Madmen" a little while ago and loved it. Hilarious and horrifying stories; I especially love the pamphlet on the freshwater squid (mostly for the notes in the fictional bibliography). So I moved from there to "Veniss Underground" which was pretty good, but I think "City of Saints and Madmen" is my favorite of the two. I am seriously considering doing at least some drawings based on these books; I can even imagine a short comic of "Detectives Cadavers" from "Veniss Underground". I'll put it in the huge pile of projects and ideas that I'm planning to get around to.

I saw "Choke" last week; really funny. I haven't read the book ("Haunted" put me off on Palahniuk, but I may reconsider) but the movie was funny, quirky and had a real emotional punch. "Haunted" made me feel like Palahniuk just wanted to gross out his readers but "Choke" felt a little more genuine to me. The protagonist, Victor, had at least some gleanings of redeeming qualities and I did feel like there was more to him than just his psychoses. And that's always nice.

Comics. I liked Hellboy: The Crooked Man a lot more than Darkness Calls. Darkness Calls just felt like it was all over the place, throwing the B-list villains at Hellboy in a vain attempt to just wrap stuff up and clear the next storyline. I thought the series lost something when they stopped using Nazis. It kind of rolled over lop-sided into fairy tale land and never righted itself; the genius of the series is the mismatched hodge-podge of genres. Lovecraft + Kirby + Pulp + Folklore= much more than the sum of its parts. But the contrast was gone from Darkness Calls and I thought it was a weaker mini-series for it, to the point where I seriously wanted to call the people that wrote in with heaps of praise and interrogate them on whether or not they were related to anyone working on the book or had stock in the company or something. The Crooked Man, on the other hand, was a bit more novel; ghost stories and folklore seem to be relegated to Europe and it's refreshing to see an American story for a change. Also, with a tighter focus (no huge earth-shattering characters like Baba Yaga, Koshchei the Deathless or Hecate with their prophetical speechifying) the story and characters seem much more important. Good old witches and tempters are pretty refreshing when you're sick of those fairy tale jerks.

I don't know if I should even bother reading Powers anymore; it's so long between issues that I just lose track of what's going on. It may be better to just wait for the trade paperbacks.

Years after it came out, I picked up the collected Sandman: Endless Nights. It's an awesome collection with a lot of great artists and strong stories. Barron Storey's Fifteen Portraits of Despair was my absolute favorite, though they're all great. I love how Storey and his students (like Dave McKean, Kent Williams and lots of others) are willing to take risks with their work and be kind of daring and experimental. I need to get some of that happening and start being less precious and timid.

Work is work, but I'm saving my money and avoiding (for the most part) wasting too much of it. I think I want to sign up for some continuing education classes when I get back to living in the city, since I haven't done that well teaching myself the stuff that I'm missing. I'm curious how other classmates are faring after a year out of art school, but not curious enough to, like, actually talk to anyone. It's a conundrum.

Ramble Ramble

2008-09-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

I wrote this somewhere else, but it's my blog about nothing in particular and I want to put it down so try and stop me mister.

Seven years ago today, at 8:46 AM I was in my first period Italian class, second-to-last year of high school. Shortly after we started, someone came to tell il professore to turn on the tv to the news. We spent the whole day just watching the tv and talking about it. My english teacher at the time introduced us to the symbolic reasoning behind it, since conventional reasoning doesn't apply when you consider mass murder a means to your political ends. I don't think we quite understood, we were just kind of numb. This was about two years before I moved to NYC for art school, a year before my older sister moved there (thank god).

I just couldn't grasp it. I knew it was important, but I didn't know how to feel and I didn't know what I could do or what it really meant. I remember that the local news in CT talked to people that escaped on the ferry, people that were actually there, emotions just layed out as they told the whole story.

Now that I've lived and worked in New York, it's always on my mind somewhere back there. A friend that worked near Wall Street told me that she gauged the terror threat level (remember the color coded bars?) by whether or not there was a riot cop with a machine gun standing on the curb when she got off the bus. I kind of take a similar approach; cops in the Times Square subway terminal with automatics and vests? High-threat day. K-9 unit, National Guard? Medium. Beat cops and National Guard? Normal. Sometimes I chafe at it, wondering at whether it's a practical measure or just a psychological one. Someone sat at a desk and decided,"This is how we respond." But at the same time, I never complain when they check my bag before I get on the subway (though my friend did; in her defense, they stopped her four times consecutively before she realized that it was only because she had big boobs. The cops didn't give her trouble after she called them on it) and I have to say that today I did feel better seeing NYPD all over the Grand Central Terminal and on the trains. Because I take the trains at rush hour every day, where there's so many people on top of each other that you can barely breathe and I catch myself thinking,"This is it. This is where the next one happens." I'm falling asleep on the ride home and I smell something strange like ammonia and it jolts me awake and I just think,"This could be it." But the other passengers aren't alarmed and I can breathe fine, so I chalk it up as that unique blend of paranoia and nebbishness unique to James M. Keegan.

I didn't have any first hand experience with the apocalyptic solidarity following the event, but I (like every other New Yorker, which is what I consider myself now) continue to live with the after effects. If the highjackers' goal was to change us, then they succeeded. But I like to believe that we were changed for the better, which means they didn't succeed the way they intended. For a short time we were brothers and sisters with common cause and how often does that happen?

I hope that this doesn't become a day for open wounds and political bludgeons. I hope that today becomes a day when we remember service and that short-lived recognition that we're all in this together, misfit nation of immigrants that we are. Misfit world of almost-monkeys that we are. And yeah, that's a hokey sentiment but it's the truth.

I don't know. Lately I've been a seething mass of depression and general self-loathing. (Thanks in advance for the awesome "Nexican Phamacy" scams that comment will invite, Blogger friends!) But today I have to set some kind of general hope for the future for my country and hope that we can steer ourselves in the right direction after so much foolishness. Otherwise, it's back in the bomb shelter, living off of frozen fish heads. Yum! Fish heads!

I want to draw magical shit for a living.

2008-08-31T17:54:00.000-07:00

Characters from the Planescape game I'm running (as best I can) on the Paizo.com messageboards. Tracing paper, mechanical pencil. I need to not get so detailed on the tracing paper, but what the hell. You figure it out before you transfer it, that's my philosophy. Not sure how I'm going to finish; considering inkwash, color in photoshop or play with these in photoshop to figure out the color/value structure and then do them in acrylic. I need to do more real scenes with stuff happening, but what do you want?

A lot of Tony Diterlizzi Planescape influence there.

Considering getting in Xbox 360 so I can play Fallout 3, Resident Evil 5 and other games I'm going to miss out on otherwise. However, I think it would be the end of me doing illustration work for a long time as I spiral into old bad habits. As it stands, I've guilted myself into drawing each night (almost each night) after work to regain my footing and I don't think I want to ruin that. Hmm.

I want to go see the Turner show at the Met, but I don't like going alone. September 22nd will be here faster than you think, so I guess I'll probably just go by myself.

She married HIM?! They have seven kids?!

2008-07-17T17:57:00.000-07:00

Here are some sketchbook character drawings I've done recently. Trying to get back on the ball, integrate more backgrounds and context into the subject and build more scenes. I like the dwarf with the pickaxe the best, I think, but the Egyptian scroll lady is a close second for thumbnails. My plan is to get more samples done for my portfolio and to do some more color work. I want to experiment with digital stuff since I find that to be a big weakness of mine right now, along with perspective drawing and backgrounds. I enjoy inkwash and ink drawing, but the drawings seem to lose some energy and spontaneity in the transition. I guess that's what always happens between a sketch and a final, but sometimes it can be quite regrettable.

More recent work can be seen in Kobold Quarterly and Open Design: Blood of the Gorgon by Nicolas Logue, both published by Wolfgang Baur. Once the 90 day exclusive period ends on these (especially Blood of the Gorgon, which isn't sold in stores or on the web) I'll post the pictures to my website. I have a few unused sketches that I may be able to show, too. Dan (Dos Santos) said these were the best pieces I've done, so they'll be worth the wait.

Recent news in James:
-Saw Hellboy 2 on Tuesday, I thought it was pretty darn good and liked it much more than the first one. "I'm not a baby, I'm a tumor."= my favorite line ever.

-Trying to move closer to work to get more time for drawing/painting/complaining about not drawing/painting enough. Failing miserably.

-Buying up used/out of print D&D 3.5 and 2nd Edition books left and right, since I don't plan on going in on 4th edition (at least, not until it really impresses me). Got some pretty good deals and some not so good deals that were still worthwhile.

-Read The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. Definitely interesting, but kind of anticlimactic. I wound up more concerned about everything except the murder that starts the whole novel, which is a success of a sort. A strange book, but worth reading.

-Need a vacation or at least to stop commuting.

You're So Last Summer (and the summer before that...)

2008-06-09T20:58:00.001-07:00

I'll admit that my taste in music isn't particularly adventurous. I mostly just listen to the same things over and over in my ipod, which is mostly stuff that friends have gotten me or what have you. Some of it is stuff that I genuinely like from a musical standpoint and there are other things that I like in some ways for the actual song but moreso because they evoke for me a time in my life. There's a way that music can crystallize a memory and polish it for a 3 minute interval in ways that writing or the visual arts never will. Maybe because we always have music in the background, now that we have personal music players and car stereos. Or maybe since the Beatles musical expression has just become the easiest means of defining an identity when you're still not sure what that identity is. I'm too young to feel nostalgic, really, but I listen to "Tell All Your Friends" by Taking Back Sunday and I can't help but vividly remember a time in my life that would be inauthentic to try and recreate.

It's the summer after my first year at SVA, perched on this edge of uncertainty. Most of that summer was spent working at Goodwill or driving around with Sean in this big white minivan. There's a bittersweet earnesty to our aimless driving and conversation, at least in my memory. Most of our discussions were over girls, of course. Or vinyl records, but mostly girls. This was also when I took up smoking these little cigars briefly before I realized that it didn't suit me very well and that it was really bad for my health. "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" would come on and we would both sing along with the utmost sincerety. Me, facedown down across your floor. I know exactly what goes on.

And I think of other times during the Aimless Driving Until Midnight Bitching About Girls and Shitty Jobs period of my life (obviously before the "Twenty Something Waxing Nostalgic for Four Years Ago" period I am now in) and the people I drove with and what we listened to; the things said and unsaid. How appropriate was it that that 16-19 year old period was spent moving but without direction or purpose? It's pretty rare to know what you're doing at that time, right? Looking back, the first two years of college for me were a directionless clusterfuck. But that's only because direction is important to me now; I realize that I don't have forever to achieve my goals anymore. I think that's what it was: remembering when time stretched out forever, when the question "Will I die a virgin?" was much more important than just about anything else. No comment on the value of that question (or its answer) now, of course.

I won't say that the current situation of growing responsibility is bad. It isn't. I take value from what I do, from where I'm going and I know now that I set my destination and it's my responsibility to get myself there.

"These feet won't tire from walking and my throat will always sing. 'Cause there ain't no road that's long enough to beat me.", Rosa "Whiskey"

I used to think I was a total piece of shit, for example, during this time. And that's me, not anyone else. Nowadays, on a good day, I'm Totally Awesome and that's an important difference and I think it's a definite sign that things are taking a turn for the better. There are plenty of things that I don't miss about these polished and re-polished memories. Maybe it's because I grew up as the only boy in my family and I didn't have much of a neighbourhood or many friends until about this time. Maybe that's why I sit up with the music and the memories and think about the people that are in my life and the people that aren't and who I want back and who's going to slip away and how everyone will sooner or later. And it makes me feel like crying or picking up the phone and trying desperately to rekindle something, anything. Because I'm back here and lonely and I wish I had someone else to suffer (or pretend to suffer) with?

But looking back is one thing; polishing and re-polishing the little scenes in your mind and setting the soundtrack back. But trying to recreate... even if it is just a phone call or something, I think if that's the only intent then it's disingenuous, you know? Every time you polish that memory, you change bits and pieces. You make yourself the hero or even more of a villain to suit your whims. There's a reason people don't stay stuck together at the hip, right? I do genuinely miss people and I do genuinely want to know what these people are doing. But I don't know. Maybe it isn't the greatest thing for your well-being to agonize over things like this. Ultimately, it may come down to old wounds and searching for validation and reasons that are totally irrelevant.

So, my conclusion is that if we all go to bed early, perhaps performing calisthetics to tire ourselves out, and try not to think about things too deeply, we won't sit up late at night when we have to work in the morning writing on our internet diaries and searching for connections that are no longer open. That's my opinion, at least. And if that doesn't work, we can always just continue to lie to ourselves.

Are you MX Missile proof? Or are you just aloof?

2008-05-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

So, a lot has been up since April 1st. I'm 23 years old now, had a pretty good birthday (considering it fell on a Monday) with the Vegan Contingent on the lower east side. I've been house-sitting in Park Slope for the last two weeks, now and it saved me a lot of time from the commute. Beautiful area. The air is fresh, only half an hour from work. I got to have a nice NYC Saturday morning of breakfast out and the some window shopping in the local Barnes and Noble (with it's more than adequate sci fi/fantasy section). And I got a bunch of illustrations cranked out, though I'm a little nervous since I haven't heard any feedback from my client. I do miss CT a bit, though. It's a studio apartment, so there's no one around to say,"I'm glad you're home". Not even Stewart to beg for my food. And I miss my own bed and things. All things considered, though; if I had $1300 per month to spend on an apartment, I would live here.

I wish I could post what I've been working on, but I have to wait until 90 days after publication. So keep an eye out in August/September/October (not sure about what the final publishing date is). I have to reflect that the Paizo.com messageboards have been the best marketing tool I've had so far. The friends I've made there have lead me to work I didn't think I would get after some of my teachers in college basically said that I wasn't skilled enough technically to pursue this field. My ego has gotten a bit of a boost, which is good since I was down in the dumps for a while and struggling. And it's pretty nice that it's an almost grass roots internet thing, where word of mouth has been a greater advertisement than anything else. I'll have to invest in some real promo material soon, though.

My day job has been brutal lately, but I still kind of like it. Everyone I work with is pretty cool, it's just a really busy time and people are having babies all over the place, so the married James and the bachelor James have had to put in a lot of hours. Looking forward to when it normals off. I'm also hoping to get a permanent place in Brooklyn soon with two worthy prospective room mates. All in all, life is decent even if I wish I had more time for my illustration work.

I got kind of sad the night before my birthday. It's silly, for a 23 year old guy, but I couldn't help but think about the opportunities that I missed or the fact that my youth (the youth that came before this) seems not to have bee spent enjoying being young. I thought of all the doors that were open that are closing. I was never and will never be the bright young Apollo or Adonis of anyone's story. My time for clumsy teenaged love is (in theory) over, washed away in years of frustration until I (in theory) should be looking for something more permanent. Does that make sense? Basically, that's the fancy way of saying that I wish I had had more premarital sex. I thought about all of the people that I had known and the decisions that I had made. I knew someone that swore she didn't have any regrets or that she refused to regret anything. And I thought that was a rather self-centered way of seeing things; I interpreted lack of regret as saying,"I'm always right". How can you learn from your mistakes if you don't regret them? But maybe I'm considering regret in the wrong light. Maybe she meant regret as in dwelling on past mistakes and missed opportunities rather than squaring your shoulders and continuing. But I still regret things; I regret things left and right.

Mostly not having enough premarital sex. Cannot stress that enough.

I also thought about memory and about the way we protect ourselves. Every memory that we have is polished and altered by recollection; we always try to find different facts and facets so that no matter what the situation is in the break up or the argument, we're always the good guys. We're always right in our own memories (at least, where we really WANT to be right). So I had to consider the near relationships that I've had in my past and how I may have dressed things up in my own favor and how the other party likely did that same thing. For you and I, the only truth is in the present, because the future is uncertain and the past is doctored. I'll go my way and you'll go yours and both of us will be certain that we got the better of the other.

I dunno. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it freaks me out that my days of sniffing glue and shooting firearms may come to an end in the next several years. Well, that's enough head-up-ass time for me, I suppose.

I've been out of college for a year now and it flew by. I do wish that I was the illustration world's hot young darling, but I've never been that nor will I ever be. I guess I'm the "dark horse" as my department head said and that's fine. I may not be busting out all over the place, but I'm better off than I was a year ago. Steady employment, sporadic work in the fantasy gaming racket. Not bad.

I met a friend of a friend recently and we were talking about what we did, writing vs. art. And I explained that I do illustrations for small internet only D&D publications and that I've wanted to illustrate things like that since I was 11. And he said,"So, you're living your dream, then." And I tried to bargain. "Well, I'm trying to." But he insisted on the truth. "You are." And I realized that I am. Even if I'm not top dog, even if I need a day job to get by. I am doing what I've always wanted for 12 years. Am I completely pleased with my work? Absolutely not. I still have a long way to go. But this is a start toward really achieving my goals and that's more than what some folks out there can say. So, I'll try for less bellyaching; I'm grateful that I'm getting a real shot.

Y2K is back! It's coming for you!!

2008-04-01T17:41:00.000-07:00

I sometimes fear the Karmic Debt that is likely following me from drawing so many mutated babies. I guess I won't really have to worry about it until/unless I spawn some offspring. My comeuppance will be here one day, of that I am sure.

I have another commission to work on in my two hours a night after work. Sketches due Saturday, finish a week after. I'm sure I'll make it and I hope it leads to more work. I need to do more color stuff, but black and white is treating me well. I'm trying to draw everyday, which is what I always say I'm trying to do and never quite do.

I got a new courier bag the other day and it's pretty great. Seems to be weatherproof, enough room for my sketchbook, pencil box and a little secret compartment for my ipod and train ticket. There's also a padded enclosure for my laptop. I may try bringing it with me on the train, but I've got mixed opinions on that. I don't like people looking over my shoulder while I download pornography in a public place. So rude. And, of course, it could get swiped. I always felt like a spazz with a huge canvas shoulder bag every day on the subway, but this one fits snug and it's just big enough for everything.

I think I'm finally on the payroll at work, so I can expect to get my paychecks on time. I can't wait to move to the city.

My glasses got hit by a train on Good Friday. It's been more than a week, but they haven't come back to life.

Sometimes I feel bad about things that aren't my fault or that I can't help; either because it's just the way I act or because it's too late. And sometimes I go in the other direction and I feel completely justified to be furious at someone and usually that's when I end up being a prick. So I find that I often don't get mad when I should or that I try to make excuses for other people when they don't deserve it. I dunno. People really treat me shitty sometimes and I either completely overreact or just take it. I want to find a middle ground because I think I need to be more assertive and not let someone put me down or treat me in ways that I don't deserve to be treated just because I want to see their side of things. I'm not someone you settle for. I'm pretty awesome, lovehandles and all. And I definitely don't think I'm someone you just abruptly stop talking to for no reason or get back in touch with because you don't feel like you have enough friends. I don't deserve to be anyone's backup or random distraction and I think my feelings deserve at least some recognition. I have a lot of long train rides to use to think about stuff like that.

So, yeah. My birthday is a month and four days from now which is cool. 23 years old, look like I'm 30. Top notch. I wonder what I'm going to do, even though 23 isn't anything, really.

I'm a skeleton in a crawlspace, Jim!

2008-03-22T12:26:00.001-07:00

Just to prove that I'm not a completely worthless kvetch machine, here are some sketches I did at work:

Characters interracting together in a scene are what I'm after and I think I did okay. The composition may need some work, but I kind of like it. Trying to imagine how annoying it would be to have a talking box follow you everywhere, snooping and butting in while you're just trying to read and be a ram-man.

The number one hobby of men with goat legs is hugging skeletons. I bet you didn't know that, did you? Even with your grad student worldliness and Starbucks liberalism, I bet you didn't know that!

Pathetic.

More character thumbnails, some more successful than others. I swear to God I'm going to make a few of these into final pieces. I swear.

Trying to get a little specific with the armor in this one; make it look more historical than video-game fantasy, even with the Heironymous Bosch helmet thingy. I need to draw more ladies.

I'll have a new creepy giant baby drawing for you soon.

It's every man for himself on Free Bagel Day.

2008-03-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

First of all, if you like comics and you like fucked up demons, check out Guy Davis' artwork. I really love his work and as I take my own stuff into more of a drawingy direction, he's someone I'm looking at. For $20, I got a copy of his second Sketch Macabre book, a copy of BPRD: Killing Ground #1 and a little Abe Sapien sketch, all signed to your truly. What a sweet guy: buy stuff from Guy Davis today!

My own work has, unfortunately, taken a back seat while I commute to my day job every day and, you know, I kind of like to have time where I'm just not working on anything. It sucks. I wanted to have a good portfolio together by around this time and in my opinion, I don't have that. Granted, I would have practically no time at all to work on commissions if I even landed some right now, so...

I like the most recent stuff I did for Adam's promo adventure and I want to do more like that, but I'm just so beat when I get home and I have to get up so early that it pretty well removes 5 days of the week from my schedule for my own stuff. I want to move to the city desperately so I can have some more time every day, but no one that I want to move in with is ready and likely won't be for a few months and if I stay with someone, I don't want to make a mess while I'm there and it's not really very social to hunch over a drawing while someone's invited you to their home. Occasionally, though, I get payed to draw in my sketchbook at work because (very rarely) someone may not have calendars to work on or dummies to make. I'll post something this weekend; I've got one really worked out tiny sketch that has some real potential: two characters, interacting in front of a background! Holy shit!

I feel like Billy Pilgrim from Vonnegut's perennial classic, Slaughterhouse Five, except on a smaller scale. I'm trained like Pavlov's dog so that once my ass hits the horrible MetroNorth seats, I immediately start getting drowsy. I go to sleep for a few minutes at a time and when I wake up, I'm somewhere else and an unknown amount of time has passed. I often wake up when my internal clock goes off before the alarm and I don't know where I am. Someone's floor? My own bed? New York? Connecticut? My dreams have become half-remembered messes of creeping anxiety: I'm always late, missing the train, taking the wrong one, forgetting something important, powerless to do anything. At least that's the impression of my dreams: I never really remember them. They're just half-recalled feelings of panic and unease, like a letter from a crazy person. I miss my fucked up pseudo sex dreams, to be entirely honest.

I also kind of get mood swings now. I blame my crazy schedule and erratic sleep; I don't think I need brain medicine. Sometimes, something just touches off in my head (or many things, like today: being seemingly ignored with no explanation by someone I feel strongly about, not getting payed on time; feeling underappreciated, exhausted and worried) and I'm ruined for most of the day. Sullen and pissed. It's not an uncommon thing: that's pretty much what high school was like. Other days I'm fine, even cheerful. And something little can send me in the other direction. I almost giggled when I remembered ol' George W. Bush's description of how OBGYNs will be allowed to continue to "practice their love" with the women of America.

I'm worried about falling into the day job pitfalls; that I'll get so used to getting that cheque every two weeks that I won't want to ever give it up and I'll compromise what I really want to do in order to maintain it. As much as I sometimes enjoy the job I do (and especially like the people I work with), it's not what I want to do with the rest of my life. I guess it's just something I have to keep an eye on.

Happy Easter, Jesus types.

I'm getting published.

2008-02-29T19:41:00.000-08:00

Hey, if you buy the March issue of Kobold Quarterly, you'll get this sweet bonus adventure by Adam Daigle. It's got gnomes, kobolds, a garnet mine. Everything you could ever want from a small press magazine about kobolds. And as an extra special bonus, the three illustrations I took way too long to make will be in there. Eh? Eh?

I did these in inkwash with some white gouache and digital retouching (only really for the webs in this spider picture). Sumi ink is much, much nicer than Higgins for the purposes of making washes. Much more rich and the ink smells nice. However, it isn't completey waterproof, so if you're like me and you like to put down your hard lines and things first and then work on top, you can lift some tone where you don't want to. I like these a lot and even though I think I still have a ways to go before I can make a living with these, I feel pretty confident and I'm eager to make 7-12 more pictures for a portfolio. I need to figure out how I'll do color work, though, because it's not my strong suit but it pays a lot better than black and white. I want to start with smaller companies for sure, though, so black and white interior illustrations aren't a bad place to start.

My mother gave me a little desk easel from the basement downstairs that used to belong to my great uncle on my mother's side, who was an artist and a photographer for the local newspaper in Bridgeport, CT. Little known fact: he actually took the first photograph of Igor Sikorsky flying in the first helicopter right in Stratford. At least, that's what my mother says; I still need to check it out.

I'm still not sure if my job is going to be a relatively permanent full time or not. The meetings keep getting pushed back and even though it's frustrating, it's not really anyone's fault so I can't get too upset.

I am an eternal kvetch, but I'm actually rather happy with my life at the moment. It feels weird. I at least feel like progress is being made to realize my true potential as an absolutely awesome human being that pisses rainbows and craps excellence. I'm bone tired at the end of the day and I often don't have the energy to draw or anything after work because of the commute but beyond that I'm pretty happy. I like where my work is going, as I've said, and even though I don't know where it will go I'm reconnecting with someone special and it feels good. It kind of sucks that every woman I have a real interest in is either spoken for or lives a long distance away, but I live with what I've got and I'm past the point of worrying.

I'll be 23 in about two months. And that's nothing, of course; I have seven more years to fuck on the floor and break shit before I really need to get serious. But there's that lingering feeling that things will start to change. My friends, in a matter of years, may start pairing up and getting married. They may stop shooting firearms and huffing glue; instead they may start families and shop at Ikea. And I find myself wondering: what will I be doing? Will I be pairing up and going off to spawn or will I just be free floating, having a ton of fun from 20-35 until I realize that I really did want a family of my own and that it's far too late? I don't know and I don't ask for the purpose of sympathy; I'm just wondering. I want to travel, that much is certain. I'm young, I don't have a mortgage or anything really tying me up anywhere so now is the time to get out there and see the world, or at the very least a little more of the United States. But I also need to save money if I'm going to get an apartment independent of my folks and eventually strike out on my own as an illustrator. And then I have to wonder if I want a family of my own.

On the one hand, my weiner thinks I should have kids. My brain thinks that may be a really bad idea; kids are expensive and I don't know how reliable my income will be, nor whether or not I would make a really good father. I feel like I would regret it if I didn't and that maybe because I've been so blessed with great parents, I should pass that on to kids of my own one day. But there's a lot that I want to do and I'm not terribly confident in my ability to keep a relationship together, much less a marriage (of course, a marriage doesn't mean kids and kids don't mean a marriage, but that's the scenario that I would want if I came down on the "have kids" side). Again, not looking for anything; it's just something I've observed of my own history. The future is a vast and foreign country.

I got the Call of Cthulu campaign book "Tatters of the King" from amazon this week and I like it a lot so far, even though I haven't had any more than one opportunity to run a CoC game. I like to read it on the train to and from work. People look at me funny, wondering what the hell I'm reading. I'm just waiting for someone to ask me about it so I can look up with my baggy, sleep deprived eyes and ask if they've "seen the Yellow Sign". It's Hasturific!

Go buy Kobold Quarterly's March issue when it comes out or else I'll have to talk more about weiners and babies and shit and then Lord only knows what will happen after that!

Fish Titties

2008-02-17T11:54:00.000-08:00

Finalish inkwash version of the icicle room drawing for my friend Adam's article. I have to do the spider one tomorrow and a few adjustments on the keys picture and then I can get going on new stuff. I like how they're going. I need to teach myself more Photoshop and I need to learn to paint better and to use color. I've learned enough InDesign to make my own invoices, which is cool, though really basic. Couple that with my just enough to get by Dreamweaver knowledge and I'm almost barely comepetent. Yay!

I worked all week; it was okay, nothing too bad. Cut myself a whole lot, but that's what happens when you use an exacto knife constantly. I like just about everyone I work with, but the commute really really sucks and it's definitely not a job I want to have for the rest of my life. I'm hoping that if I find out next week that they want me on for good, it will allow me to put money away, pay bills and keep myself going while I work out a really good portfolio so I can freelance full time. But we'll see how that goes. If I don't get it, I'm going to have to get back to the job hunt, which really sucks. I get pretty mad sometimes, thinking that I have to get up at 5:30 AM to go to work, rush my ass off for the train and subway connections and then have to repeat the same miracles of timing on my way home and still have no real security at the present job. If I miss that first subway, the 1, on my way home, it's almost certainly a half hour delay getting back because of the trains. And that really pisses me off, since it cuts into the two hours a working day I had between getting home and having to go to bed. I guess it is encouraging that they've asked me in for more hours than originally planned and I certainly dig the pay. All in all, it isn't too bad and I shouldn't kvetch overmuch, especially if my sisters let me stay at their place whenever I need to.

I was tempted to post on Valentine's Day, then I remembered that that shit is a little too 15 year old James with a Livejournal for me. So I just had the usual quiet evening at home with Rosy Palms and her Five Friends, wearing my crash helmet and weeping ever so softly. Yes, that is information you needed.

I'm considering finally taking my older sister's advice and opening an Etsy shop to sell the pieces that I don't want anymore and I unfortunately couldn't sell at SQFT while it was open. I don't know who would buy them, but we'll have to see, eh?

My mind is a fucked to death pile of burning ca-ca.

2008-02-09T08:48:00.000-08:00

That's the finalish inkwash drawing for the kobold mine. It needs some more adjustments; more rocky texture on the walls, darker darks on the figures, maybe a few hits with white gouache or acrylic to make those light areas a bit more punchy. But I like where it's going and I've finally managed to make a piece with my ass right in your face, just like real life! I need to get these done by Friday or next weekend, thereabouts, with a full week of work ahead of me.

Work has been interesting. Some days it's pretty good and I enjoy myself, other days I wonder why they even asked me to come in. I like everyone there, just about and when I get to use my hands, I'm pretty busy at least. Printing stuff and collating are pretty abstract to me and honestly pretty boring, but even when it's a repetitive thing, I like piecing together calendars with an exacto knife and double sided tape or things like that. A little more concrete and I feel like I've done something when I go home with a lot of little cuts on my fingers. If you took the commute out of the equation and all of the crap that goes with it, I would be pretty happy with the job.

The commute still renders my mind into a fucked to death pile of burning ca-ca by the time I wake up for work or get home, but I'm starting to get on the schedule. At my present freelance post, they'll know by the end of the month whether or not they want to keep me on. At least two more weeks there, they say and then whatever my original boss has in mind for me. If I stay on it's decent pay but no benefits, but it will be a stable enough situation that maybe I can get a place in the city, finally. I need to make sure I draw for at least a little while every day, though. I can't afford to get lazier than I already am. It'll be awesome if I can actually move back to the city.

Ever see a sandwich that could take a bite outta YOU?!!

2008-01-28T20:12:00.000-08:00

A woman drove drunk (or "under the influence") into some of the trees in front of my house this evening. It was lame. I had to go out and try to help. We just heard a loud crash from outside and since it was pretty dark, all we saw were the hazard lights from the car. When I got up there with a flashlight, there was a panicking woman crying and swearing and three guys a few years younger than me trying to calm her down and ask if she was okay. I have to give them a lot of props; that's a decent thing to do and she didn't really thank them very much. I didn't know what to do. She called her husband, ranted about how she had back surgery but "not a pill popper! I didn't have any today!" and how she "only had a few" (drinks, I'm assuming). No mention of feeling bad about driving into someone's lawn. Fantastic. Again, I had nothing to say; I don't think she even realized that I lived in the property she crashed headfirst into. She begged us not to call the cops while her husband came. Fortunately, someone else had. They showed up, sent the guys off (the only thing I feel bad about is that they didn't get a pat on the back or something for doing the decent thing), cops took care of the hysterical woman and called in a tow. Got my info. Last I had to do about it, thankfully. I mean, I've done some dumb stuff myself, so I shouldn't cast aspersions. I hit a mailbox once by accident, right after I had gotten my license. I parked the car on the curb and walked right up to the door, knocked and told them what happened. After an old woman yelled at me a lot, everyone calmed down and we got it sorted out after the cops came and just told me I had a warning and we should work it out between us. But I was sober at the time. An idiot, yes, but a sober idiot. I suppose we should just be grateful it was only a tree that she drove into and not Stewart or my father.

I started my temp job at the publisher this week. The commute's a killer; two hours or so each way, not counting driving to the train station or if the shuttle/1 train are late. Can't really draw on the train and I don't want to bring my computer for fear of it getting swiped somewhere. So it's a lot of dead time and by the time I get home (around 8/8:30 pm; catch a 7:00 am train) I'm pretty much a zombie. It's only Thursdays and Fridays, though. The job itself isn't bad at all. I've picked up a little InDesign already, but otherwise it's really boring. Printing and collating print-outs of page-a-day calendars. A lot of my time the first two days was waiting for files to be ready or waiting for the printer to finish. I'm told that they'll figure out some other stuff for me to do as time goes by. Not bad, really. I'm payed well while I learn and the rest of the week can be used for my own work. I need to find a real job or start getting a lot of paying freelance gigs to be able to afford a move back to the city, but it's a start and everyone so far has been pretty nice and good about answering questions.

I updated my website for the first time in months; if you read the blog, you've already seen everything. But now it's official-like.

There's going to be a Masters of Illustration workshop at Amherst College in Massachusetts during the summer. Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo, Rebecca Guay, Scott Fischer, Donato Giancola and Dan Dos Santos, teaching classes and talking about illustration for a week from 10 am to 12 midnight each day. Actual personal attention from illustrators that are at the top of the field, many for more than twenty years. Only problem is that it's $1700 for tuition. I'll try to save up, but I don't know if it's something I'll end up doing.

The SQFT Gallery in Nashville is unfortunately closed. Really seemed like an eclectic, fun gallery; especially if Kathy and Aaron were willing to put my work up. It's hard to sell art, though; collectors and companies have the money to invest, but they don't want it to hang in their houses and enjoy. They want to sell it like an investment; like a stock, betting on the talent that's likely to be the next Damien Hurst or something. And folks that buy it just for the love of owning it don't really have $300 at any given time to spend on a young punk like me. It's too bad, but that's how it is. It was a great opportunity, though and I'm happy that I got to particiate. So, uh, if you're looking to buy some of my work, maybe I'll set up an online shop or something of my own. I gots a framed pitcher of Eddie Munster trying to get laid if yer innersted. Frame by New York Central 2's very own Phil Conigliaro. Eh? eh?

I may make a Valentine's Day card this year. Not just for a special lady, but for the rest of you weirdos, too. I don't know how I'll top slow dancing inmates, but I'll figure something out. Maybe it just won't even be Valentine's-ey; maybe it'll just be an illustration of my short story "My First Sex Toy Tupperware Party". I'll let your imaginations work on that. Hint: Tom Jones' "Pugilist At Rest". Yeah, a hint that leaves you even more weirded out and confused. That's how I roll, grandma.

I'd better get cracking on those illustrations for Adam's kobold mine.

I'm glad I got my suit dry cleaned before the riot started.

2008-01-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

I made a few adjustments to this sketch because I think making the building a more enclosed space allows for something a bit more coherent and allows some more contrast around the main character.

Here's a voyeuristic modron, listening in on your conversations. I love drawing modrons because they're adorable and they're basically cubes or other shapes, so they're super easy to get started on. Making them distinctive is the only real challenge.

Here are some more studies for Planescape PCs, which is what those previous ones were as well. The centaur-like guy is a bariaur (ram-man); I like the upper left hand little study the best and I'll probably go with that one. The woman is an elf with a peacock feather fan and an avant-garde hairstyle. I'm not a big fan of that one; I think it needs work. The head study of the bald guy is a githzerai monk, even though no one is playing one, I think they're cool.

Here's a female elf druid. I wanted to work on texture with this one, hence the bearskin vest. I love sexy babe pictures in any genre, but I don't think I'm cut out for it. My mother taught me a healthy respect for women, so I tend to avoid gratuitous sexiness (unless it fits the character). It's also much easier for me to draw deformed freaks without reference than it is for me to draw beautiful people. My friend Meaghan noticed that most of my drawings of women tend to show wounded or mutated women and I don't want to think about the possibe psychological implications. Leave me alone, Dr. Freud! I just draw what I want to draw!

Here's a sketch inspired by a D&D adventure (Tammeraut's Fate by Greg Vaughan; great zombie action). Trying to do at least a few more actual scenes instead of just a guy floating in space. The players have to descend to the depths of the ocean to stop continuous assaults from the drowned dead upon this hermitage/fort. Dan gave me some suggestions and I'm going to rework it after taking some reference.

I've been into Planescape a lot recently and Tony Diterlizzi's early work for that setting is pretty inspiring. The art itself has a lot of flavor, but the really cool thing is seeing how far he's developed from pen and ink/charcoal/water color wash/highlighter stuf to really refined gouache/watercolor children's books. Adam Rex's work for the Great Modron March and other books is also very inspirational. Before Dan became my mentor/friend Tony Diterlizzi's work was what really got me into fantasy art. From the 2nd edition Monster Manual illustrations he did to his work on Planescape and Magic cards, I was really inspired by his work and when my folks ordered me a signed sketchbook of his, that sealed the deal. He was the guy I looked at the most and one of the reasons I kept with it. I'm still figuring out what I'm doing, but it's really helpful to go back and look at what excited me when I was 14 and realize that it still is very relevant.

I think I should try to get more finishes out the door now, though. Lots of sketches; time to get serious if I want to get anywhere with this.

I'm not ashamed to get excited. I got friends who get excited.

2008-01-19T13:58:00.000-08:00

So, I've had a project for a little while with my friend Adam and I thought it would be a problem if I posted my sketches before the date of publication. But since the job doesn't pay and since the publishers have been pretty relaxed with the deadline, I'm just going to put up the sketches since I don't think it's a huge deal and there's no nondisclosure agreement that I know of.
My friends Meaghan and Phil posed for a lot of these pictures, though you won't recognize Phil anywhere (I don't think I actually used the photos I took of him in these).

This is probably the best of the three. Spiders are really scary to a lot of people and I thought it would be a cool, iconic D&D scene to have an adventurer (Meaghan) in peril, fighting off a giant spider while falling into a pit with sharp spikes and blades. There's going to be indications of the spider's web in the final; I just want to get the foundation layed in and then maybe add in the webs where appropriate digitally. Otherwise they might get too heavy and detract from the piece and you really would only see it in the parts where the light is hitting it directly. Adam suggested an orb weaver and I think doing the research on flickr and finding some good orb weaver photos made all the difference, along with really arranging those legs and Meaghan's willingness to get on the stool and make a really uncomfortable pose.

The location of the adventure is a mine inhabited by smaller races like halflings, gnomes, goblins and kobolds (I don't want to give too much away, so I'm just throwing it out there) and a big part of the manuscript is the location rather than the inhabitants. I wanted to show off the size disparity, with the human (who looks awfully familiar...) is actually at a disadvantage because of the terrain, whereas his shorter companion is perfectly comfortable. They're deciding on a keyhole to use, lest they trigger some sort of crazy trap.

God, I swear I've seen those people before...
Anyways, here's the icicle room. As Dan pointed out, the composition is pretty good in my opinion, but the icicles on the ceiling get a bit repetitive. So I've doubled the size of the front ones in the version I'm working on.

I want to get back into ink drawing, so I'm going to try these out in ink (since I've apparently got plenty of time to mess up) rather than graphite. I think it just gets a little too difficult for me to get a good sense of contrast with graphite: my darks always need a bump in photoshop when I finish. So maybe ink can help with that and also provide a good foundation for eventual digital coloring (assuming I can learn) or watercolor washes, like Greg Ruth. I'ma give it a shot.

Here's a little thumbnail of a character one of my players on Paizo.com came up with for my Planescape play-by-post game. I'm trying to address some of my weaknesses and I think perspective and backgrounds are a big weakness for me. So I'm trying not to do just characters floating in air. I also tend to draw on a slant if I'm in my sketchbook or on the desk, which is pretty clear. For final pieces, I've started laying out my paper with a ruler on the drawing board so any slant is intentional, but it happens a lot with my sketches and thumbnails.

The character is the discarded last follower of a dead pantheon of gods. Because he wouldn't disavow his former masters, he was made immortal, had a metal plate grafted over his mouth to prevent speech or prayer and then shunted off to serve as a demonstration. Sounds like a pretty good premise to me. I'll probably do a few more versions, since I need to shoot reference to do finals.

News in James:
I'm getting a new computer, paying my parents back in the future for helping me out. I may need to buy my own copy of the Adobe creative suite, though, since my sisters' version doesn't have any activations left on it. That's at least $600 right there.

I went on a job interview yesterday for a publisher that I won't name (keep the stalkers on their toes!). I didn't get the job I was applying for, but I did walk away with an offer to temp there and learn the ropes. It may not be a permanent position, but I'm looking forward to the possibility. Lots of practical stuff to learn about the publishing business and something to really strengthen my resume.

I'm also learning to survey land tomorrow. Because I'm multi-faceted.

I draw people's Dungeons and Dragons characters because I think it's fun. One day, I would like to do it professionally.

2008-01-14T13:22:00.000-08:00

So this is a drawing of a feral half-orc druid with a lot of tattoos and a white wolf's hide draped over him. I'm gearing up to run a play-by-post Planescape campaign on the Paizo.com forums for some of my internet D&D buddies over there and I'm excited by the characters everyone is coming up with. Once I get my sister's hand-me-down computer, I'll start trying to color them digitally.

What's cooler than being cool?

What do they know about me?

2008-01-13T07:16:00.000-08:00

Very little of the email that comes to my website email address is about, you know, asking me to do art for someone. Most of it is spam centered around offering to give me a newer (presumably better) wang. I don't know what it is about my artwork that says I need a new wang, but I think I have at least a few years left on this one before I need to trade up.

I found one today that says,"Your new cock is waiting for you" and I was like, "Oh, snap! I forgot to pick up my rooster from the bus terminal! He's going to be FURIOUS!"

Cities On Fire with Bitch and Moan.

2008-01-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so my personal computer died this week, after I finally managed to get a Wacom tablet to teach myself more computer skills. After Christmas, I took it to Tekserve in order to get the RAM maxed out so I could install a newer version of Photoshop, which would allow me to make good use of that tablet. It started up fine in the store after the RAM was installed, but when I got home, it wouldn't start again and when it finally did, it worked for about an hour and then died once more. So, I took it back to Tekserve the next day, since they couldn't tell me what was wrong over the email. They told me that the logic board is fried and I could either send it to Apple and get it fixed for $350 or I could just save the money for a new one. I thought it was pretty fishy that it would just happen to break down right after taking it in for service, but I got a full refund and they didn't charge me for that visit, so I'm willing to not throw a fit. It was almost five years old, but I wanted to try and get another year out of it in the hopes of getting a nicer one after I have some kind of reliable cash flow.

With only my mother's computer to use for my internet stuff, the hair on my palms is starting to fall out. For the love of God, WHY?! WHYY?! (sob!) How will I go on?!

Fortunately, my older sister is going to give me hers because she can afford a new one and hers is also pretty battered, so sometime next week I can get back to scanning drawings of horrible freaks and playing with Photoshop. Goodbye, ibook G3, my old friend. You survived all throughout my years at SVA. You weren't much to look at after I spilled ink all over you, but you were so reliable.

Times like these make me realize I should have taken more pictures. Oh, the memories.

Still waiting for word from what I hope will be my future employer. I really want the job, but I'm not holding my breath. I was pretty okay with things during the summer, but I've worked up a powerful loneliness and depression over the last few months. My attempts to find employment have failed and I'm still not happy with a lot of my portfolio stuff. I need to move out of CT soon and get myself back in the swing of things but it's been difficult. Being an hour and a half away from everything really sucks and I miss having some sort of social life. Blah blah blah. Nothing I can do about it without money and employment.

The Cookie Monster's Birthday (a.ka. Cookiemas)

2007-12-30T11:17:00.000-08:00

I had an okay Christmas, all things considered. My family wouldn't let me take photos of them, because they know now that I'll put them up here. But I gave out some presents, which were well received because I got my sisters what they asked for and I picked out something decent for Mom and went in on Netflix for Dad. Caitlin got me another cool, industrial/nihilistic Cyberoptix tie (the Raven one) as well as some Pocky, another Japanese candy that resembles mushrooms that I haven't tried yet and this awesome postcard book of a plastic frog doing stuff like going ot the bathroom, being stuck on a desert island with nothing but a crate of food and nudie magazines (awesome) and various other super fantastic things. Sian got me this bundle of little notebooks, one for each month. It's a pretty practical gift and I've already started on the January one, since it fits in my back pocket and is nothing but blank white pages: perfect for drawing on the train, taking down notes and addresses and planning my day.

My folks got me a Wacom tablet, so that I can start actually learning to do some digital art things. Now I have to upgrade the RAM on my ibook to use a better version of Photoshop, but it won't cost that much and should really end up being a sound investment. I also got the Simpsons Movie (which I haven't watched yet), a nice sweater, some D&D adventures and some other awesome shit. I'm a very lucky person and I'm glad I asked for something practical like a tablet instead of an Xbox 360 or something that would be really fun, but wouldn't help me get work done.

We haven't been able to meet for Dungeons and Dragons the last few weeks because of the weather or because I needed to work on something. It kind of sucks, since I like having the nerdy fun I know and love. Maybe next week we'll do it.

I reapplied at the frame company that I interviewed with a few months ago, since I felt like that interview went well even though I didn't get the job and they had a listing for new people in entry level positions. I was excited, so when I got an email the day after Christmas to come in on Thursday for an interview, I was very pleased. So, I left the house at around 10:30 in the morning to meet up with Caitlin for lunch before the interview, which was at 3. So, I got there after killing enough time and sat down to wait. I was about fifteen minutes early, which is usually how I do things. After waiting for a while, maybe twenty minutes after the interview was supposed to talk, the secretary came in with an expression on her face like she was going to tell me that both my grandma and my dog had been killed in a plane crash.

Turns out the person I was meeting with had gone home. She had emailed me and called the house, but since I had left so early, there was no way I could get either message. So I left with as much professional dignity as possible and bought myself Spectrum 14 at the comic store as consolation. When I got home, I saw that she had indeed called and emailed me a good two hours before the interview, so it really wasn't her fault. I should have sent her my cell phone number. I tried to schedule another one for Friday, but it didn't happen. I'm hoping sympathy for the spazz that showed up when he shouldn't have will get me in, but I kind of doubt it.

2007 is just about over and I have unrealistically high hopes for 2008.

I hope to have a decent day job that will allow me to leave my parents' basement and move back into the city, like Brooklyn or Queens.

I hope to exercise more and eat better, but I always say that.

I hope to have a serious lady friend of some sort.

I hope to improve as an artist, to develop a better portfolio and start getting paying work.

We'll see how much of that actually happens. I'd like to do something fun for New Year's, but I should probably work on stuff at home and the weather is supposed to be kind of bad. Oh, well.

Happy New Year, one and all!

I'm gonna punch motherfuckers until I get my baby elephant back.

2007-12-23T18:58:00.000-08:00

This is my first real paying commission, from my friend Jody. It's also my first real action scene; usually I do a character without a background or anything. The project has been a great learning experience and I think it's really been worth the time invested into it. So much of the work on this was done before even starting to shade things or finalize anything; getting friends to model so I could take reference, drawing and redrawing the scene after every critique. I'm largely happy with it, though I'm sure it could use a few more little touches here and there. Originally, the shield was going to have my friend Hilary's drawing of her dog Elvis on it, but he was too butch and scary even for goblins to use. Maybe big tough orcs will be Elvis material, but I'm not sure goblins are ready for him.

I look forward to tomorrow for spending time with family and making up for the weird Thanksgiving we had. I'm not a shlub this year; I actually got everyone presents. Even Sean and Phil are getting at least SOMETHING from me. After tomorrow and Tuesday, I've got to work like crazy for another project I've got to do. I've been asked not to talk about it, but it should be great (assuming I can get it done in time).

Merry Christmas, gentiles. Late Happy Chanukah, Jews. Happy New Year, drunks. Maybe I'll have some Keegan family holiday pictures tomorrow or Monday.

Holy Shit, it's The Incredible Octopus Girl!

2007-12-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

Holy. Shit.

Also, Kathy at the SQFT Gallery has been kind enough to put everyone's work up from the show in the online store. Please check it out. Even though my work plainly does not belong there with everything around it, please consider buying a picture. Maybe if I actually sell something this time, I'll be asked to contribute again. If not for me, for the Humane Society.

These are the freaks that live under my basement stairs.

2007-11-30T16:15:00.000-08:00

Oh, wait. I meant your basement stairs. In fact, they're behind you right now!

If by some bizarre quirk of fate you are in Nashville, Tennessee tomorrow night you should drop into the Square Foot Gallery to see the "Deck the Walls: Affordable Art Show". Everything is $250 or less and 10% goes to the Humane Society. I have three things in there ranging from $200 to $100 for drawings or paintings (one of which is framed by my friend Phil!). You can order online, too, so you don't even have to actually BE in Nashville to give me and the gallery money!

I hope I make some sales, since I owe some very bad people a lot of money. Won't you please help me by buying some of my artwork?

...

Come on, they're gonna take my THUMBS!!

No Joy in Mudville

2007-11-26T18:36:00.000-08:00

Here's a second stage/generation sketch for my first payed commission. It started with one of the thumbnails I've already posted. I'm trying to take it further now, after taking some photo reference and reexamining the composition. I want to get a good sense of impact and movement throughout the picture and I'm not sure if I'm completely getting it. I'm looking at this Mike Mignola sketchbook a lot to get a sense of how he handles people punching each other. The trick is, I think, to get it right before or right after connection. It's just getting the foreshortening/perspective right on that left arm that makes or breaks it. Or maybe the main guy just needs to be bigger.

Very weird Thanksgiving. My grandmother went into the hospital on Tuesday night and is still there until tomorrow morning. Heart stuff, which none of us saw coming. So it was just immediate family for Thanksgiving (my parents, my sisters, Ollie, Stewart and myself) which has never happened before. The food was good, though, and I had faux turkey that was actually quite good despite giving me the worst gas ever.

My father and I went to visit her on Saturday and she seemed fine. It was strange going back to the hospital, since the last time I was there was when my grandfather passed away fifteen years ago. Looking out the same window over Bridgeport, driving past the same Dairy Queen on the way there and back, my father pointing out the huge cemetery where his side of the family is buried and what used to be the GE plant where his great uncle was locked in during a strike. So much of Shelton and Bridgeport are just a series of memories waiting to sneak up on me. The next morning, she had another heart attack. They've got her pretty much taken care of, now, but it's definitely scary. During the visit, looking out her window because I really had nothing to say, all I could think about was how golden the city looked in the late afternoon light from ten stories up and how odd it was that so many trees hadn't even changed color that close to Long Island Sound. I can only imagine how much it stinks to be in a hospital for a week, surrounded by the sounds and smells of other humans in various stages of degeneration. I'm glad she'll be out tomorrow, though my mother isn't sure how wise it is after the procedure today.

On a lighter note, I saw No Country For Old Men with Sean and Phil on Wednesday. Excellent movie. Highly recommend it. Wednesday or Thursday I may go take care of my sisters' dascheund, Ollie, in Park Slope. So I'm looking forward to that. No job interview calls, no big deal.

My dog has been a very bad influence on me.

2007-11-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

Listen. You've all had a chance to talk and I appreciate that you've all taken time out of your day to sit here and judge me. Very much appreciated. But during this whole "talk about how we feel" gangbang you've sprung on me, I'd like to have the opportunity to get a word in edgewise. I don't have the rules on what makes an intervention in front of me, but I believe I'm allowed to speak up in my own defense.

This whole thing that you, Judith, have so lovingly titled my "Shit Spiral Breakdown" is not symptomatic of our divorce. No, it isn't. And just because you've managed to become a licensed psychologist it doesn't give you a license to be a judgemental bitch. So go ahead and take a seat with ex-wives one and three while I address your concerns. Let me make you all feel important by saying that I think everyone here, even the mailman, has raised a legitimate issue. The thing is, I'm not completely at fault.

My dog is.

Sit down, I'm not finished. No, I am not trying to deflect blame and I am not refusing to take responsibility. Well, that's your perception. You've all ignored the elephant in the room (or Newfoundland, in this case) but I for one will not. Stewart has been a very bad influence on me. The months of lazy alcoholism. The codependent relationships. The drunken belligerence. The years of methamphetamines and failure. It's all because of Stewart. I just look at that big fluffy dog and I get reckless. He lives his life in a reckless spiral of self-destruction and I've been along for the ride. Think about it. You know what he does all day? He sleeps, he tries to start fights with the UPS guy, screams and yells at odd hours of the night and just try eating something in front of him. The boy's liable to chew your arm off. He's got an addiction problem and I think (unlike myself) it will require more than just a stern lecture to get him to stop.

Now, I realize that I'm culpable for my own decisions. But what you don't realize is that over the course of months Stewart is capable of changing any man. Yes, Betty, or woman. Nice to see you haven't abandoned the shrill feminist angle after your little "accident" with the sleeping pills in the bathtub. I must have missed YOUR intervention, because if I was actually there I would have suggested that if it failed in "The Bell Jar" odds are it can fail in real life.

No need to cry about it. I'm sorry, I know. This is about me. Back to my original point.

It's not so much that Stewart FORCED me into a life of indolence and self-destructive addiction. It's more like a slow erosion. At first, I didn't even notice it. But over the course of several weeks, I began to get lethargic. My hungers grew, my passions grew. I stopped working, I lost interest in friends. I had a one hundred pound dog on my back, exhorting me to imbibe more, to rest on my haunches and enjoy the simple pleasures in life. I lost myself to his influence and I'm deeply sorry if I've hurt you all.

C'mon, Dad. Sit down. "Poppycock", huh? You're poppycock! This whole meeting is poppycock! You people are lucky to have me as a scapegoat for all of your problems. Your lives are shams with happy little smiley faces painted over them and if you didn't have a "loser" like me to deride you would have to focus on your own problems. Looking at you, Mike. You may fool everyone else, but I know you lost those fingers to a loan shark and nobody's really buying that bandsaw story. Ex-wives one through three, if you couldn't change me by yourselves, teaming up isn't going to help. Yeah, you get out of my house now. Good.

Come one, Stewart. I know where we can score a paper bag and some contact cement.

I remember you were reckless, you were hungry, you were real.

2007-11-13T17:48:00.000-08:00

Because Hilary called me on not updating this blog very often yesterday, here's some new pictures and the normal assortment of jerkface commentary that I usually throw in. The fastest way to get me to do something is to yell at me about it or call me a pussy.

So here is the second black and white pencil drawing in the fantasy character design aspect of the new portfolio I'm working on (and hoping to have finished and ready for advertisement by the spring). Dan recommended that I start with six to eight of these, two to three big scenes (fights, chases, things like that), three to five pictures of items like helmets, armor, weapons and one to three environment drawings. I have some thumbnails that I've already posted on iinck below.

This guy is another character from my own D&D campaign (which I keep a journal for online, but never update it so I won't put a link here). His name is (was) Orm the Toad, due to the big double chin and slimy demeanor. He's a priest of the entity known as Mak Thuum Ngatha, the Nine-Tongued Worm; an inscrutable extraterrestrial creature that takes an interest in the doings of mankind. I would voice him like The Monarch from the Venture Brothers and he had a really rotten personality. I figured that he doesn't wear pants because he finds them "too confining". I imagine that in his off hours he would be clad in a moo-moo and ordering Japanese animated tentacle porn on amazon. Shudder.

Now for something completely different.

On December 1st, the Square Foot Gallery in Nashville, TN is doing a "Cash and Carry" show of $250 and less artwork from everyone that's shown there and I (assuming everything works out) will be sending this drawing in, nicely framed courtesy of Phil Conigliaro who is also playing Eddie Munster in the picture, opposite my friend Marissa Herrmann. It was inspired by the song "Raised By Wolves" by Voxtrot. He's bringing her a felled squirrel to show that he's a good provider but she is not at all into it. A pain I know all too well...

It may need more contrast and I need to make that squirrel look a little clearer. I'm not sure if I'm going to send anything else to the show. I would feel a little bad sending old portfolio stuff and I may need to concentrate more on the fantasy portfolio, just because I think that may be a better ticket to a career. I would like to do a few small robot prom drawings, though (which again featured Phil getting shot down by a girl, this time by Cecilia).

Since a lot of this stuff has already been posted somewhere else, it kind of gives away the fact that I haven't been very productive lately. It's been six months since I graduated and I have neither a day job nor a portfolio that I'm proud of. I feel like, from a practical work standpoint, the entire last year of college was something of a waste since I didn't end up with work that makes me proud. I have no one to blame but myself, but it's really discouraging to have to start over like this and I just get angry that I lack direction and even technical skill and that even if I did spend more time in the studio SVA set aside for seniors than almost anyone else, it doesn't mean dick if I don't have strong pieces. So I haven't been working as much as I should have because I've been really discouraged. Cry me a river. But I'm getting back on my feet (I hope) and I'm setting my sights on the spring to have a quality portfolio capable of getting me paying commercial work.

And it stinks that the only people that are dying to get me to work for them are Jerry's Art-a-Rama in Norwalk, which doesn't really pay well enough to merit driving two hours round trip and would probably just cover gas getting there at this rate. But that's how it is. And now I'm being bitter about it and that's never good.

The internet loves you.

2007-10-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

I guess it's kind of weird to blog about it, but I just found out from Mike Freiheit that I was the unknowing recipient of a wikipedia entry. I was creeped out for a second, but then I found out one of my friends from the Paizo.com messageboards put it up. Kind of strange. I appreciate the thought and my ego does demand that I go in and flesh it out when I get a chance, but still. It was kind of weird.

I've decided, after spending the summer floundering and trying to figure out what to do and where to go, that I'm going to go for a fantasy/D&D related portfolio. It feels good to get back into it, Dan has encouraged me to pursue it and I think the calendar contest is a sign that it may be a good idea. So, I'm in the planning stages (lots and lots of thumbnail sketches) for a full blown portfolio. Above is a finished sketch of my friend's D&D character and below that is a thumbnail sketch of the Moathouse from the classic Temple of Elemental Evil module from the first few years of Dungeons and Dragons.

I had a great weekend full of pumpkins, cookies, vegans, girls, corn mazes, Indian food and other things. You know: bowl, drive around, the occasional acid flashback. It was really good to have visitors and to be able to play tour guide/host for a while. Made me realize how much I miss college and the city and all the wonderful people I don't get to see as often as I wish I had. I'm sorry...I have something in my eye.

I've signed up to be in the December show at SQFT Gallery in Nashville, TN (thank you, Kathy!). I'm planning to send in a few cool drawings because it's a cash and carry, $250 or less show. And everyone thinks my drawings are better than my paintings anyways.

Check out my friend Wesley's site; she makes some really cool ink drawings and she's published fairly often in magazines and newspapers. And, of course, stay posted on the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School.

Winner is You!

2007-09-27T14:54:00.001-07:00

Here's the largely finished Moth Man picture for the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School. Moth Man, you so crazy!

Good news: I'm a grand prize winner in the Wheel of Time Calendar Competition that ended last month. The piece I made (which can be seen on this blog or my website) will be in the 2009 Wheel of Time calendar when it comes out, assuming I get all of the legal stuff signed and notorized in time and the picture sent out properly.

The sad thing is, the series' author Robert Jordan passed away literally the weekend before I got the call saying the piece was a winner. It's kind of strange and sad that judging the contest was one of the last projects he did before he passed away. And I suppose he didn't quite finish the series, either.

Debbie Downer, that's me!

I like my women the same way I like my coffee: huge and black.

2007-09-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

Here's the pencils for another Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School piece, for a lucky soul. Mothmen are something I really like and I had an idea for a tender whiney indie comic involving them. I like putting monsters into my personal work, since they stand in often for myself or act as symbols. Mothmen for me are harbingers of old desires, bringers of sleep and dreams. Kinda scary, but fairly benign. Plus, you know, monsters. Fucking cool. He's eating a scarf out of a laundry basket here. Oh, Mothman. When will you learn?

I'm kind of stuck on him right now, since I don't know what do with the lighting. It's an interior, but I also think it should be night. In my concept of them, they're attracted by these special red candles that someone can light in their window if they want clothes/memories eaten in their sleep. But I've used a lot of red and orange and yellow light in my work so far, and a lot of nocturnal pictures. Maybe pale, blue moonlight would work with orange or red rim lighting. Not sure. I don't even have reference for the pose or lighting, so that tells you just how professional I am. I plan on putting the patterns on his wings in freehand with the paint when I sit down to do the color, since I want them to look transparent and organic.

I went back into this one because I thought it really needed to be darker and pop more. I plan on sending it out to the good people I was working with on the article, even though the due date is exceeded and I've technically finished the assignment. I've decided that I'm not too happy with what I've turned in and I want to keep working on this and the long one out of principle. It's easy just to say "It's good enough" and move onto what may seem more interesting at any given time, but I've done that too much and I'm really not happy with what I've got so far in my portfolio. I have to stop compromising and be more of an anal-retentive douchebag or else I'll never have professional grade stuff. At least, as far as artwork goes.

And the guy's right arm is way too long.

Connecticut is killing me, but what else is new. Gaining weight, feel like crap, still looking for a job. Feeling useless. Blah blah blah.

I'm reading Paul Malmont's "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril" and it's been pretty good so far. Set in the '30s during the pulp era, all of the main characters are pulp authors: Walter Gibson (creator of the Shadow) and Lester Dent (creator of Doc Savage) are the main characters, but L. Ron Hubbard, H.P. Lovecraft and even Orson Welles are part of the narrative. It's great pulpy fiction, alternately over-the-top and down to earth. I especially love how Malmont wrote L. Ron Hubbard from back when he did westerns, prior to Scientology. There's remarks about his future leanings toward Science Fiction and his character makes a few remarks about organized religion and socialism that bring a pleased smirk to my cynical face. Orson Welles (even though he's only in there briefly, so far) is written very well in my opinion. If you've seen "F is for Fake", there's a great lecture on the Big Lie that seems to fit right into that film. A lot of great tidbits of true information in the fictional narrative and it's clear Malmont has lovingly researched the book.

Suddenly I want to make a car trip to Providence and see where H.P. Lovecraft was buried so I can read his epitaph, if it really just says "I am Providence". Ideally on a foggy, chill day in October/November, with no sight of the sun in the sky and in view of the harbor. Autumn is rolling in in New England and it's the one thing I'm pretty excited about in this lonesome town.

After I finish "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril", I've ordered Michael Moorcock's "The Warhound and the World's Pain" second hand. It's kind of appropriate, since Moorcock was so influenced by Clark Ashton-Smith and Robert E. Howard and the other pulp authors. I've heard nothing but rave reviews of the old book, so I'm excited. My adolescence was spent, somewhat anachronistically, reading Moorcock's entire Elric of Melnibone series from the little white paperbacks I somehow found randomly in a Waldenbooks in Danbury, CT. Then I picked up some of the reissued collections of Moorcock novels; Corum, Hawkmoon, Erekose and Cornelius (probably the most trippy of the bunch, and the one I didn't quite grasp during my troubled youth; I just knew that if it was banned in thirty countries it had to be worth reading).

I think it may have just been by chance that I even found out about Moorcock; the "Tales of the White Wolf" short story collection had a Brom painting on the cover, which lead me to check it out. Reading about a frail antihero that wields a huge soul-eating black sword in stories full of sex and violence and sorcery is a good way to spend your time when you're thirteen. Especially if his angst mirrors your own.

So, yes. Excited to read "The Warhound and the World's Pain". I also got Mike Mignola's latest book, written with Golden "Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire". I mostly bought it for the illustrations. I have to say, on the Mignola note, I've been really disappointed. BPRD is great, mostly because of Guy Davis, but Hellboy: Darkness Calls has been awful in my opinion. They just tossed in every second tier villain that didn't get destroyed in the previous stories, whisked most of them out of sight as soon as the Baba Yaga showed up and then continued piling folklore characters into the story from that point on. And two dead soldier guys that can't die fighting Hellboy. Again. THIS is what took them a year or more and two authors and two different artists to come up with? It just ticks me off that they would drop all of these characters, bring them back into one big clusterfuck together after how many years and expect readers to give a crap. Especially after the scant two-issue story that told what the big red hand was all about. Not even really mentioned in this story. You'd swear it didn't mean anything by the way things go in Darkness Calls. Baba Yaga's revenge would have been cool if it had, I dunno, followed up the story where Hellboy actually dealt with her in some way. And maybe he did in the Third Wish, what, four years ago? when he fought the Bog Roosh. But that was four years ago.

My prediction for the end of Darkness Calls? No resolution interspersed with some other moody gothic poem or old sailor shanty only to be picked up eight years from now after another mediocre Hellboy movie comes out. Bring back the Nazis. I'm really sick of cutting back and forth between eight hundred different folklore characters that need crummy dialogue to explain exactly what they are and how I should care what they think. Bunch of fairy tale jerks.

If my dog were as ugly as you, I'd shave it's butt and tell it to walk backwards.

2007-09-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

These are the finished illustrations for that article my pal Adam Daigle wrote for the free online Dungeons and Dragons periodical, the Oerth Journal. I may go back into them, depending on the feedback I receive, but I'm mostly satisfied and they've both been sent through the electronic mail to their new home.

They're both done in acrylic washes (basically like watercolor) layered on top of each other over the drawing underneath. I'm still working out the kinks and figuring out how much drawing to leave showing, how opaque or transparent the paint should be, etc. The important thing to me is that I rather enjoy doing it this way, more so than with oil paints.

I feel like my job interview on Monday went well. Salary and benefits were discussed on the first interview and my interviewer commented that I could start at the normal rate despite a lack of experience due to 'relevant education'. They told me to call back in a few days after thinking it over. However, I haven't gotten an email or telephone response to my further inquiries. So maybe they need more time to think about it or I don't have the job or I need to pester them more on Monday. Getting this job would go a long way toward the fruition of my get-away plan of leaving Connecticut behind. Pray for me, internet comrades. Pray for me.

So now that these are taken care of, I owe Hilary an SDF Correspondence School piece and I have to get going on pieces for the SQFT December group show (assuming I'm still invited to contribute). And some more portfolio stuff. And ideas I have for comics and stuff. Taking bets on what I actually get accomplished.

My blog smells like a hobo.

2007-09-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

This is the last sketch for Adam's article. A black pudding menacing a guy with a lantern. I'm almost certain the perspective is wrong as it stands, but I'll have to wait until I get some kind of reference to actually be able to tell.

It looks like it will be a pretty hectic week: these two illustrations are due on Saturday (but black and white or color, up to me; I plan on doing color) and Monday is going to be eaten up by a job interview. First one I've had since graduation; it's an assistant job at Bark Frameworks in Long Island City. Phone stuff, paperwork, filing, occasional help on frames. In my dreams and aspirations, I get the job or one like it, Phil gets a job in the city and we can find a decent apartment somewhere with maybe one other person if necessary. And then somehow I find time to work on my portfolio and start getting either freelance gigs or more gallery shows. An apartment could also allow for Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School meetings, like Marcel Dzama's Royal Art Lodge, where we do trust falls and team building exercises. And in this fantasy I lose twenty pounds and meet a nice girl that's DYING to hear about my 30th level ranger. Someday, cold and indifferent stars, someday.

Oh, and in case you didn't know: my tomato plants are officially dead.

I loved them dearly for several long weeks while I waited impatiently for some fucking fruit. But they got sick, which is what my love does. Like Lenny from "Of Mice and Men" but not retarded and more insidious, creeping and rotten. Such is the love of James Malcolm Keegan. My love is like kudzu to this blooming mass of vegetation: alternatingly suffocating and negligent.

It's a good thing I got a vasectomy when I was fourteen, or else I could be facing criminal charges. Assuming you replace the words "tomato plants" with the word "baby". And "killed by borderline neglect and disease" with "shaken and kicked".

I'm re-reading Neil Gaiman's "American Gods". It is a pretty damn good book, I just figure that maybe Gaiman should move on from the "metaphysical as character" thing. Sandman was cool, American Gods is cool, but it seems like almost every other character he writes is meant to stand in for some element of universal experience (usually with some charming personality quirks and unexpected casual attitude). Maybe I'm stereotyping. After my re-read, I'll give "Chinatown Death Cloud Peril" a shot.

Wish me luck on the job interview. And pray that no employer is curious enough to see my website and hit the "blog" button that will take them here.

Time-travelling lesbians stole my wallet. And my heart.

2007-09-03T19:20:00.000-07:00

New Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School piece. It's less bizarre and bombastic than a lot of my previous pictures, just because I want to see if I can pull it off. It doesn't really need a story, but doing it I came up with the idea that it's for a reinterpretation of Huckleberry Finn, except with a religious baboon and his trusty kitten companion instead of the main character. It's another watered down acrylic drawing. I'm starting to figure it out.

I desperately need to get out of Connecticut, as usual. But this time, I may have the beginnings of a getaway plan. A prison break, if you will. The first step is the one I've been struggling with for four months: find a job in the city. If I can pull that off in the next month or two and save up some money, I may be able to get a place with Phil in Brooklyn or Queens, assuming he also lands a job in the city. And if that ever happens, I can start working on the other things I want to do.

I'm thinking about trying out a vegan diet for a while, just to see what it's like and how I feel. Now that the weather is really nice, I wish I had learned to ride a bike when I was younger, rather than being a pussy and never getting past training wheels. Still don't know how to swim, so someday when I'm not embarrassed by my exposed hirsute form I'll learn. I'd like to travel when I've got it together, too. But above all that, I have to work on my portfolio and start making postcards.

My car's in the shop at the moment, so I'm pretty well stranded in the house. Not that I went out that much anyways (where the heck am I going to go, beyond the three places I usually go?), but I won't be able to do the few normal things I did to get out of the house from time to time. Regardless, hopefully this will get me working more on the projects I've got lined up.

Oerth Journal pieces due- September 15
SQFT group show- December
Portfolio- Still needs work

A Salute to an American Hero.

2007-08-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

Master Belch <3 Fly Honey.

This is another Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School piece. It's my first time trying out this approach similar to the excellent illustrator Eric Fortune or Paolo Rivera. I layed out my drawing (in pen and ink, which isn't the way they do it) and put down layer after layer of transparent acrylic wash. I learned a few things from doing this little card: adding white gives you something more like a tempera than a wash, for instance, so light colors should be kept somewhat thin for the most part and work off of the natural white in the paper. Also, mark making becomes a lot more important, since you can't smooth it out as easily. I like the fact that you have to be methodical; light to dark, layering and layering to get the darker values in. I'm going to keep experimenting with this.

One of the major things I like to think about myself and my work is just how thoroughly I am made of media and television. Whether it's spilling Simpson's quotes verbatim at the drop of a hat, or discussing the cultural relevence of Herman's Head, I'm more or less a walking depository of television/video game/book/magazine/musical influences. When I was ten or eleven, a game called "Earthbound" came out for the Super Nintendo. It remains one of my favorite games ever, mostly because of how downright quirky it is. Ten year old kids with psychic powers must go unescorted from town to town, fighting irate mice, mushrooms, cavemen, abstract paintings and all kinds of other crazy enemies that appear on a psychadelic backdrop to try and beat you up. All in the hopes of defeating an alien invader from the future on the word of a talking bee that fell to Earth with a meteor. Yes.

My favorite villain has always been Master Belch up there. He's basically a pile of crap that smells bad. But the wonderful, quirky thing about him is that he LOVES this stuff called Fly Honey, which you get after killing an evil circus tent in a town overrun with zombies. You throw him some during a fight, and you can just wail on him with baseball bats, frying pans, yo-yos and psychic powers while he sits there devouring his Fly Honey in absolute rapture. He makes you stink so much that before you can talk to any of the friendly little Mr. Saturns back in town, they make you take a bath.

Looking back, I can't help but realize how much impact that silly video game had on my sense of humor and aesthetic. It also taught me that evil people aren't really evil: they're just the victims of mind control by evil magic golden statues from the future. Really makes you think.

I'm a Godless, Unholy Bastard.

2007-08-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

Hey, if you like the Shelton Diagram Factory, maybe you should check out the artwork exchange/art community I've got going: The Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School. Tons of fun. Only one post from me so far, but I'm hoping it picks up since I invited everyone to join in and post what they've received from other people in the program. Hit that shit!

This and the drawing below it are some preliminary sketches for some illustrations I'm doing for my friend Adam Daigle's article in the upcoming free D&D online periodical the Oerth Journal. I'm not even sure what size they're looking for, so these were really just an obsequious shot in the dark based on the draft he sent me. I'm planning on doing a third sketch for a possible eavesdropping tavern scene. Should be a fun project and hopefully three great portfolio pieces. This sketch was inspired by Adam's opening paragraph.

And this is a shot of an expedition about to head into some ruins. These are only a few inches large in my sketchbook.

Diarrhea of the mouth.

2007-08-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've felt pretty discouraged. I'm beginning to see just how far I have to go to make this art thing into a living, and how much I need to improve my craft in order to get there. It would be easy to blame all of it on art school, even though it was kind of a touch and go education. But the major thing rests on my shoulders, I think.

It's hard to come up with a direction. There are a lot of things I'm interested in, but I just don't know what to focus on. I like sci-fi/fantasy stuff, but I lack the technical chops. I like comics, but I'm not sure I'm trained enough or if I can invest the time. I like doing my weirdo crap paintings, but I'm not sure who would buy them or who would hang them in their gallery. I'm all over the place, and it doesn't help that I don't really know how to paint. People say that my work isn't "bad", it's just that I have a naive, amateurish way of handling the paint. But I don't think that's necessarily what I want to do. I've said it before and I'll say it again; I don't want to be Henry Darger. It's kind of bad when you're thought of as some kind of naive amateur artist when you've gone through "professional" training at a big expensive art school. I don't want my work to be defined by my limitations, but sometimes that's all I see. I make a lot of lame excuses for how difficult it is to find models around here, especially if I can't afford to pay them. It is kind of true, but it's not a good excuse for not producing as much work as I should be.

Getting out of school has been a blessing and a curse. I had grown pretty fed up with school in general in the last few months, since I had all of these other ideas I wanted to pursue that I couldn't while it was going on. Now I have nothing but time, since nobody will hire me for a job, but I'm still not getting as much done as I probably should. I just get really frustrated now, especially since I can't leave the house to work like I could when I had a studio at school. I miss the city and being on my own. I mean, it's only been three months since graduation, so it's too early to say that maybe I'm not meant for this, but it's always in the back of my mind. Dan has been helping me a lot, like always, but it is still pretty discouraging at times, just seeing how far I have to go.

It helps that I got Jon Foster's latest art book from Amazon today (after the usual preorder bullshit they put you through because I bought it with Paul Pope's book, which set it back because they oversold that one) not only because I really like his work, but it's also kind of heartening to know that he originally struggled to figure out where he was going, too. I'm glad I'm not the only one that has to teach themselves or seek instruction elsewhere after art school, and I'm not the only person that's had to struggle to see where they're going. (It's a really good collection of his work; you should get it. "r/evolution: The Art of Jon Foster"- the title sucks, but the book is great.)

That being said, I'm going to keep trying; though I think I should definitely find a day job and get out of my parents' house as soon as possible, rather than trying to make a living at this right away. I'm not convinced that grad school is the solution, to be honest. The last thing I really want is any more over-priced, impractical education. At least, not until I get some real world experience first.

I was thinking about going into the city on Tuesday for a play, but if everybody I've talked to is going to ditch me (or just end up being too busy), I may just forget it.

Love is...

2007-08-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

A squid cuddling an atom bomb. Made for a lucky member of the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School.

Even my tears are spicy.

2007-08-15T20:03:00.000-07:00

Here's my calendar competition piece. It's an oil painting, but since it was due today and I'm really insecure, I brought it to Dan and he gave me some pointers on giving it that extra polish digitally. Not sure how I feel about it, but it's sent in.

I'll probably stick this and my SDF inkwash pieces on the website tomorrow.

I'm a barrel full of hate, boys! Come open me up!!

2007-08-14T18:01:00.000-07:00

So I'm back from the family vacation to Vermont. I don't want to be too much of a Debbie Downer, but I don't think I missed very much during the last few trips that I opted out on. I was the only hot dog at the barbeque, if you catch my drift, and the vacation plans reflected that. I did make a vote to hit the Clark Museum in Massachusetts for a showing of Monet drawings (superior to his paintings, in my less than humble position) and some Turner watercolors- among other things. It was worth seeing, but I hadn't realized that the Clark Museum is the ONLY thing to do in that neck of the woods and the place was swamped with old folks. I got some reading material at the gift shop, though. Taschen volumes on Bosch and Vermeer- $20, mostly good quality reproductions, definitely worth the affordable price of admission. I also procured a copy of "Human Anatomy: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age" that Jonathon Rosen had raved about in the anatomical illustration class. I haven't read it yet, but it's full of woodblock pictures of organs and viscera. So I'm happy with it. Its looks like a really smart study of the subject and it's on my reading list.

So after hours of sitting in the minivan, somehow unable to sleep, we reached Vermont. And hey! Who's this sprightly fellow, but a typical Vermonter! Notice the dead eyes and the vacant stare. The blatant disregard for his progeny between his legs. You know this guy would totally get hopped up on PCP and murder your ass. I don't trust that big strawberry/apple thing he's offering me, but I don't want to risk getting him mad.

If you're like me, I'll bet you thought you had left your psychadelic moose days behind you with the mushrooms and prom night. No. You may have left him, but he hasn't left you. He's here, outside the Apple Barn where they dispense delicious diet ruining homemade treats, waiting for you. He wants you back, and no matter how many times you swear you're done with him and his kind, he'll just lay into you with that ,"Aw, man. You used to be COOL" routine. And you know what? It works every time.

We settled into our motel soon after arriving (Mom, Caitlin, Sian, Grandma and Me). It would have been an okay place if 1. there were enough towels 2. the beds weren't hard as a rock and 3. I wasn't left sinking into the couch or on the rock hard skeevy fold-out. I stuck with the couch because sleeping with any of the above people is weird to me. Needless to say, much of our devoted Mother's time was spent bitching about the motel, getting us all the much needed linens.

So after a night of listening to Grandma snore, it's time for breakfast. This is Up For Breakfast, my mother's favorite Manchester, VT breakfast place. The food was pretty good, the coffee was pretty excellent. My omlet was kind of runny, but the vegetarian sausage was homemade and mighty tasty. And yes, every place in this tourist town has a cutesy sign. It hurts.

Here's a view of Manchester. Southern Vermont's big tourist attraction. Outlet shopping, expensive restaurants ($15 for a freaking burrito and you don't even get rice on the side!) and the big claim to fame, the Northshire Bookstore. It's a nice little place, but it honestly doesn't have the amazing selection that my family believes it has. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places (if a bookstore doesn't have a roped off adult section, it isn't worth my time, personally). We spent plenty of time running around to outlet stores. I even bought clothes myself.

We also headed up to Rutland to see my cousin Shannon, her husband and my new second cousin, Avery. Everybody was cool, the baby is nice (even if I'm not much of a baby guy, she was quiet and happy and that's all anyone can ask for) and we spent a nice afternoon/evening as the very first people at the steakhouse.

After a rough day of sitting in the car, occasional clothes shopping and trying not to be sucked into the Purgatory under the couch cushions, I needed a drink. Not just a drink: a libation to the gods.

Virgil's Root Beer. Not too sweet, not too syrupy; a root beer that doesn't fill you up too much. It's like someone bottled Christ's sweat. You think it's lit by a lamp, right? No. Heavenly light seriously follows this shit around. I get withdrawals just thinking about it.

Are stone walls, flea markets, outlet and antique shopping and picturesque little cabins like crack to you? Check out Manchester, VT.

On the drive back to Connecticut and life as we once new it, I was forced to sit and ponder the family dynamic of the Keegan household. You know you've got an interesting family when your mother notices the headshops on the road before you do. And then slows so you can take a picture.

Wheel of Time calendar contest submission is due tomorrow by midnight. One or two more glazes and things and it should be done. I wrestle with a crippling fear of failure and the realization of my own shortcomings every time I sit down to paint and this was no exception. I'll let the good people at Tor Books and Robert Jordan judge whether this one goes on my wall of fame or my blooper reel. The super blue skin on the protagonist is going to push it one way or another.

You'll see. One day, I'll be the finest professional Bea Arthur impersonator around.

2007-08-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

Here's the painting in progress that I posted the color sketch of about two or three weeks ago, for the calendar competition. It's due in a week and I haven't got a whole lot of time, due to the family Vermont trip. I've left the skin for last; after that gets blocked in, I'm probably going to go back in and glaze a whole lot. Adjust values and things. I vacillate back and forth between liking it and hating it. Typical artist thing. On the one hand, I think it's looking pretty good for me. On the other hand, it isn't a pro piece yet. The foreground probably needs to go even cooler in order to get the right pop in contrast. I wanted to do this thin, with a lot of the drawing showing. But I wound up piling on the paint in parts. I like pushing thick paint around. It feels good. Plus, the medium I use is too glossy, I think. Leaves a sticky sheen that I don't like. Old habits die hard.

I dunno how I feel about it. I don't even know if it's going to be a contender for the competition. I'm not a huge fan of how cartoony it is, maybe I need to try for more realism from now on. If I have the patience, which, so far, I've shown that I don't.

I'll post the finish when it's done.

Smile, you son of a bitch!

2007-08-06T10:51:00.000-07:00

I got back last night from my weekend in Brooklyn, watching that little guy up there. It was a good weekend, though not nearly as productive as I had hoped. Ollie's a sweet dog, but he's weird. Doesn't really like taking walks, sleeps most of the day with little bursts of insane energy. Stares at me longingly at all hours, delights in climbing on top of my head and licking my ears.

The first time I met him at my sisters' apartment, the first time I picked him up Sian and Caitlin pointed at him and started shouting,"Lipstick! Lipstick!" And I was like,"What? What are you talkin-"

And then I saw that his "lipstick", aka puppy dork, was out. I put him down in a hurry, let me tell you.

Fortunately, incidents like that are a bit less common now. Especially after the New York State Initiative Against Ollie Dork Related Sexual Harrassment started to do its job.

So, Caitlin and Sian went to Nashville for their show with Julia at the SQFT Gallery (which I did not realize was called the "Square Foot Gallery", rather than the initials themselves, until Cait and Julia made fun of me during MOCCA) and had themselves a time. This is my special souvenir for watching Ollie over the weekend: novelty cowboy boot sideburns.

This, along with the squid brain tie I love so well and the Mr. T bobblehead from years ago proves that no one knows me like family. Best gifts ever. This will never be opened, much like the Gary Coleman safety video I found still shrinkwrapped at Goodwill when I worked there.

You know what's weird after art school? Seeing the school's nude models around the city. And just my luck, when I do see one of the models it isn't one of the ladies that does the Burlesque shows or what have you (i.e., the ones I get sweaty palms around and am terrified of speaking to; basically the women that send me back to the High School dance mindset). It's one of the dowdy older women that always struck me as kind of persnickety. And that's what happened while walking Ollie in Park Slope. Of course, I didn't say anything. How weird would that have been?

"Hey! I've seen you NAKED for twenty minute stretches of time, broken up by five minute breaks over the course of three hours! How are you? Still posing in the buff for college kids?" I'll let you be the judge of whether or not that was a good call.

So here are some random photos of happenings in my room (no, not that kind of happening) and little "let's get to know each other, internet stalker" photos.

This was a moth that was seriously the size of my delicate, gnome-like hand. I feel awful about killing it. With a sandal. It's a harmless creature that I slaughtered because I didn't want it flapping around while I was trying to sleep. What if it was my spirit animal? Huh?! What if I went to sleep while it was over the bed and it appeared to me in a dream, voiced by the late Johnny Cash or the currently alive Ron Perlman or Kathleen Turner? What if it was there to show me the error of my ways, convince me to go to law school like Dad wants me to? Or just tell me why I'm not getting layed?

Killing this moth may have fucked up my life forever.

Oh, my what's this? Just a record player laying out, ready to be played. With the first Black Flag album on vinyl prominently placed before it. Huh.

*coughHipsterDouchebagcough*

This is the only way that I can listen to my copy of the (admittedly reissued) Come on, Pilgrim by the Pixies. I think it's a good album, especially "I've Been Tired" where Frank Black sings in a high falsetto a vacuous, drunken conversation between the narrator (himself?) and this girl he's either trying to get in the sack or just make fun of.

This is the desk where I used to try to work, but often failed. Tons of books on the shelves and on the desk itself. This is probably a quarter of the assorted novels, comics, D&D manuals and art books that I have spread out throughout my territories in the house.

And this is where I keep the sentimental stuff that I either value a tremendous amount, can't bring myself to throw out or just want to keep displayed. The top cigar box contains detritus from various failed attempts at relationships that I can't bear to get rid of, but also can't handle looking at. The action figures are Lobster Johnson from the Hellboy comics, a Japanese Godzilla character toy I put together during my junior year after a trip to Toy Tokyo with Heather and Josh and a Hellboy action figure that Steve and Dan gave me for Christmas during my internship. I got the Japanese print from an antique place in Stratford; my parents gave it to me for Christmas and I think it's really nice and a good (if somewhat monochromatic) example of woodblock printing. The comic strip in back that you can't read was given to me by Hilary on our first year at SVA; it's about the two of us with paper bag heads. I don't know what the little soft doll thing is. The Gary Coleman safety video is my favorite Goodwill find from when I worked there. Still shrink-wrapped from 1986. I think if I opened it, it would crumble to dust because the universe wouldn't be able to handle it.

I picked up the first two TPBs of The Goon by Eric Powell on comic book day (Wednesday) this week. Really great; not only tremendously pulpy and funny, but beautifully drawn and damn, can this guy paint a cover! "All I got to say is KNIFE TO DA EYE!!" After the Wheel of Time Calendar painting is done (which it should be before the 15th, when it's due) I have some pro-bono work coming up for my friend Adam in Austin, doing illustrations for a D&D article he's writing for a free online journal. And then I should get started on stuff for SQFT's December group show benefit for the Humane Society.

We were marooned off the Horn of Heston. It was a long season of rain and dreariness.

2007-08-01T18:43:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when you date one of my friends and it's your birthday: you get an inkwash drawing of a squid fighting a Tyrannosaurs Rex. I stole the idea from Brandon Bird. But it's legal because his painting also has a sperm whale in it, and mine doesn't. Totally different symbolism.

On a related note, I'm still looking for a quality sperm whale belt buckle to wear with my awesome squid-brain tie. Prey above, predator below; if you know what I mean. And by that, I mean I want nothing more than to display my enthusiasm for marine biology. The double entendre is unintentional; just a delicious side benefit that I am convinced will get me layed in some parallel dimension where being a douchebag will get girls to like you. Oh wait! This IS that dimension!

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be heading to Park Slope to dog-sit Caitlin and Sian's dog Ollie. I'm excited, even though there is literally an "Ollie Manual" that I will have to digest for the weekend. To keep him happy, apparently, though Sian pointed out that mere access to my bald, shiny cranium will often be enough to please him. I'm looking forward to seeing folks from school, spending the weekend drawing, hanging out with the dog and sweating my balls off. Who needs 'em? I don't want kids.

While shaving that bald, shiny cranium today I gave myself a tremendous gash right at the base of my skull. It took a few minutes to stop bleeding and I was kind of worried. But then it stopped.

The Calendar Competition painting is going okay. I'm a little nervous about time because this weekend will be taken up by Ollie-sitting duties and then next weekend is the family vacation in Vermont (read: James sits in the back of the minivan with his headphones on for three days vacation). And the piece is due in exactly two weeks. But the drawing is layed in, the warm/cool relationship established so it's really just a matter of layering in the right areas with the right colors. Shouldn't be terrible, though I still get the weird fear of failure that I always get when starting a painting.

I really love working in ink, whether straight or in washes. After this painting, I'm thinking that I'll switch to doing acrylic washes and just layer color over a good drawing. I think that would be a more natural approach for me and may take some of the fear out of the process.

Job search is pretty much at a stand-still. Not even an offer for an interview from most of the places I applied. Because I am not a graphic designer. They weren't kidding when they said those guys get jobs. I guess I have to sign up for some classes or something to get the design software knowledge I need. Jerkcity.

I was jumped by a bunch of Morlocks on my way home from this sweet industrial concert.

2007-07-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

So I made an ink drawing about it for the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School. Now I've got some distance from it, and I can cope a little better.

I like gas masks.

Fat, but alive.

2007-07-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

Who's that handsome douchebag in the left hand corner?

Thissa here picture is my first (long overdue) piece for the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School. It's just ink and ink wash on a 4"x6" postcard. I'm hoping to do one or two more before Monday and then mail them out to their lucky new owners, because I sure as shit haven't gotten any from anyone else yet.

Okay, this is the sketch for what will be my submission to the Wheel of Time calendar contest. Let me run it down for you: the Wheel of Time is a series of fantasy novels, each about as thick as a brick with a cast of characters to rival every Charles Dickens novel. The author of this still growing series of novels that you could tie as a makeshift millstone around the neck of your enemy before tipping them in the lake to their doom is a man named Robert Jordan, who has been fighting a very rare and deadly disease for some time. He wants to finish the story before he dies, somehow without compromising his enormous vision. The guy's got a work ethic. So Tor Books is holding a contest for art submissions based on any character, any place and any event from the books in order to make a calendar and raise money to fund future research for a cure. Noble cause.

So, this is the basic run-down of what I want to do. I did the drawing, then showed it to Dan Dos Santos. He ran it through photoshop and made it better by adjusting my values a smidge (...I swear, a smidge) and establishing the warm/cool contrast. But that's all! The drawing and its bulletproof composition was all mine. And now I'm going to try and get it blown up, inked and painted by August 15th, the deadline. I wonder if it's too cartoony, just because most of the pieces made for the series are very classical and realistic. But I like it.

The story is that this is in a treasure room under this abandoned city and the three main male protagonists followed this guy they just met named Mordeth down to the vault. Then, they notice this Mordeth character doesn't cast a shadow. The jig being up, Mordeth bulks up to fill half the room and menace our heroes. The main character, Rand, falls to the floor, the hilt of his sword tangled hopelessly in his cloak. Is this the end of our plucky adolescent hero?! That's the scene I wanted to depict.

You'll notice I haven't put up any new pictures of my tomato plant. That's because I'm not too sure of its health. You see, some days it looks like the damn thing is about to die, others it looks fine. Many of the tomatoes succumbed to bloom rot and others are spending a ridiculous amount of time in the white/yellow stage of gestation. Why does everything I love either whither before my eyes, dying a long drawn-out death or run to the more able arms of another "gardener"? IS MY LOVE POISON TO YOU?! AM I NOT GOOD ENOUGH?!

The thermometer reads a comfortable seventy-five degrees farenheit. But it's twelve below zero here...in my heart. There aren't enough sad face smilies to express my pathos and loneliness.

....

So, in other news, I'm gaining weight due to my ingenious "no job, no excercise, no life" lifestyle. Scintillating. Good news: my new D&D game is going well (laugh if you like), I'm dog sitting in Park Slope for my sisters the first Thursday through Sunday in August and a trip to Vermont with the family is coming up in August, though I realize most of my time will be spent in the car with the ipod on.

Thanks for checking in, jerks.

For make size larger!

2007-07-10T18:51:00.000-07:00

I'm writing today because I finally broke down, took out the old computer (the one that plays video games on it) and made the basement bedroom into a studio space. I used to "work" in my bedroom, but I found that there were too many distractions easily at hand. In the basement, amongst the spiders and bugs, I can be away from distractions and actually get back to a work routine. It does triple duty, in that I make art there, my father does patent lawyer stuff there on the weekends (when he isn't supposed to be working) and we also play Dungeons and Dragons there. Who's got a problem with spiders and bugs? I'm down with spiders and bugs.

Yep, got my free tabaret from Dan in there all set up and ready to go and...oh. It's you. You...followed me down here. What's that you say?

I told you, Porcelain Baby Head, I'm not your "instrument of wrath".

No! I am not "The Sword of Michael"! I'm done with that and I'm done with you!

I must secure my tinfoil hat and shield myself from your telepathic evil, Porcelain Baby Head, even if it means being shunned by the opposite gender. And just about everyone with common sense. (Remember ladies, there's nothing sexier than a man battling inner demons to free himself from the darkness that is Porcelain Baby Head's foul wishes. Even if it means dressing in tinfoil.)

These were in the basement when I got there. I didn't make them and I don't know who did. And because the word "house" is the secret word of the day at the Keegan homestead, I can't ask anyone. Or else we all have to scream, which means that the neighbors will call the cops again. So I'm just going to assume that these neat little houses are older than man. I'll find some cool use for them, probably in practicing perspective and junk.

Now that there aren't any art teachers around to tell me that I'm too old, or smart or whatever to be making D&D drawings and then make fun of me, I'm making some D&D drawings. So, this is supposed to be Andy's Half-Elf Sorcerer in our upcoming horror campaign starting next week. Yes. May be a little too Wayne Reynoldsy, and probably a little too flat and stiff or something. But whatever, I'm going to ink it and color it soon.

I went a little crazy on this one. Phil is going to play a kenku rogue in the game, and this is meant to be his character. Kenku are raven people that make excellent rogues (thieves/burglars/bandits) due to their ability to work closely with their allies and ability to mimic familiar sounds. I wanted him to look like he had scavenged most of his armor and equipment, so there are mismatched pieces. Plus, he's a rogue, so he needs someplace to keep things like his lockpicks, rope, loot, weaponblack and junk like that. So I designed it. I looked at Tony DiTerlizzi's early Planescape and 2nd Edition D&D work for inspiration.

Foreshortening is hard, especially when you don't have any friends nearby to pose for you and you're too cheap to hire a model. And internet reference material can be problematic. So that's how I explain why this evilish dwarf fighter guy looks kind of bad. I like his face, though. You can tell he's kind of evil because he has an eyepatch and no iris or cornea. His rapidly spinning flail needs to change, I think and his legs bother me.

I'm still unemployed and watching my money rapidly dwindle, due mostly to amazon.com and BudPlant.com. I can find too many cheap, used books and cds on amazon that I can always justify buying it. And Bud Plant has too many good books to ignore. I got Mark Ryden's "Fushigi Circus (Mysterious Circus)" Japanese import from them. Beautiful paintings, beautiful reproduction. I wish I could paint my magical nonsense half as well as he can paint his magical nonsense. Someone said that my paintings reminded them of Jack Vettriano, just in the way they were rendered, so I decided to get a book on him and check him out. Jury's still out. I like the pulp romance feel of some of his pieces, but there is a weird almost misogynistic undertone to a lot of his pieces. Women are almost always portrayed manipulating men through sex and desire, though I can't really decide if that's better or worse than the other way around. Or they're portrayed simply as sex objects. Whether that's a problem or not is a matter of opinion. There is a kind of "mall poster shop" feel to his paintings; so popular and honestly, a little cheesey, to the point where people like me with expensive art degrees feel the need to snub it. But the painting is pretty proficient, and I love his heavy hand in applying the paint, plus the aspect of a mysterious narrative in a lot of his pieces is interesting to me. Jury's still out on this Vettriano guy.

ART OUT LOUD!!! (My freakin' ears!)

2007-07-02T20:27:00.000-07:00

Okay, below are my Art Out Loud photos from this Saturday at the Society of Illustrators with Klaus Jansen, Paolo Rivera and Mike Oeming. But I want to start my little art odyssey with some inane Shelton facts to make sure that you don't get too excited. Little known fact: this blog is the leading cause of internet blog related brain anyeurisms. So here is the majestic Wiffle Ball Factory on Bridgeport Avenue in Shelton. Shelton, CT is the birthplace of the Wiffle Ball and the only place in the world where they are manufactured. So when someone asks you,"From whence does one find the wherewithal to mount such mighty instruments of recreation?" You can answer,"Shelton, Connecticut."

This, my "peeps" is my ride. Yes, your eyes do not deceive you: that is a bronze 1991 Ford Contour and she is CHERRY. Ladies, ladies. No need to fight over who gets a trip in my sweet "ride"; there's room for four (five if you squeeze in and six if you count the dead guy in the trunk). Fortunately, Dan had a much nicer ride and is a much more trustworthy highway driver so he drove up to the Society while I was allowed to tag along.

Here, during the set-up period and free bagel time, is Mike Oeming, Irene Gallo and Helpful America-Man Arkady.

There was a good crowd for the event; not too many people, not too few. Everyone could get nice and close and ask questions and talk to the artists. Here we see Mike Oeming asking Klaus Janson if he's ever been to a Furry Convention. Now, if you read this blog regularly, you know my propensity for making up fucked up shit. But Mike really did ask Klaus whether he's been to a Furry Con, probably in connection to an anectdote about his Mouse Templar comic. "Yiffie", as the people that dress up as mascots and rub against each other like to say!

Pictured here is Dan Dos Santos, my good friend and the organizer of the event, his buddy Mike and everybody's pal Mike Oeming.

Here's Klaus Janson, inking the SHIT out of those pages!! Give 'em hell, Klaus!

Paolo Rivera showed us just how much work he has to put into each comic page that he paints, and was kind enough to show us a digital demo after the event was basically finished.

Here's Paolo again, over the shoulder. He uses digital color sketches to dictate the palate for what he's working on, trying to keep the comic consistent.

Little known fact about Paolo Rivera: to get the perfect reference, Paolo uses the ancient art of alchemy (learned at RISD, I believe) to sculpt and then animate tiny homunculi of the comic characters he is currently drawing. He then beheads the screaming abominations and mounts them on wire so that he can light them, turn them around and avoid having to pay for food and stuff. The artist gives life and takes it away, all in the pursuit of excellence.

My main job at the event was manning the door, making sure no bums came in to escape the pleasant weather outside and steal the Norman Rockwell painting on the wall. Of course, I left most of the work to Dan's thirteen year old neice, Deidre. She doesn't like having her photo taken. Grrr!

Well, looky here! It's the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School's very own Mike Stefan Freiheit, here to check out the event! Mike's the only person that dignified my repeated pestering over Facebook by actually showing up for the event. Good on you, Mike! You will be spared my terrible, terrible wrath.

This is the fourth Art Out Loud that I've been lucky enough to help with and I have to say that I am always really impressed by just how nice and down to Earth all of the participating artists are. It's really cool as a fledgling artist to see the pros at work, to be able to talk shop and just hang out. It's really great to leave with the understanding that great artists aren't flakey eccentrics, but are actually really cool, smart people that just love drawing and painting. Mike, Klaus and Paolo were all cool enough to donate their time and energy to the Society for this event in the hopes of helping students, not only by teaching, but by aiding with the Student Scholarship Fund. And, of course, this time Dan did a lot of the work getting the event together, so he deserves a great deal of praise along with Irene and Arkady and our friends at the Society for helping to bring this event to fruition.

I left feeling like I had to really start stepping up my game if I ever wanted to be in the same league as these guys, which I suppose is part of the idea.

So here are some studies I did today from reference: a moth, a raven and a crappy crow that got decapitated by the scanner. The moth is a study for an upcoming project with the excellent Hilary Florido that will hopefully happen. Soonish? One of my big goals is falling in love with my sketchbook again, since schoolwork had prevented me from working in it as much as I would like (that's my excuse, at least). Drawing every day, getting my ideas planned out, working from reference and life. It's a start.

Understand this, bitches: I am one hard mothercuddler.

2007-06-27T18:58:00.000-07:00

Here is a finalish sketch on tracing paper for my next piece,the Call of Cthulu based one. It's bigger than my scanner, so I had to prop it on my easel, shoot it with the camera and then adjust it in photoshop because it wasn't straight. Hopefully on the finish I'll find a friend with a large format scanner to let me get a good reproduction. Her foot needs work, as does her face I think. Not sure about his left arm and where it's meeting his tail, either. I'm trying to decide on a medium. It's supposed to be from a 1920s desert epic movie, seen through a blue lense. So I considered doing it in ink wash with a transparent layer of acrylic over it. But I could also do it in black and white acrylics and then still go over it. I also wanted to experiment with doing like an ink drawing with sumi ink and then putting transparent layers of color over that. Even though it doesn't fit the theme, doing it in color may make it a better portfolio piece. Well, it's on tracing paper, so I can always take the sketch and transfer it to a different surface and try something else.

MOCCA was a good time and I feel like a douchebag for kind of not wanting to go at first (happy?). There's currently a class action lawsuit pending against all of the nice people that indirectly made me feel like a douchebag. My lawyer says we don't have a chance in hell, but I will not be dissuaded. Expect a subpoena.

Once again, I didn't take nearly enough photos and I didn't take photos of all of my friends there, so I won't post any. Because you dicks are too immature to handle my accidental favoritism, okay? I met Jeffrey Brown, which was cool because I've liked his comics for a while. Amazed at the difference between how he looks and how he draws himself, and I'm sure I said as much about a thousand times to anyone that would listen. Saw Yuko there, which was nice. I only had her for half a semester, but she's been really cool to me. Ate lunch with my older sister and her friends Julia, said goodbye to all of my friends there with booths and took a train home. It was a good time and if I have a career by next year I'll consider getting myself a booth.

Speaking of career, I got an email from a gentleman at Nickelodeon in regards to my resume on the SVA job board. He said his boss was impressed with my resume, since they were looking for people fresh out of school with a strong focus on illustration and cartooning and wanted four samples. So I sent him some. Looking back now, I probably shouldn't have sent him the "Handmaid harvesting deformed babies from a giant tomato plant" painting. But what's done is done. I'm glad to have some interest, at least, even if I'm sure there are laws against me ever doing art for children.

Made a big purchase from BudPlant.com the other day after getting the catalog. Mark Ryden's "Fushigi Circus" Japanese import book came out, so I had to get that. I also bought a Jack Vettriano book because someone told me my painting looks like his, so I wanted to check him out. I wish I had the money to get Jon Foster's book, but I had to limit myself. They were out of Guy Davis' second Sketch Macabre sketchbook book, because I waited too long to decide to get it. Hooray frivilous purchases made with dwindling resources!! (Never mind the used D&D books I had ordered last week; it's an addiction.)

Friday: Heading back into the city to shoot reference photos for some more pictures. I got an idea at MOCCA; since I do a lot of paintings based on songs, I thought a good thing to do would be to make a series of ten paintings based on a few favorites and then make a little book and some mix cds and send them out as promos. Of course, that may end up being really expensive, but I'm going to try it. So if you want to be in a weird, pseudo-surrealist painting about a mopey song that I like let me know.

Saturday: Once again in the city to help out with Art Out Loud at the Society of Illustrators. This time it's all about the cartoonists! Mike Oeming, Paolo Rivera and Klaus Janson will be there drawing comics, talking about their methods and how they got into the business. It's a great event for students, recent graduates and fans and all of the proceeds are going to the Student Scholarship Program; these guys are donating their time to benefit the students, so it would be great to have a big turn-out. And if you want to see more cartoonists coming featured in these events, there's no better way to support it than to show up. Previously Art Out Loud had been mostly realistic fantasy painters; like Dan Dos Santos, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, Jon Foster, Brom, Donato Giancola, Todd Lockwood, Greg Manchess and many others, so this is a step in a different direction and it will hopefully pay off for the student scholarship fund. 12-4 pm, Saturday June 30th at the Society of Illustrators on East 63rd street.

And if that's not enough, it takes place in the historic Society of Illustrators dining hall, which contains paintings by Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth. AND during the event, people from DC and Marvel will be doing portfolio reviews. That's a lot of great opportunities for a $25/$30 price tag. So won't you join us?

I'm a bitter man, I know, but listen, honey, you're no fun.

2007-06-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

These are two studies I've done from stolen advertisements/film stills from the internet in the interest of getting the right 1920s movie feel/composition for the picture I talked about last time. This one was from a painted advertisement. I like how sylized the original was, and the shadows. Plus, a good simplicity.

And this one was from an actual still in the film (in this case, the 1925 version of Ben Hur) that I think was used as a cigar promotional or something. I like this one for composition and all of the background elements that scene needs, plus real anatomy and everything. You can tell I didn't give a darn (trying to watch the cussing; for whom, I'm not sure) about drawing the guys, even though they would have been kind of helpful. Meh. I've got a prepped piece of illustration board, so I can work on the two finals (this and D&D fish woman) at once.

I was considering writing something self-indulgent and angsty and typical "navel-gazing sensitive privileged middle class artsy white male", since I've got nothing but time on my hands to think about past relationships and how screwed up I am and woe is me, I feel sorry for myself. And how I'm concerned that maybe some of my instructors/classmates were right and how I don't want to get on the train into Henry Darger/Vincent Van Gogh/Daniel Johnston/Raymond Johnson/James Ensor/Irving Norman Town with stops at "Reclusive weirdo artist that lives with his parents and makes weird pictures until he kills himself" Junction. Even if I'm famous after I die or go crazy, fuck that. If I'm going to go crazy, it's going to be while saving the world from a secret peril at the hands of dread Cthulu, anyways. Man's gotta have priorities.

So I stopped and reminded myself why I stopped reading autobio comics and livejournal drama nonsense in the first place: that shit sucks (yeah, you knew I wouldn't be able to stop myself; despite the fact that this links to my professional website and that potential employers will read this). As it is now (and no offense to diarists; this applies to everyone's work but yours because YOU are brilliant) I know that my life is over when I actually act on my impulses to start writing and drawing my own pathetic life in tiny little panels. That would just be such a new level of masturbation and masochism to inflict on others. Panel 1: gets out of bed. Panel 2: takes a whiz. Panel 3: has sexual fantasy about anchorwomen on MSNBC, featuring commentary by Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann. Panel 4: desperately tries to hide erection from UPS delivery man; ultimately just over estimates himself, since the guy doesn't even notice. No thank you, I think the world of art is better off without it. And for the record, I did actually consider doing some really candid mopey autobio crap and decided against it. I know I'm technically an artist now, but I'm also technically an adult. That shit has to stop.

But I have other ideas; other crazy ideas. More nerdiness, sure. But also more goofy/sad/sweet/witty(?) art work more in line with my existing portfolio stuff. And of course, it's inspired by a Voxtrot song. "Raised By Wolves" to be specific. It'll have the literal tie-in to the title, but also kind of a real nod to what the song is about, since the whole thing is really about desperate infatuation despite readily observable incompatibility. Which is basically what a lot of my work (and life) is about in some fashion (hooray?). Ultimately, personal work like this is I think a more practical emotional investment than doing some mopey autobio piece, just because I think it's easier for other people to relate to and it isn't about me as a person, but about feelings and situations that can be universal. "I will never live like you do, I will never love like you do" is the central quote for the direction I'm going for in this painting. My hope is to shoot reference with Phil (of course) and a female friend of some sort when I'm in the city next (besides the MOCCA festival tomorrow) and rotate final pieces to keep myself interested and working.

I'm now more than ever realizing that Sal was right in his observations of me over the past year. He noted in a one on one conversation that I have this creative drive that's miles ahead of myself; whacked out ideas that are strange enough to be original in some way (but may not be marketable in an illustration context) in a great volume. But my technical abilities and patience aren't anywhere near where that creative thrust is, and I still need to learn to slow down and really work things out and develop a proper working method. And he's dead on; I rush to the next thing oftentimes because I'm more interested in exploring the next idea rather than the current one that should occupy my time. Either that, or I'm lazy or scared of seeing how bad something turns out. Bottom line: none of it is practical.

So I'll be at MOCCA at the SVA booth tomorrow despite the fact that I have nothing to sell, really. But it's a networking/marketing opportunity. I'm actually pretty shy in real life a lot of the time, especially in a huge room packed with people just milling around aimlessly, so I'm rather nervous. I don't handle conventions well and part of me is even now trying to convince the other part to bail. But in the interest of expanding my horizons/having fun/making contacts/not being James Ensor, I'm going.

I have three people besides myself signed up for the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School. Do I have to start calling people out and calling them names to get you to join us? It isn't even a huge commitment and we can all use the practice. For the record- Hilary Florido: total fuddy-duddy. Thomas Pitilli: enjoys wearing bike shorts, if you know what I mean. Marissa Herrmann: gigglepuss. Mike Freiheit: doesn't kiss Grandma. Prove me wrong: email sdfcorrespondence@gmail.com and join the program.

For America.

Hey, you!

2007-06-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Are you searching for meaning in your life? Are you tired of your normal routine of sitting around the house, eating corn chips and masturbating? Wondering if maybe the world is better off without you around; using up valuable oxygen, food and fuel? Want to slide into the bathtub, slit your wrists and end it all?

Well, I can't help you with that. But I CAN offer you membership in a fun little activity I've come up with. Join the Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School and make art for friends/total strangers through the mail! All you have to do is write to Our Beloved Chairman at sdfcorrespondence@gmail.com with you name, mailing address or post office box along with your social security number, major credit cards, nude photos and list of turn-ons. Then, Our Beloved Chairman will send you a list of other participants and the formal rules and regulations, along with a pyramid scheme that he thinks you'll be REALLY interested in.

This year, we're using a set format for artwork exchanges: everything will be postcard sized, no larger. Any medium. This is to reduce the cost of mailing between members and to keep time in transit down. This way, no one is investing more than anyone else, everything is fair and nobody feels like a douchebag. Everyone will have a list of addresses and emails, so staying in contact with people you're sending work to should be no problem. I'm setting the deadline for entry at July 1st, so hurry up and join.

But wait! That's not all!

Once this thing gets started, I plan on adding a Correspondence School section to either my formal website (www.jamesmkeegan.com) or this very blog. Then, if you receive something from someone else that you think is awesome, you can just send me a good scan with that person's name and I can post it for all to see! Won't that be fun?

So sign up, sign your friends up (provided they aren't jerks) and let's exchange addresses so I can stalk you.

"And then the Doctor said I didn't have worms anymore and that was the best summer ever."

2007-06-17T18:32:00.001-07:00

This is another sketchbook creature thing. The return to my parents' house in Shelton has also apparently returned me to my pre-college nerdliness, before I was "too cool for school". I can already feel my ass getting bigger, my interest in the outside world waning and a deep desire to paint my fingernails black. I must be stopped.

This guy is a "Spectral Hunter" from the Call of Cthulu roleplaying game, based on the horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Specifically, from a portion of the "Shadows of Yog-Sothoth" campaign, which I want to run but haven't been able to yet. And now I'm going to spoil part of it. The investigators (i.e. the players) are sent to an ancient Native American settlement where the shooting of a 1920s swords-and-sandals film was derailed by eerie happenings and the death of the director, as well as the sudden insanity of many cast members. The investigators have to figure out what happened as the same things start happening to them, all while also looking for a part of a gold disk that could supposedly wake slumbering Cthulu from under the Pacific Ocean to do all kinds of rotten things. Ultimately, they may find this special camera lens that the deceased director had had created and allows them to see these invisible creatures, like this critter here. But this is just a study for another picture.

With that camera lens, they can look at an outtakes reel that had previously had this weird, disturbing aura. With this special blue lens, they can see the presence of these loping monstrosities in the film, which may inflict a loss of sanity points on the investigators watching. One of the scenes described that really creeped me out was the description of a part where the female lead, dressed in the 1920s approximation of Babylonian finery, is seated on a Roman style couch eating grapes and awaiting her lover. There's a look of barely concealed disgust on her face as the folds in her dress seem to move in an unnatural breeze of some sort. With the special lens, the investigators can see two of these big spectral hunters come in through the window and touch her suggestively with these crab claw hands of theirs, while leering at the camera. So that's the picture I want to really make.

I managed to find some pictures from the 1925 version of Ben-Hur, which will be awesome reference. So this should be a really cool picture.

Moving into slightly less nerdy territory: Voxtrot was awesome. They played with a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of heart and they played all the songs I wanted to hear. They had a huge set-up: keyboards, a xylophone, drums, two guitarist along with the singer's own guitar AND a string quartet on the side. So, nine people on stage at once. They jump around a lot, wildly gesticulating. It was good to see, because the "anti-show" mentality that some bands have, where they don't move around or smile or anything is pretty lame. It's good to see a band that's actually into playing music live. My only criticism is that I couldn't hear the quartet at all, because everything was really loud and overpowering. It's a shame. I liked Au Revoir Simone, too, though it's kind of funny to watch someone rock out on a keyboard. There are worse instruments to rock out on (tuba, accordian, keytar, digeridoo) but it's still kind of interesting to see someone get THAT into something that's basically a step over from the computer.

"Man, did you see Jerry? He gets SO into his word processing! He's in the zone, going all Bach and shit!"

So, beyond that, nothing much else. I'm back to being a shut in after my brief excitement in the city: delivering strawberries, buying comics, calling people that are out of the city for that day only because I didn't think enough to call ahead, seeing concerts and then visiting some other folks before getting the midnight train (just like the Journey song that they wrote for me after my Goodwill adventure!). Still looking for work: there are two positions I'm going to try and apply for, but I'm not really sure. Working on more portfolio material in the hopes of making a career for myself and writing up scripts to eventually draw some of my own comics, since I kind of feel that the stuff in my portfolio now won't get me illustration work.

If you've never taken the midnight train from Grand Central toward New Haven, it's an experience. Everybody's asleep, drunk and about to throw up in the vestibule or doesn't speak English and is on the wrong train. AWESOME.

Some day, you're gonna go too far. And them there ostriches is gonna chew you up whole.

2007-06-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't know, I have an official website now after I somehow managed to teach myself enough Dreamweaver to get by. Check out JamesMKeegan.com for the skinny. There's even a link to this very blog, so that you can pretend that you're an art director that's curious about my shit and then discovered this blog and realized that they never want to either work with or talk to me. Fun fun fun!

So, the last time I put pictures up here I had some sketches of this Dungeons and Dragons adventure character that I wanted to do as a promo piece. Here's the finished (well, almost) pencil sketch in my sketchbook. I just want to try and figure out a way to make the locket in her hand more prominent and then try and push the contrast and values a bit more. But, at the same time, it's supposed to be a dark cave, so how much contrast can you really get?

I'm going to paint this soon (I SWEAR!) on a 16"x18" piece of expensive illustration board that I've prepared. I'm a bit nervous because I'm working in acrylic, which is not my usual medium. But I can't very well sleep with turpentine fumes in the air, now can I? Unless I'm seeking a very slow death in about thirty years. I also want to see if I can make some more promos in this vein for a portfolio of fantasy/sci-fi/horror stuff, but I'm not all that sure about whether I can pull it off. A lot of my teachers at SVA looked down on that kind of stuff. But you know what? They aren't the bosses of me any more. So I'm gonna nerd it up. I used nerd as a verb in this case, because the english language CAN GET FUCKED FOR ALL I CARE!! YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID, YOU BASTARDIZED LATIN/GERMAN/FRENCH/SPANISH/ITALIAN BASTARD!!!

I will rectify your shit all day long. You don't even know what that means. Neither do I, but it sounded threatening and I'm now an Internet Tough Guy all of a sudden.

My tomato plants are getting really tall. You know why? Love. Definitely love. I spend a good six to eight hours every day just hugging that pot. Carressing it. Taking it on tandem bicycle rides. Lying on bear skin rugs in scandalously little clothing with it. I figure that since I don't have a girlfriend or kids or a pet that gives a shit about me beyond getting his butt rubbed or offering him table scraps: I might as well love a plant. It just feels, you know, pathetic. And that's really what my life is all about. But say there, Junior Campers! What's that lurking furtively in the leaves?!

GESTATING MUTATED INFANTS!!! Or it could just be tomatoes. Could be anybody's game here. Still even potential for an XBox 360 or something. I've never done this before, so the field is still open.

Grow you motherfuckers. I've got big plans.

Other news: My cousin, Shannon, had a baby this past week. Avery Nicole is her name. All babies look like Winston Churchill to me. Just little Prime Ministers, waiting to fight the Axis. They're both healthy and fine and my uncle Ron (who looks like a shorter, older version of me and its lead to me being referred to as "Ronny" about a million times) is thrilled to be a grandfather. This prompted my mother to remind me that I am expected to produce grandchildren for her (she doesn't understand that men can't have babies). This will not happen, barring a tomato plant grown army of freaks. I figure, I've had a good thing going with my parents for a good twenty-two years and I'll never be able to match the parenting that I received. So I won't even try.

Got my dentist work wrapped up with three fillings today. One of them feels like it may be a little too big, since the left side of my mouth doesn't close all the way now. Meh.

Friday I will get up early and pick strawberries. Then it's off to NYC for comic book planning and a Voxtrot concert at six. I'm going to the concert alone, so anyone that wants to come and will pay for their own ticket is welcome. If not, well, fuck you too.

We will play Dungeons and Dragons in my basement at the beginning of July. This pleases me, even if it means I will never get laid.

Considering going back on Myspace to promote my website.

I got my resume finished and uploaded on the SVA job board. However, the people I've pestered for letters of recommendation have not responded to me. This causes me concern. Regardless, my plan is to find a day job in the city that will keep me going for a while so I can move back. I will also work on promotional pieces for my portfolio, including maybe painting that cactus man drawing and finishing the caterpillar baby/my mom as a little girl painting. I also have a ton of ideas for comics, some small, some large, but I'm not sure if I should pursue them or not. Regardless, by August, I want to have a really solid portfolio and some new promotional cards and things.

If I can get off my fat ass.

Man of Inaction

2007-06-03T21:50:00.000-07:00

No pictures this time, since I'm still working on whatever it is I'm working on (yeah, keep telling yourself that, Jim). Since I've gotten back to Shelton, I've really been cooped up in the house in a kind of stasis. Not working, finding it difficult to figure out what I'm really doing with the website and the resume. Nobody's really around, so I'm pretty lonely. My art supplies arrived in the mail, so I really don't have any excuses for my current state of indolence and ennui. I guess it's just the post-graduation heartbreak, hanging up eight months of momentum for the familiar comforts of home. I'll shake it off.

But, in the meantime, I've taken advantage of the time to do a lot of reading; ordering used books and cds and just whiling away the time. I just finished K.J. Bishop's The Etched City, her first novel. I bought it when reviewers mentioned China Mieville as a similar author. So, it's kind of similar to his work: very dark, with a lot of grey areas and compromised ethics. The story follows two failed revolutionaries (Gwynn and Raule) that meet again by chance while they both seek to flee prices on their heads. Gwynn is an overly competent gunslinger/swordsman of the super kill guy variety and Raule is a battlefield surgeon/doctor seeking to somehow recreate a lost conscience. The third major character is the city of Ashamoil; a tropical hellhole of a city. It seems that in Bishop's Ashamoil, there's no such thing as a middle class. You're either in the slums; full of violence, disease and hopelessness or you're in the oppulent upper class; rife with corruption, decadence and casual villainy. After arriving in the city, Gwynn finds almost immediate success as a henchman for a slaver and Raule works in a church hospital in the slums, tending to the poor in the hopes of regaining what she had lost.

I have a love/hate relationship with genre stories like fantasy/sci-fi. On the one hand, it's the bread and butter of my youth and there's no way I can deny its appeal to me. But on the other, it's so easy to make a derivitive and atrocious genre novel. The reason I like Mieville so much is because of his willingness to change the sentimentality of the genre, which makes it more cruel and more adult. Not to mention the fact that he works in politics to really give the story some charge. One of the things that I liked about The Etched City was Bishop's willingness to make her anti-heroes truly despicable. Too often, a writer will just slap a black trenchcoat (blech), a bunch of skulls and a big sword on a one-dimensional hero character and call them an anti-hero. But Bishop really does make both characters hard to like; Gwynn casually enjoys butchering his fellow men and Raule, despite her outward moralizing and attempts to convince herself she has a conscience, is guilty of standing aside to allow Gwynn's violent urges to find a vent on the innocent. The Etched City doesn't really have a plot, which I think is fine. I mean, these aren't people that are going to save the world. She's more interested in the characters and how they react to each other.

It's a decent first novel and there are points where a brilliant surreal sensibility shines through. For example, there's a beautiful section where Gwynn is tripping on these alchemical drugs and he finds a red hair similar to the hair borne by the sphinx in an etching he bought because someone had worked him and his distinctive peacock-feather coat into the image. So he goes on this search for who belongs to that red hair and ends up in a bar with these run-down characters that all wax poetic about that red thread he has there and how, if they had found one, maybe they would have had their chance at glory and redemption. You know I love the fact that Raule begins collecting the deformed births of all the women in the slum for her own study, including a baby with the body of a baby crocodile and the head of a baby boy, supposedly the child of an indigenous girl and the god of her people. A man laying on a mattress in a night circus has an orchid growing from his navel and challenges passers-by to try and remove it for a shilling. But beyond those stories within the story, the rest of the novel is a little less compelling, with a lot of missed opportunities.

I'll say first that I'm sick to death of Super Kill Guy, the overly-competent soldier hero type prevalent in fantasy/sci-fi novels that's just too cool for school. The guy that people on the internet fetishize and people dress as at conventions. Boring as hell. Bishop manages to make Gwynn more dimensional than most SKGs by getting under his flinty exterior with a genuine love interest that leaves him changed and vulnerable to heartbreak,if not permanently, then at least for a little while. I honestly wish she had done more with Raule. The doctor isn't the most action-oriented character, but I'm much more interested in the fruitless search for the reason behind the misshapen babies, which mirror her own conscience and that of Gwynn. The foetuses are a metaphor for human cruelty, ethics and values sacrificed to a hard, unforgiving world. It would have been nice to see Raule realizing that, searching for that answer, rather than having her as just the person that hands that fact to Gwynn and the reader. And, honestly, I don't want to spoil too much, but if an author is going to kill a character off I think it's really a cop-out to bring them back. Smalls, you're killing me. Even if it does lead to another character being fully fleshed out in the narrative, it's cheap. Kill 'em off and stick to it. It's not as if he was all that interesting to begin with. I wish Bishop could have developed the brilliant nuggets hidden in the novel, rather than giving into some of the more conventional genre-baggage. If she learns from The Etched City and doesn't fix what ain't broke, Bishop could end up as a really original author.

It's rather unfair to talk about an Haruki Murakami novel and another novel in the same entry: he's my favorite and there's no way around that favoritism, which is probably why I put K.J. Bishop first. I finished Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World just before finishing school and I'm now reading Sputnik Sweetheart. When I read a Murakami novel, I just have to devour it. I can't pace myself, really. I may just start buying the novels that I haven't read and hiding them or shelving them without reading it first, just knowing its there to change my life in some small way. I'll just pat the spine, knowing its there.

I chose Sputnik Sweetheart because the blurb on the back promised "a profound meditation on human longing". That's to say, I'm kind of going into the novel with the same mentality as women going into "chick-flicks", hoping for some kind of sympathetic voice to their own feelings. That kind of does a disservice to the novel when I put it that way, but that's the closest analogue. I'm not saying at all that it's anywhere near the same kind of sensibility as a melodrama or anything; all the characters are human with human-sized emotions. Like most of Murakami's characters, they're all kind of lost in the world, which I of course can sympathize with. I'm only a third/a half way through the book, but it already resonates pretty deeply with me.

The narrator talks about his situation, being smitten with a longtime friend that happens to be smitten with someone else with an unflinching honesty that I can't help but connect to. I just read a section where the narrator is helping his friend move into her new apartment and they're both sitting on the bare floor, talking. And she rests her head on his shoulder and they're talking about the woman she's in love with, and how her feelings for her are different than for him. And who doesn't know how that feels? He's looking at her, and his body and mind are united in just the sheer power of wanting; the desire to reach out and touch her, to taste her, to hold her. And even if so much of him wants to get carried away in that urge, he knows that to do so would change things completely. That it's a notion that is unwelcome or unwanted or impossible for the person next to him to reciprocate.

It's like being twelve in gym class and realizing, to your chagrin, that you've got a boner in your sweatpants. And everyone will be able to see if you stand up straight in the soccer goal, because, dammit, you're wearing sweatpants. They'll know. So he's got to get up, decline going out for dinner, and head home. And, yeah, that's something I totally understand. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that that particular experience and that flood of emotions (self-loathing, longing, pain and a peculiar, hesitant joy) defines my own personal life (past, present and likely future) to a tee. And those follow-up feelings, trying to cope with that constant pain and deciding that it's worth it because he has someone in his life that makes him feel like no one else had before. So he's stuck dealing with it and being the person she confides in about her longing for someone else.

Okay. Little too candid. A little too Livejournal. Current mood: hiding the boner in my sweatpants. What kind of floaty icon would that have?

Dr. Moore, my French Existentialism professor in college, described his first time reading Camus' The Stranger as making a new best friend. That's really similar to how I feel about reading a Murakami novel, especially something as emotional as Sputnik Sweetheart. He sums up those human experiences and emotions, even when put into bizarre and weird metaphysical experiences, better than I ever could for myself. Good book, recommend it.

Back to the regular, ridiculous Shelton Diagram Factory next time.

Make a saving throw vs. dorkiness!! FAILED!

2007-06-01T18:53:00.000-07:00

So, here are some more Dungeons and Dragons related sketches. These are from a Nicolas Logue adventure entitled "The Bullywug Gambit" (you'd understand what that meant if you were cool) from Dungeon number 140. It's part of a larger storyline of adventures that the editorial staff cooked up and then commissioned authors for. This character, Brissa Santos, was a beautiful artist/cutpurse/liason to pirates that happened to date the recurring villain of the story. Unfortunately, she didn't realize what ultimately always happens to the love interests of recurring villains. So she was accidentally turned into a half-human monster by this crazy green mist. Yeah.

Let that be a lesson, ladies. Never trust a guy with a pointed goatee. Especially if he's just using you for your connections to an infamous syndicate of smugglers and pirates in the hopes of getting rich.

I worked on this from her description in the adventure. She's supposed to be obviously formerly beautiful but for her newly acquired hunchback, crooked jaw of shark teetch and wide-splayed hands with extra hook-tipped fingers. She's found in a cave after her former special fellah kicked her overboard when the green mist got everyone. She's described as hunched over a half-eaten pile of fish and sea anemones, tormented by hunger and the twisted memories of love.

I like the drawing, even though I'm continuing to feed my bad habits and not using as much reference as I should. During my exit interview at SVA, Thomas Woodruff and Sal Catalano both agreed that maybe I should try to focus on mood and atmosphere a little more, rather than just tossing as much weird shit into my picturs as possible. So that's what I wanted to work with, as well as working on value and emotion. I wanted her to look terrifying and weird, but also tragic and pathetic. This is an okay DRAWING of her, but a later thumbnail below actually may end up working better as an ILLUSTRATION.

So, this was done in significantly less time than the above image, using just straight office pen on paper. I've found that I can't really do compositional sketches in pencil, because there's too much room for revision. I end up trying to make it perfect when all I have to do is figure out where everything's going to be, what key (overall value structure) the piece should be in and generally how I want poses to work. Ultimately, I think this is the one to go with for a final painting of the character. There's room for revision, of course; I decided to make a slightly more emotional piece by having her staring at a locket containing the painting of the man that betrayed her, but you can't really tell in this thumbnail sketch. I like the pile of fish and sea anemones and it's something I can play with in the composition, and her pose is a bit more vulnerable and violated than the other one, which is more aggressive. The goal for me is to make her breath as a character, rather than just making her into another thing to be killed in a cave, even if she has very small bearing on the plot.

My next step with this is to start working much larger (after not being lazy and gathering at least SOME reference), first on tracing paper to figure the whole drawing out and make it perfect, and then on illustration board for the final after I do a color study. I haven't worked very large since the first semester of this past year and I want to return to bigger pieces. If I do this larger, I can kind of spend more time getting into the details during the last stages and making it sing.

As soon as the art supplies I ordered arrive, I'm making the switch from oil to acrylic, just because now that I'm at home and working in the same room where I sleep, having turpentine in the air and soaking in rags is a bad idea. Not that acrylics are much safer, since they are a liquid plastic polymer, but at least they're water soluble. Plus, I figure if I'm going to do art on a deadline it can't hurt to try something with a faster drying time.

So far, I've been keeping up the promise I made to myself to try and sketchbook every day. Not always from observation, which is bad, but it's a step in the right direction towards getting my technical skills up to speed with my competition.

Tune in soon for the next stages of this and other pieces.

I'm not lazy! I'm not lazy! Okay, fine, I'm lazy.

2007-05-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Hey! It's a sketchbook drawing! And, wouldn't you know it, it's a deformed undead demonic pseudo-baby. I make stuff like this and then wonder why I'm not getting work.

The story behind this sketch lies in my profound love of Dungeons and Dragons and its related periodicals and paraphenalia. In my favorite magazine, Dungeon (which isn't actually a BDSM publication, though I'm sure that would be a fine periodical in its own right), D&D enthusiasts and professional adventure authors send in adventures they've written and the magazine publishes three in a month. On the messageboards for the magazine, a fun little rivalry between Richard Pett (author of "The Devil Box" and "The Styes", both excellent, dark China Mieville/Neil Gaiman inspired adventures) and Nicolas Logue (author of the noirish "Chimes At Midnight" and the totally sweet "Library of Last Resort" and various other character/event driven moduels) sprang up. They started putting each other in their adventures as NPCs (non-player characters), Logue starting it with a flattering portrayal of Pett as an acclaimed actor in "Swords of Dragonslake". Pett responded by placing a demonic undead baby in a cage in his excellent "Serpents of Scuttlecove" and calling it "The Young Master", complete with a penchant for writing incomprehensible scribbles and screeching for attention. So, since they both post on the boards and I'm a regular on there myself, I thought it would be "fun" if Nick came back from his honeymoon to a portrayal of his fictional self in pencil. And, naturally, I am now ensconced in their ongoing war as the slippery turncoat that I am.

You know how it feels when you tell a joke that you're sure is hilarious and then kind of mess it up or realize it's only really funny to you and then all of your friends look at you funny? Yeah, that's kind of how I feel now. But, anyways, one of the weird things I love in art history is that Jesus (and all kinds of other babies) are depicted not as infants, but as little men. Brueghel did it, Cimabue did it, all kinds of Renaissance guys did it. Now I'm paying homage. By making a deformed freak to go with my other deformed freaks.

One of the things Sal Catalano, one of the best teachers I've had at SVA is a real stickler for is drawing from observation. And I've realized lately that I'm not doing nearly enough of that, so I did a study of this porcelain baby doll head that my older sister Caitlin acquired at some time and left here in the Keegan household. You can kind of see on the above drawing where I kind of took some cues from this study. See! See! I'm not that lazy...I did two drawings...that's something.

Stewart got groomed last week! Now he's pretty. And he totally knows it. The $100 gate my mother bought for the drive down there was knocked over in a matter of seconds, literally before we left the driveway. So it fell to yours truly to restrain the 100+ pound neurotic, hyperactive dog in the back of the minivan for the 15-20 minute ride to the groomers. Somehow I managed to keep him from climbing into the driver's seat with my mother, killing us all. But it was a near thing. But, hey! Look how sharp he looks! He's gotten more clingy because of the attention, too. He does that thing where he leans his whole body into you and demands affection.

Here we are playing his favorite ridiculous chase/catch game that never goes anywhere.

These guys are going somewhere, though. Getting taller, with yellow buds. Soon enough I'll have some nice tomatoes for some vegetarian cooking, which is the other thing I'm learning. Again, this is one of the many things I'm trying to learn in order to impress women. But this will end up actually being useful in day-to-day life, regardless.

You know what else is growing? The Diagram Factory. I'm working on a real website for my work (http://www.jamesmkeegan.com) and when it finally gets up and running, you'll be the first to know ladies and gentlemen. In the mean time, my friend Hilary Florido has a blog at http://hilaryflorido.blogspot.com, my older sister Caitlin has her own portfolio up at http://www.caitlinkeegan.com, my twin sister Sian has her own blog at (I believe) http://siankeegan.blogspot.com and my friend Heather Sporing should have her blog at http://heathersporing.blogspot.com. If these addresses are incorrect, punch me. I can't figure out how to make real links on the right hand side of the thingy, so this will have to do for now.

I walk slowly when I walk away from you.

2007-05-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

It seems as if the four people that actually read these burning missives from the brain in a jar (me) like things a lot better when Stewart is featured prominently. So, since I haven't been working at all, here's a picture of our domesticated behemoth. He likes to sit on the couch, directly over the back so that he enjoys the highest seat in the house. The strange thing is that he asks for permission first most of the time. This is the only time that Stewart could be called "polite".

So, I've been hanging out with Stewart for about a week or so now with nothing to do. After last semester, I really looked forward to some time off to just hang out. But now that I'm doing it, I've come to the conclusion that free time sucks big time. Video games are boring, no one's around. Haven't even been able to run our much anticipated Dungeons and Dragons game yet. Time to get back to work. And I've got a lot to get done. I need to type up a resume and look for a job in the city, because despite Dan Dos Santos' recommendation that I stay in Shelton and work on my portfolio as a day job, I just can't stay here. Love the folks, very supportive. But I don't even feel like I can work here. Ridiculous, I know, but after working four years in New York, I kind of need to be back there. And all of my friends live in the city; everybody in Shelton has moved on or is in the process of moving on. So I need a resume and a job and then eventually to move back to the city. I bought a domain name today and Dreamweaver is coming in the mail, so I need to get cracking on a website of my own. I'm hoping to use this as an opportunity to learn both Dreamweaver and Photoshop to a greater extent, which can be helpful in the job department.

Our friends Kathleen and Aaron at the SQFT Gallery in Nashville (which, for your information, is showing my sister Caitlin's work alongside her friend Julia in August) are holding a benefit gallery show in December for the Humane Society or a similar charitable organization and everyone that's shown in the space is invited to contribute something (or several somethings) in the $200 and lower range in the hopes of encouraging a lot of hip young people to buy art as gifts. I've been invited to contribute, which is great, so there's one project to work towards. I also want to produce a little comic/illustration book of my own as a surreal/satirical view of my own jittery fears and anxieties about the impending world calamities. I've also got to figure out how to get my portfolio targeted a bit better towards the editorial/book cover market that I hope to work toward or I have to gear it towards the horror/fantasy/sci-fi market that I frequent personally, which would be kind of nice because I already have the information in regards to whom I would send work to. But the thing is that my technical abilities aren't really up to snuff, so I have a lot of practice ahead of me, I think.

Here are my growing tomatoes. Hanging out. Photosynthesizing.

I've got a mess of blank enchanted postcards sitting on my magic desk upstairs, just begging to be covered in my typical nonsensical junk and sent to unsuspecting victims. So, I was considering restarting the run-down and failed Diagram Factory Correspondence School with a slightly more narrow focus. The plan would be to draw/paint/whatever on one of these, put it into an envelope with three other blank ones and send it to someone. Then, that person would take one blank one and draw/paint/ejaculate/bleed/collage on it and send it back to me. Another blank one would be arted up and sent with the last blank postcard to someone else, who would send it back all arted up to the person that sent stuff to them. So..that's kind of a confusing paragraph, but that would be the procedure. That way, there's only the standard postage rate to worry about, there's a format and no big commitment on anyone's part. I dunno if that's something anyone would be interested in, but that's an idea. Probably won't go anywhere, but there it is.

My goodness! What's this? Shakey amateur footage of a rare occurence on the elusive and dangerous tomato plant: budding! That little thing in there...no, the other little thing, is a gestating tomato. I think this one is going to be purple, actually. Cherokee Purple. Stolen from an INDIAN BURIAL GROUND!!! What kind of HORROR will it unleash on the Keegan household?! Will it's delectable purple fruit contain the faces of the damned?! Will that make them taste even better?! Or will we all fall to some horrible curse and turn into delicious purple tomato people?

Find out next time!

Rockin' The Suburbs

2007-05-14T12:03:00.002-07:00

Hey! Check it out! I graduated on Thursday. Yeah. I didn't take many pictures for some reason, but Caitlin and Grandma did. It was okay. I feel kind of bad that I won't see everybody that often and blah blah blah. I'm still waiting for it to turn into a robot or talk or vacuum for me or something. So far it just...sits there.

So, now that I'm stuck in Connecticut for the foreseeable future (until I find some kind of job in the city and an apartment with someone) how am I going to make time pass, beyond painting, drawing and playing video games?

I'm growing tomatoes. I wanted to grow automobiles, electronics and deformed babies, but my mother, the gardening expert, convinced me that I should start small. So tomatoes it is. Maybe if these turn out well, I can try growing a PS3. It can be done, I just need to figure it out. I'm sure my delicious tomatoes, which should be here in 60 days or so, will teach me where to start on my next agricultural project.

And here they are, with their cage to prevent escape. Little known fact: tomatoes are one of the most vicious and pathological predators of human beings since the death of Dracula in 1978. So a cage is a mandatory investment for the aspiring gardener that doesn't want his/her neck and face eaten off in his/her sleep. It's a lot like growing babies.

Here's Stewart, wishing he could join in on the gardening fun! Silly Stewart! Gardening is for people, not dogs!

This is my happening, and it freaks me out!

2007-05-02T14:47:00.000-07:00

Last night was the SVA open studios, which is a student run, student installed show in the studio space at the illustration and cartooning department in SVA. Seniors in both departments, with studios and without put up their work to be admired by the public and the school. The whole affair was a labor of love for all of us, necessitating a lot of organization, a few very late nights and some heavy drinking. Elizabeth Morahan deserves a great deal of credit for organizing the event, along with our SVA valedictorian Chari Pere and the rest of the installation, refreshment and clean up committees, which included (and I apologize to anyone I may leave out; completely uninentional and you're welcome to clean my clock because seriously, it's dirty) Hilary Florido, Mike Freiheit, Edmund Derrick, Timothy Miller, Thomas Pittilli, Johnathon Sperry, Ray Sell, Nick Dybalt, Greg Heddermann, Chris Duffy, Heather Sporing, Sung Mi Hong, Cecilia Granata and Our Beloved Chairman (meaning me). Also, I apologize if I spelled anyone's name wrong. This is the only picture where I'm not making a stupid face. Definitely rocking the bright red Hulk Hogan 'stache, though.

These are people checking out my studio space. Hey fella! Chick by the window! The pictures are on the wall! At least the woman in the foreground has the right idea! It is at this point that I will apologize, since I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I should have with as many people as I should have. It was a very well attended event, with my mother, father, my older sister Caitlin, her friend Channing, my friend Linsey Li from Shelton, with her friends Chrissy and Dan, Irene Gallo (award winning art director of Tor Books and a very cool, fun professional in the industry) and many, many more in attendance. It was really gratifying to see so many people at the show after we worked so hard on it.

Opposite me the entire year was the sublime Cecilia Granata's studio. It would have been nice if I actually saw her there once in a while, but the gasps of admiration from both students, tour groups and faculty that I was able to vicariously enjoy while sitting across the way, moping in my space was more than worth it....really. Just kidding, just kidding. Cecilia's going far, and it's more than a little humbling and inspiring to have shared a space with her over the year.

Speak of the devil! THE DEVIL!! Here is Cecilia herself in her studio, alongside the lovely Stephanie Ortega, who (along with Hilary and Tom Pitilli) endured the freshman year alongside me. Look at them tongues!

Behold! My patented "constipated Dungeon Master" face!

...

I shouldn't have said that.

Gee whiz! It's one of my comrades from the Cartooning department! Here we see Margo "Just take the fucking picture" Dabaie saluting all of our brave soldiers on the front...or something. Margo is another excellent member of the 2007 graduating class, with more than a few scholarship prizes and honors under her belt.

On the left, you can see some of Thomas Pitilli's work; he didn't want to be photographed in front of it.

Hilary "Mace in your face!" Florido stands proudly in her space in the cartooning studio. Another surviving member of my foundation year courses, Hilary is currently working on a great comic for First Second Publishing, is an honors recipient and is someone that you need to remember. We found a frozen salmon head together on the sidewalk Freshman year and it cemented a strong friendship. Godspeed, you, Salmon Head.

Here we see Phil Conigliaro and Thomas Pittilli reunited before the painting I did of their infamous prison experience. I can't begin to tell you how helpful it's been to have Phil, Tom, Cecilia and Nick (one of the cactus guys and a part of the "Yankee Bayonet" painting) around and willing to pose for embarrassing reference shots for me.

Here I am with Stephanie and Cecilia, having a final epiphany in the studio. I think this is where I figured out that maybe instead of making art, I should find a VW van, a few other plucky teenagers, a talking dog and drive around solving mysteries. My squid tie (which garnered more attention than my artwork, somehow) was a Christmas gift from my older sister, Caitlin.

Well, that's it for pictures. Time for me to brag about accomplishments (graduating with honors, fourth highest grade in my department, just about a 4.0 GPA for the last semester) and then get really sentimental for a minute.

I'm sure I've gone an a lot of diatribes about art school and what a zoo it is and things like that. And I meant it. And I do wish that maybe I had taken a few different courses, maybe gotten serious a little earlier than I did and things like that. But, honestly, for every douchebag, arrogant asshole and jerk that I've had to deal with here, I've met an honest, talented, fun and driven person. I've had a lot of great teachers that changed my life for the better and I've made friends that I will fight tooth and nail to keep. At first, I didn't feel much of anything about leaving here. But the last few days, it's been difficult to keep it together. It's so hard to face the fact that I won't be able to see such amazing people, such valued comrades on a daily basis like I wish I could. The last few days have been marked with a comaraderie that I've rarely experienced because I'm such a shy person (believe it or not) and there's nothing I can offer in response to that but my most earnest, sincere and genuine gratitude.

When I went back to the studio to collect my work today, I just couldn't understand what I was feeling. One little cubicle, three white walls and a window, where I worked harder than I ever had before, the place where I learned and created and socialized is gone from me now. And I'll never have it again. I hate being sentimental, and I try to avoid the mushy stuff whenever possible. But right now, I can't really help it.

I'm not giving the graduation speech at the ceremony (this distinction falls to Chari), but if I did, it would only consist of a quote from one of America's last great authors, Kurt Vonnegut. It's from "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater", in a baptismal speech the main character is planning for the neighbor's twins. And, like most Vonnegut quotes, it sums up the experience of being human in a way that is sad, angry, funny and sweet all at once: "There's only one rule that I know of, babies- God damn it, you've got to be kind."

My friends, I respect and cherish all of you and I wish you all the best this spherical rock full of neurotic, water-filled sacks of flesh can offer.

Now back to the normal, stupid Shelton Diagram Factory nonsense.

Scraping paint from our bones, unashamed.

2007-04-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

Hey, everybody. I wish I could have updated sooner, but I've been pretty tied up with school and finishing all of these paintings. The one above is based on the sketch from a previous entry. It's another Iron Council piece. I worked super hard on it, but I think I like the drawings better. I dunno. I did learn a lot about glazing with this one, which is valuable. I may go back into it and change the lighting on the guy in the middle, make the tools suck less and make the hand darker. I also think he needs more pistons and pipes running through his body to make him look more clearly Remade.

This is one of the two pieces I had to do for Yuko Shimizu's class. I wanted to do a super good job because I like her work a lot. Anyways, I'm revisiting an old idea from last summer, which I sent to Heather Sporing (http://heathersporing.blogspot.com, I believe) for the now defunct Shelton Diagram Factory Correspondence School, a program I tried to start last summer where every member would make art for each other and exchange them through the mail. It failed because I'm lazy and didn't want to manage it and because I didn't want to impose deadlines on people.

Anyways, back on topic: the painting. Yuko liked it after I did a ton of sketches, improving them with each stage. It still looks too happy, so I may glaze the cell even darker (and maybe even the figures) to make it more sad. I would like to thank Thomas Pitilli and Phil Conigliaro for being manly men secure in their heterosexuality enough to pose for this painting for me. On one of the SVA tours through the studio while I was working, some jerkoff kid was like,"That's so gay!"

What a smart, tolerant crop of prospective students SVA has coming. I swear, if their mom wasn't there to back them up, I would have fought them. I bet you aren't so tough without your Mom around, pal! I'll take you both on, just you wait!

The painting was inspired by "Chain Gang of Love" by the Raveonettes and a lyric from a Voxtrot song that went "I'd break the law once every week to feel your touch". I guess touching/dancing is starting to become kind of a motif for some of my work. Maybe.

This painting was also for Yuko's class. It's inspired by the Decemberists song "Yankee Bayonet (I will be home then)" which is a call and response song from a dead Confederate soldier to his pregnant wife/girlfriend back home. You can't see her face at all in this picture, because 1. it's small and 2. she's supposed to be far away. It's a good song and I highly recommend it. The Crane Wife isn't their best album, in my opinion (Picaresque has that distinction for me) but the first three songs on the album (Crane Wife 3, The Island (Come and See, the Landlord's Daughter, You'll not fear the drowing) and Yankee Bayonet) are some of their best.

Tuesday May 2nd, 6-9pm at 280 Second Avenue, New York NY on the seventh floor will be the SVA open studios for Illustration and Cartooning Seniors. Won't you join us? Free booze for as long as it holds out! You can see me all dolled up and drunk and affectionate before I graduate! And my work and my compatriots' work will be up in person for your viewing pleasure! WOW!

"Oh my love, though our bodies may be parted, though our skin may not touch skin. Look for me with the sun-bright sparrow, I will come on the breath of the wind."--The Decemberists, Yankee Bayonet (I will be home then).

Nerd Alert!

2007-04-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

So this and the images that follow are part of my overly ambitious ridiculous project to finish out art school. They're illustrations to go with China Mieville's homosexual Victorian communist revolutionary science fiction novel Iron Council. It's a great book, highly recommend it. This first thing was going to be the cover image. This is the result of a paint over by my friend Dan, who gave it a lot more mood and a tighter composition. I was going to paint it, but the color rough was awful and Sal was more excited by my other sketches, so I'm putting this one on hold until after I graduate.

So, in this scene, Judah the protagonist is riding one of his golems to escape the New Crobuzon militia. Someday I'll paint it, but I just can't now. Three weeks until the end of the semester. Too much to do.

I don't want to spoil too much of the plot of the novel, so I won't go into too many details. This is a strike scene for the Remade railway workers (in Mieville's setting, if you're convicted of a crime the authorities surgically and thaumaturgically rework your body with animal parts or steamwork pistons and things; those are the Remade, the lowest of the low on the social ladder). This is the sketch. I'm currently painting this one because I'm an idiot. Choosing the most complex and difficult piece to work on out of everything is my trademark, apparently. I refuse to realize my limitations.

This is a study of an Inchman, which is a mutant caterpillar person (communists and mutant caterpillars; this book was written for me).

Here is a sketch of an Inchman menacing a sleeping camper. The finish is below.

And here is the finish, in graphite pencil. Once again, Phil is being menaced in his sleep by something horrible. It's amazing the guy can sleep at night after what I put him through in my artwork.
If I explain this one, I seriously ruin a surprise in the story. But, anyways, this is the finish for this guy. It's too big for the scanners at school, so I had to put it back together in photoshop. It looks okay for the first time I've had to do this.

That's it for this particular installment. I have three finished paintings due by the end of the month, a paper, a presentation and twelve slides to shoot before I can graduate. Tick tick tick.

Snakes, Mosquitoes and Sexual Education

2007-02-15T20:09:00.000-08:00

Okay, so since it's been a while since my last update, I have a few new pieces to show off. The above was painted (oil, as just about all of my paintings are) for Jonathon Rosen's anatomical illustration class. The only parameter for the assignment was that we had to include anatomy of some sort; skeletal system, organs, etc. My original plan was to work up a few things about the situation in Darfur, since there are a lot of anatomies undergoing stress down there to say the least. I whittled it down to one piece, to ensure greater quality. This is about malaria, which is a big killer in a lot of impoverished countries. I think my favorite part of this is her juicy yellow brain.

Okay, this one requires some translation, I guess. When George W. Bush took office, he decided to set aside funding to allow Christian organizations to teach abstinance-only sex education in public schools. I kind of have a problem with this. Having been a troubled youth only a few short years ago, I feel that having been talked to thoroughly about the birds and the bees by our gym teacher in middle school and high school was a great help; I know about contraceptives, STDs, puberty, all of the things that I was being ushered into. It's my opinion that teaching young people to tie it in a knot and try not to think about it is a potentially damaging thing.

For one thing, while abstinence may be the only way to 100% prevent the spread of STDs and teen pregnancy, condoms do drastically reduce the odds of such occuring. But one has to know about condoms and other contraceptives in order to use such protection, and if teenagers aren't taught about it, odds are that they will not have safe sex. There are some that would say there is no such thing as "safe" sex, but from a purely objective point of view, the use of condoms can make it as safe as it's going to get. It's my opinion that withholding this information from young people is a very harmful decision in the long run. At around 15 and 16, teens are starting to come into positions in which they can make their own decisions; about college, school, work and most importantly their own bodies. Refusing to impart information that may mean the difference between a valuable life experience and a horrible, permanent mistake (meaning pregnancy, HIV and herpes) imposes ignorance upon a group of people when they are most vulnerable. Many of the kids that have had abstinence only sex ed have gone on to have unprotected sex, resulting in a rise in teen pregnancies and STDs.

I just think it's ridiculous that when irresponsible choices can lead to a death sentence (which is exactly what many people the world over, specifically thousands in Africa, are living with) there are people choosing not to share as much information as possible. For what reason would anyone refuse to educate teenagers about this? "Morality"? Obviously there are a lot of people that have forgotten what it means to be young and totally, like, missed the little thing called the "sexual revolution" a few decades ago where we all decided to try removing guilt from a basic expression of affection, and (hopefully) love. So I made this picture in the hopes of at least giving people a headache trying to figure it out. Yeah.

I had some more academic stuff (model paintings, value studies) but I decided against showing them because they're just further proof that I'm "the crazy color guy" or whatever. Someday I'll learn not to paint yellow people.

Let's Get Together!

2007-01-25T20:01:00.000-08:00

"Your Biggest Fan"- $350 in SQFT Gallery's upcoming group show in Nashville, TN. This painting wouldn't be possible without models Cecilia Granata and Phil Conigliaro and the input of such great teachers as Salvatore Catalano and Peter Fiore. I think the photo has a bit of a yellowish cast, due to the tungston bulbs that the slide photographing area at school uses and since I'm not able to figure out how to set my camera to tungsten for photography purposes. It was on this picture that I kind of figured out how to like painting again.

"Harvest"- $300 at the SQFT Gallery show Let's Get Together in Nashville, TN. This one's from my painting class with Sean Mellyn last year, but I punched in some more contrast for the show in Nashville. The psychadelic red in her dress really doesn't reproduce well; there's a bit more modelling in the original. Inspired by The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and Maoist propaganda posters.

Please, please, PLEASE if you can, check out http://www.sqftgallery.com for Kathleen and Aaron's excellent space in Nashville and links to the other (professional) artists' websites. I have to really thank them for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the show in a professional space, and thanks also falls to my older sister, Caitlin, who suggested me in the first place and remarked that I am,"...a great painter".

If you want to know the half-baked philosophy behind my work and a joke that isn't very funny, here's my artist's statement from the show.

"I’ve always been fascinated by the strange and blurry line between humor and
horror, and that is what I seek most to bring about in my work. I’ve realized recently that
I am made of media and the drive to consume, and this is something else I try to
examine. When the most common human interaction is through a computer screen and
much of our food is vacuum-sealed, artificially colored and preserved and often frozen,
what does that say about us as human beings and our connections to each other and
the world around us? More importantly; why is the supermarket always out of those
great frozen vegetarian barbecue ribs? "

Once again, that's www.sqftgallery.com . If you're in Nashville next Saturday, check it out!!!

Damn! Good! Times!

2007-01-09T20:35:00.000-08:00

This is the first stage for one of the pieces I'm going to send to Nashville, Tennessee for the SQFT Gallery group show that Kathleen and my sister Caitlin have been kind enough to invite me into. I'm also planning to send my baby tree and the painted version of Cecilia and the radio guy. I need to have them done soon, but I'm confident that I should be able to get all of them finished before the deadline in two weeks. The little girl on the right is actually my mother when she was little. I'm sure she's going to be completely thrilled that this is what I did with her picture. I'll post better pictures when I get finished with the next stage.

Holiday Hysteria!!!

2007-01-03T16:09:00.000-08:00

This update will be the Keegan family's holiday adventures in Shelton, Connecticut (birthplace of the Diagram Factory). Since I know nobody is interested in my family nonsense, I have chosen pictures that prominently feature the puppies that we had as guests. Above, Caitlin holds Ollie while visiting Aunt Dot at the Jewish Rest Home.

This is my twin sister Sian with Lilly, whom she is dogsitting for a friend at school. Not pictured: Lilly humping the crap out of my arm at Sian and Caitlin's apartment this past Monday when I dropped in for a visit. She didn't even buy me a drink first.
97 year old Great Aunt Dorothy makes a new friend for Christmas and proceeds to talk to it for a good fifteen minutes. We all sit in awkward amusement as we wonder whether she is joking or not.
My grandmother and Sian discuss Aunt Dot's senility. With bemused concern.

Aunt Dot meets Lilly. A powerful friendship is formed.

Bringing cheer to the elderly is exhausting, as Ollie discovers, so he relaxes in the loving embrace of my mother, who does not like having her picture taken when she doesn't have a puppy in her lap.

All Ollie, all the time.

The Keegan family Christmas tree, courtesy of our friends at the Jones Family Farms.

Caitlin, Sian and Ollie sort through their Christmas Eve goodies.

My father, innocently enjoying his Christmas gift whilst being exploited callously for my blogging profit.

Not pictured: Stewart, who had to play second fiddle for a few days while Ollie stayed over. We love you, Stewart, but you don't photograph well. The constant moving is a problem.

Also not pictured: myself, dolled up with the awesome squid tie that Caitlin got for me. I am also not pictured enjoying the following equally excellent gifts: money; brushes, tiny canvases and a notebook from Sian; books on Bruegel and Bosch, Dungeons and Dragons miniatures, a Dungeons and Dragons book (NERD!!!), clothing and a novel by Harry Stephen Keeler (The Ed Wood of 1940s mystery writers) from my parents and a lot of other great things.

Also not pictured: the awesome brunch at Kate's Joint here in the city that I attended with Phil, Meaghan, Stephanie and Rachael and the subsequent fun baking cookies, playing Resident Evil 4 and watching a movie at Cecilia and Meaghan's apartment. And the rest of the evening graciously hosted by my sisters, all while dolled up in my awesome squid tie.

I hope everyone else's holiday was as great as mine.

TV Casualty

2006-12-18T12:53:00.000-08:00

These are the original drawings that became a xeroxed minicomic as the final project in my Experiments in Narrative class. Since this is an experiment, I'm not even going to explain what I was trying to say with these. I'm just going to let them be completely incomprehensible. So there.

PUT THE LOTION IN THE BASKET!!

2006-12-03T21:50:00.000-08:00

This is a cover image that I painted to go with Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece "Slaughterhouse Five". It's one of my favorite books and if you haven't read it, I highly recommend reading it. One of the funniest and most compassionate novels ever written by a human being. I wanted to sum up the book with an image without giving too much away; the novel has autobiographical elements about the bombing of Dresden in World War Two, but seen through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a fictional character. Pilgrim is also a time traveller that is picked up and put into a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. But only for a microsecond by our time. Yes.

If I were to do the cover again, I could go in any number of different directions. I would have not put the main character's face on the cover, though. I needed him in there for my time travel element (the clock hands point to five and as the clock in changing, Billy becomes a different version of himself because he's a time traveller) but I think having him looking into the background so that we see his back would have been more intelligent, since he is this blank eyewitness character.

The text on the top will be "Kurt Vonnegut" and "Slaughterhouse" since the five is in the image. I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Another Caterpillar Baby picture, based on Jack and Jill. Archibald the Entimologist is the bird-man that is stabbing him with a huge needle. He is forever torn between a desire to eat the Caterpillar Baby and a desire to pin him in a display with his other bugs. Polly the Prosthetic Girl tumbles after him, helpless to intervene on his behalf.

The process for this piece involves a pencil and inkwash drawing on a toned piece of paper, then turped down oil paints on top for color, but thin so that the values show through. I think if I go back in to this with thicker paint in the lights and glazes in the darks to cool it down, I may be on to a new way of working. I'm striving to find a way to let the drawing do more of the work for me than the paint because the method I'm using (as seen in the Slaughterhouse Five cover) just isn't satisfying to me. Rather frustrating, in my opinion. This is a little more methodical and less scary for me.

This is a sketch for tomorrow's class with Sal. We had to do a 9" by 12" illustration to accompany the short story "The Model" by Bernard Malamud. When it's finished next week, I'll go into the big speech about what I'm trying to do because this is kind of incomprehensible even if you've read the story. Metaphors are sticky! Hurt my teeth!