painting | sculpture | comics
Here are the pages for the first 18 pages of my new comic essay, Beyond Paper Walls. It’s 61 pages in all, and it is being printed with a grant from the Dept. of Cultural Affairs and Special Events of the City of Chicago. The hardback book will be released in 2016. (These samples still need final editing of the text.)
These are samples from the last 2 seasons of Cloud Arcadia that have been taken down from the web-comic page as Cloud Arcadia shifts to be hosted by a new digital comics publisher ComixToon.
Check out the Zine my students produced this summer at the @Collegeofdupage . The anthology contains the one-page comics they made by creating a story around 5 random words. They’re fantast-ink!
My Rotring Art Pen was the first cartridge drawing pen that I had, and my dad gave it to me in high school when he started teaching me how to pen and ink. It was perfect for learning control of line weight and always glided on the paper. When I finally got it out after far too many years sitting in an artbox, I found that the cartridges I had left were only half full (or half-empty?) and thanks to the evaporation the remaining ink was too think to flow. I decided rather than buying my own cartridges- I’d refill them myself. I got a pack of 6 vet syringes and was able to load the cartridges with Rapidograph Ultradraw, once I had cleaned them out. Now it’s fully functioning and ready for my sketchbook- but I think I need to experiment more with some hypodermic needle drawings.
One of the many art tools I have of my dad’s this Boston Model 18 electric pencil sharpener. It quit working at the start of the summer, so I dissected to see what the problem was. The plastic gear seemed to have lost some of its teeth, and as I looked for schematics so that I could draw the gear in Illustrator then cut it with a laser cutter- I found someone who was already tooling gears for just this purpose. It was pretty easy to install, and now it’s up and running again.
At this year’s CAKE (Chicago’s Alternative Comix Expo) I picked up lots of books, but the one that stayed with me the most was Joshua Cotter’s Skyscrapers of the Midwest. The black and white graphic novel follows the lives of a pair of brother cats growing up in the midwest and delicately plays out the transition from childhood to adulthood with seamless shifts between fantasy and reality that are at once touching and disturbing. There’s a loving nostalgia for the past evoked with each obsessively hatched and cross-hatched line, but also a dark current running beneath the shifting dreamscapes. I’m definitely looking forward to picking up his other books. Here’s his website: jwcotter.tumblr.com and an interview of his on the Comics Journal .
In the studio. A mini artist residency at home.
This weekend I will have a table in a tent with Third Coast Comics and other great Chicago Comics artists at Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago ( around the area of Dearborn Street, from Congress to Polk streets) on Saturday, June 7 from 10am thru 10pm, and June 8 from 10am thru 6pm. Come check out my newest Dragon and Goat comic: The S’Parktacular S’Particles: HERE. 
