Friday, November 13, 2015

How is being an artist like playing basketball?


Ten years ago can feel like a lifetime past and then it can suddenly feel like the day before yesterday without any warning. Ten years ago today was Cheryl Weaver's last day on this planet, a fact that everyone who knew her will recognize as pitifully unfair. She was remarkable and beloved in too many ways to count. I've said plenty in other places about all that. For today I will just put down some images and pictures of her own. So, below are pages from a little book she made the year we met, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She made copies of this book to give to each of the students on our floor of the SAIC artist's studios on the 15th floor of the Michigan building (more of her work can be seen here, here and especially here). Some of these people are lifelong friends now, all these years later, but others are long gone from my life. If one of these faces is familiar to you, pass this post along, they'll surely remember the book, I think. And if you knew Cheryl yourself take a second to raise a glass sometime this weekend, and spare a moment to remember a remarkable woman. Her time was way too short, but it was also very well spent. She's not forgotten.
















Friday, November 6, 2015

~•O=O•~

Conceptual drawings for an animation project that hasn't entirely left the ground:



































And these are a few drawings from Autoptic meetings earlier this year (and one of a colleague at MCAD, Kindra Murphy, from a meeting there last Spring): Zak Sally, Jenny King, Raighne Hogan (twice, in various stages of beard growth), Robert Algeo, Justin Skarhus and Jordan Shively. Somehow I never got around to drawing Caitlin or Tom. Next time.




Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Titles are useless: Interview at the Comics Beat

Q: So why is poetry useless?
A: [laughs] I don’t know if it is useless. The title says that, but I don’t know if we should trust titles to come to conclusions about actual things in the world.

An interview I did with Alex Deuben at Comics Beat just went up, here.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Also: check out those crazy storm-trooper boots Jason Lee was repping

I can't remember what made me think of this, but when I did I had to go looking. And lo and behold Thrasher has an archive of, apparently, every page of every mag they ever printed. Which means they have a jpeg of this spread from their April 1989 issue, when I was 15, in which my recipe for Gingerbread half-pipes was printed (re-written by Chef Boy-Am_I-Hungry) Merry Christmas.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Victorian Picture Book Illustration

I was in Portland a couple weeks ago and found this beautiful little book at Powell's. It reproduces a number of entire books by several authors/illustrators, and despite having been printed in 1983 the printing and the colors are crisp, bright and gorgeous. The illustrations below are by Walter Crane, Richard Doyle and Eleanor Vere Boyle.