This Moment

From the Sovereign Republic of Northern Ohio, it's This Moment in Black History! Playing a show in Austin Texas with locals Strong Silent Type, The Dead Space, The Gospel Truth, and Fingaar Bangaar which has easily the worst name of any band I've ever had to write on a flier or posters ever. I almost didn't even include it. I don't know if TMIBH is on tour or just playing this show or what. Red 7's good to me though, so, hell yeah Austin people (if there are any reading this), do it up.



My backgrounds are getting crustier and crustier... just letting go and making a mess that could be interpreted as a landscape... of some kind. I mean, the flags are obviously flags, and I was going for a billow of smoke coming out of, if that can be interpreted as downtown Cleveland, that federal court house by the Terminal Tower. I drew this using a pretty beat up watercolor brush on watercolor paper with some Speedball Super Black India Ink that I mixed with some Yasutomo Sumi ink and left the lid off of so it would thicken. It's pretty thick ink.



I used my own hand as a reference for this. Actually, I took a picture of my left hand, and flipped it, but then I didn't save the picture because I wasn't thinking. So, yeah, that's my hand, it's really that beat up and rough. The broken handcuff, it occurred to me not to do because it reminded me of this one poster that my old friend Jake Kelly made, which you can see here: JAKE'S POSTER. However, I didn't want to just have a naked arm, and I think a broken handcuff is a pretty awesome thing to have on your arm. So let's call it an homage to Jake's genius. By actually using the idea, I'm showing my appreciation.



I was slightly on autopilot when I made this poster, and I think that worked out for me. I'm pretty happy with the colors on this background. I like the new move of lightening and adding color to the black areas of the background that I normally would have left just black. It looks way better than I think I planned on that looking.

I saw a wolf on the highway at 2:30 in the morning last night, just walking across I-90 on the near west side. I think it was a wolf, it certainly looked like one. Pretty unusual. I mean, I suppose it could have been a stray dog on the loose, but it was really big and wolf-like. I thought maybe it was a coyote, but I've never heard of any that far east. He was completely alone, there weren't even any other cars on the road.



Here's the color art without the bands just to show it off a little I guess. I tried the move with the white stroke around the character in the foreground, in this case the raised fist pointing, but I didn't like it. It pops enough already and the line was weird because I didn't really clean up the edges of the drawing anyway.

There's so much more work coming down the line here, so if you don't normally check in, feel free to subscribe or follow this blog. I'm going to start some projects on here that may be somewhat interactive... also, feel free to leave comments. They're always appreciated. I don't think I've ever mentioned that on here before. I want to know what you think, if you want to tell me.