Cinematico

I'm DJing the Sunday Brunch at The Beachland Tavern on January 10th from 11am to 3pm. I'll be playing music from film scores, probably mostly from different spaghetti westerns and samurai films, with the occasional blaxploitation souljam thrown in. I love that shit. Here's the b/w work in progress:



I really like this piece. The first part of December was slower, and even though I was working a lot, it was all on non-paid personal stuff. I've been grinding on a couple comics, and then a couple pieces that I gave to people as gifts. Working on longer term projects is probably a good thing to do once in a while. I draw all the time, and sometimes ...while I'm doing it, I get a little freaked out by the fact that I actually know what I'm doing. I didn't come to The Monastery on Christmas, and it felt weird. Wrong, even. What the hell?



Here's the splattery stuff I scanned and dropped onto the art in the sky. It's fun to make this stuff, and I like the way it looks. It's just a mess of ink and some white out. It took me 3 minutes to make that. I wondered what it would be like to blow this up to some bigger size, so I made a 20 x 40 print of it last night when I was printing the posters and fliers. I think it came out awesome. Here's a crummy photo of it:



I will gladly sell this thing to anybody for pretty much any amount of money, or in trade for something dope (food is dopest). Get at me and we'll make a deal.

So, the origin of "Cinematico" is that I recently participated in a Mix CD exchange, where the CD I submitted was a 46 minute long jam of songs mostly from soundtracks and film scores. I often listen to instrumentals while I draw, especially in the planning/rough stage. I really love the way music can conjure stories, narratives, adventures, romance, doom. I love how simple beats can make me feel completely capable.

The requirement was to make multiple copies of the mix, and package them. I ate up the idea of the packaging and went slightly overboard.



I took these pieces of watercolor paper I had sitting around and cut them into a fold out design. I planned this out a little, but not nearly as well as I would have liked.



The majority of the music is from Spaghetti Westerns, Samurai films, and Blaxploitation movies. I decided to draw characters representative of those genres on one of each of the packages. So, the fourth is a wolf-form self portrait. I stuck one track on the CD that's not from a movie, a Black Pus jam that I added because I wish there was a movie it could possibly be from. It's a pretty bonkers track. So that's the genre the wolf design comes from. The genre of "Bonkers".



The package folds out and the illustration spans the width of it, there's more art on the inside too. It's widescreen, letterbox format. So much fun to draw. With any luck, I'll get four mix CDs from other participants back. There's also a track list/explanation sheet, in the industry they call those "liner notes", or so I've heard.

I've been to The Beachland's Brunch three weeks in a row now, and I gotta say- it's a really great way to spend a Sunday. One week I was there hanging out all afternoon. This past week, I went in, ate, and then came to work fulfilled for the entire day. The food's great, the drinks are great. Hopefully on the 10th, the music will be great.