Straight Banger 2

Straight Noise Banger 2:

Regression
Dog Lady
Jerk
Fragments
Hot Air Balloon Ride
Andrew Kirschner
Skin Graft
SL Makita
Pimlo
Pabst
Interstates Ect. Collab Project
Fascist Insect
Spykes
John Revolta

Now That's Class

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.

In The Cold

The struggle is uphill, always. The obstacles are many and imposing. The burdens, heavy. It never gets any easier and there's never a reprieve. Even at the pinnacle, you find yourself alone. But... you don't turn back. It never even occurred to you not to embark on this journey, this harsh path through the night. In the cold. By yourself. This is what must be done.

It starts with that one step. After that it's one foot in front of the other. You make your moves, take your time. Be careful. Pay attention. Behind you is the evidence that you're actually going somewhere. The footprints, bold scars on an otherwise pristine snowscape. A trail back to where you've come from. Where you've been. The story, incrementally told to no one... but you.

Going back to when I was just a pup, many years ago, I would draw an annual picture of Santa Claus for my father at Christmas. I didn't plan this, it just kind of happened. It was just something I did. I haven't done this in a long time. I've definitely drawn Santa Claus pieces over the past six years or so, painted them, printed them... but these were not specifically for him. They were for everyone. I've sent them to my best friends, and strangers. I've sold them. Lost them.

This piece, I drew for my father. This year, we spend this day together, out in the world for the first time in a long time. Together, we both travel this path. Alone. In The Cold.

Rooster Haus

January 7th, 2010: at Front Room Gallery, a show. Wooden Skin is three drummers doing a percussion trio. They do something unique every time so it's best not to miss them. Jordan Knecht, Matt Dill, and Charlie from St. Louis are awesome travelers making their way across the arctic Mid-West. Revelation Blitz is George V (Steve Dracula/Pimlo) and John Elliot (Emeralds/Outer Space), so that will be awesome.



I'm really pleased with how crazy this Rooster/House thing came out. Sometimes when I try and execute something like this, it looks like ...like I tried to hard to make it work. This just fell together. I dunno... it's a rooster... with a weird looking Victorian house puzzle growing out of it's back.



I was sternly told NOT to set this roosterhaus in a background off a destroyed city. This person was adamant that I do something more fantastic and weird. I think I already planned on not using my go-to setting of a bombed out looking skyline, but still... so, bubble tree and mystical city from a million miles away got drawn, hard.

I probably should have planned out the entire thing better. As it stands, I just drew the rooster really big and placed him on this small background. A lot got covered up, which I don't really mind.



I accidentally didn't save the final version as a psd with layers intact, so I can't do a breakdown of the colors. This is the stage right before I colored the foreground. It definitely gives you an idea of how bonkers the colors are getting over here. I have no idea what I'm doing half the time, but I like that.

Mystery of Two in February

The mighty Mystery of Two are doing a winter residency at Arts Collinwood in February. Should be interesting, with great local shows all month: Filmstrip on the 6th, The Buried Wires on the 13th, Freedom on the 20th, and Founding Fathers on the 27th. Brought to you by The Letter "F".



For some reason it took me a really long time to get this from sketch stage to final. Like, more than a week. I'm never that slow, but I just worked on this incrementally. I think choosing the colors for the text took me at least an hour. I went with making it look sooooo cooold. February can be pretty harsh here. I'm never entirely prepared for the harsh weather, but once we're in the thick of it I feel like it's just matter of fact. Sometimes I feel like it's a challenge, like I have to go out just because it's harder than when the weather is nice. Not that I mind staying in and just drawing. I've been working on some new comics. I've been really hyped on comics lately, and I'll hopefully be posting some soon. They're part of my 2010 plans, which... Big Fat Gritty THANKS to Mike Hawthorne for the love and kind words on his blog a couple weeks ago. I've known Mike a long time and hold him up there with the greats of comics, as well as one of the most honorable and bad-ass dudes I'll ever know. He and I are going to throw down, and get bonkers, with some sequential art over the next year and I'm super stoked about it.

Gritmas 2009

Things have been both kind of crazy and pretty chill lately. I've been meaning to post up a bunch of various things, but haven't found the moments for typing. My hands have been busy. Been making moves out in the world. Been baking cookies in The Cave. Been hyper about producing comics again for the first time in a while. Been layered up to combat the harsh skies. Been plotting out schemes for 2010 and beyond. I'll hopefully be posting up again really soon.

In the meantime, I want to mention how well Genghis Con went and give a shout out top all that exhibited and attended. I was really anxious about the day all the way up to and including the hours right before. It totally went off without a hitch and everybody had a blast. I haven't seen that many happy people all having as much fun in such a way in a long minute, and both Scott and I couldn't be more pleased. Big thanks to Cindy and The Beachland. Big Hard Cleveland Thanks to Andy MacDonald, who came from New York, and Abhay Khosla who froze his ass in from LA.

Merry Gritmas, friends. Make it a good one.

A Bachelor in Cleveland 2: Christmas Lights Boogaloo

The second in the series of "Cleveland Bachelor Show of The Month" posters for http://clevelandbachelor.blogspot.com. This time it's for the Beachland Christmas show, featuring Bears, Unsparing Sea, The Modern Electric, Shit Slicer, Mystery of Two, Terminal Lovers, and All Dinosaurs. Seven local bands filling both the Ballroom and The Tavern, not a bad way to spend the night before Christmas Eve.



This was drawn from a photo reference that I actually took, but am not posting because it's a pretty crappy photo. I like The Terminal Tower, though. How awesome would our lives be if the original plan for Goodyear to use the observation deck as a terminal for dirigible travel between Cleveland and New York City had actually been feasible and worked? "Pretty goddamn awesome." is the answer. Hey, it could still happen. Dirigible travel might be the next best thing.

I'm old enough to remember the Cleveland Skyline when the Terminal was the tallest building, and when the plans to build the BP Building included making it taller than the Terminal, it was kind of a big deal. I vaguely remember that Cleveland freaked out at the idea of something new surpassing something traditionally held as the standard. Didn't matter though, Key Tower went up 6 years later. Skyscrapers, what an awesome idea.



Our hero, this time drinking a milkshake from UDF, outside, in the cold. I'm a huge fan of the UDF milkshake. They're open until 1AM! My favorite is the chocolate peanut-butter, extra thick. I always go to the Lakewood one, and there's always something weird going on. Just those weirdos that are only ever hanging around in Lakewood, buying smokes or standing next to the payphone. Always an adventure. Sometimes I wonder how long it will be before I'm one of those weirdos.



I just drew the text by hand, I didn't lay it out first. I figured by now I kind of know what I'm doing with this stuff. I like using the banners on something like this, but then it took me forever to land on the colors I eventually ended up with. I tried a hundred different schemes.



This is what the snow layer looks like when I scan it. Black ink splattered on white paper. I used to just splatter white acrylic paint right on the art, but then coloring that and keeping the snow white would be impossible. So I've evolved to simplify.



It's the holidays, so the city lights up the Terminal with a red and green glow, it looks okay. I will say though, the lights in Public Square are pretty bonkers. I don't really remember if I even saw them last year or ...paid attention any other year, but this year I drove down Superior and my eyes got rocked. I'm a pretty grumpy dude, maybe, but I really love Christmas lights.



So, I drop the character in on top of the background, which, sometimes I don't do this. Sometimes I draw it all as one, but this time I kind of knew I wanted the white stroke around The Cleveland Bachelor. Also, I think I was still working on the text layout when I started drawing the art. So if I needed to re-size the character, it makes that a lot easier.



So, I take that piece of black ink splattered white paper, make it a layer over the background but under the character. Then inverse it so it's white on black, then just delete the black so all I have is white splatter on the art. I almost opted to not use this technique on this one because it obscures the background so much, but then when I ran a proof, it looked awesome. So, yeah, snow.

I'm really not looking forward to the snow this year. I mean, it's beautiful and it makes the warmth of being bundled up and cozy that much more warm and cozy, but goddamn. I hope me typing this doesn't call upon the winter demons to come forth and lay frozen waste to my city. I'd like at least a couple more weeks of sludge free wheeling.

The Mighty Macaroni Melt

Another month, another Sandwich Special at Melt Bar & Grilled!

THE MIGHTY MACARONI MELT

Creamy Macaroni and Cheese
Coated with Seasoned Breadcrumbs and Fried to a
Delicious Golden Brown
Nestled Between Even MORE Melted Cheese
and our Wonderful Fresh Baked Bread
Are You Kidding?!?


I don't have time to do a thorough "behind the scenes" write up on this poster, but let me just say that I've had this sandwich and that it truly is Mighty. Such an amazing invention. I took some out of town comics friends to Melt on Saturday after Genghis Con, and I think it almost killed them. I'll write about Genghis Con later, I think I might have a lot to say about it. It went really well though. Just incredibly well.

Speaking of Voting for Sandwiches, go to Melt's website, www.meltbarandgrilled.com, and vote for the special you want to see added to the menu. If you know what's good for you, you'll vote for The Godfather. I'm not saying anything bad will happen to you if you vote for something else, but you never know. Accidents can happen to anyone, at any time. I'm just sayin'.

Also, at the Melt Website, special limited edition 12 x 18 signed and numbered prints of my posters are available in the shop. Of course these make great gifts for your favorite Melt fan friend or family member!

That sandwich is so good. You can also just order the Fried Macaroni, as a side or what have you. It's amazing.