Milky's Sketchblog

Horrible Things That I Do In My Apartment

2010-12-11T17:49:00.004-05:00

I fire off my cap gun while on wild Boylan soda binges. Total depravity.

I set up idols to Dagon in grimy kitchen nooks.

I also have an altar set up for some manner of disgusting bird god.

Worst of all, I don't watch my TV. How will I know what's going on in the world? How will I ever keep up with "Dancing With The Stars"?

And then I create unholy objects out of Play Doh...

Hunter College Work

2010-11-08T14:43:00.006-05:00

In the past 5 months, I've graduated with my Associates, moved to Manhattan, and continued on my education at Hunter College. I don't have access to a scanner or digital camera anymore, so recording my work digitally is a lot harder. Here are some scans and photos of my projects from my Advanced Drawing class.

Sonic the Hedgehog Collage

2010-05-27T12:06:00.003-04:00

This project was a photo collage, my choice. Well, I had some ideas like doing the slums of the Jetson's neighborhood, but things were really complicated and I didn't have a sketch yet, so I decided to work off a screen shot. That way, I didn't have to come up with the composition myself. Everything here is a photo except for the blue sky and water. The file was pretty big for one of my stuff (~200 mb). I guess all those sick days I took in 5th grade have paid off. Thank you, Sega.

Photoshop Book Cover

2010-05-27T11:47:00.004-04:00

I don't think Penguin would ever accept this, but I had a good time creating the Moloch collage monster.

The idea for this project was "New York City", and you can't get much more New York than the Beats. Not to mention, I'm feeling pretty beat myself.

Cat Got Your Tongue?

2010-05-23T14:32:00.005-04:00

These are 4 T-shirt concepts I created for my Adobe Illustrator class. We needed to illustrate an idiom, and I chose "cat got your tongue?", because it seemed like a good visual idea and I also seem to be good at drawing cute animals and severed limbs. It was my first time really drawing with Illustrator, and I liked how easy it was to reposition shapes or change colors. Even changing the thickness and shape of the linework was really easy, though I had less control over thick-thin transitions than with an actual pen.

PANEL Magazine layout: Final

2010-05-20T09:43:00.012-04:00

This was my class project for Publication Design. I did the layouts and covers in InDesign CS4, the logo in Illustrator CS4, and edited the cover images and some of the cartoon guys in Photoshop CS4. So you can see, you can consider Publication Design my college's gift to Adobe software.

My original concept for this project was a magazine focused on cartooning and comic books, targeted at young cartoonists such as myself. My professor encouraged me to broaden my audience by also discussing pop culture news, like the latest comic book movies and toys.

I did NOT create any of the content, including photos, drawings, and the article itself. The authors of their respective work reserve their rights to it. Also note that this is not a commercial publication, but a project for class.

Table o' Contents for my fake magazine

2010-05-11T09:35:00.003-04:00

Deviant Art Cover and Magazine Departments

2010-05-08T14:19:00.005-04:00

Some more from my Indesign class project. Still in progress.

For some reason the JPEG has the month and volume overlapping, but the Indesign file does not.

Photoshop ads

2010-05-06T14:17:00.001-04:00

These were for my Photoshop class. I had to use layer masks and clipping layers for these imaginary clients.

2 Banners that I painted back in 2007 and 2008

2010-04-25T18:52:00.004-04:00

This was outside the Staten Island armory on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing (Auguat 6, 2007). The banner was about 20 feet long, and created with paint and canvas that we had salvaged. It reads "Nukes Off the Table".

This was created in the spring of 2008, using the same paint and same roll of canvas. Boy are we thrifty. Our Food Not Bombs project lasted from Thanksgiving of 2007 until April of 2008, every Wednesday in front of Staten Island Borough Hall. We fed people for free with food we had salvaged, because me and my friends are very fond of salvaging things. Eventually we had to salvage our free time, because there were only 3 of us running the whole thing and it took a lot of work to maintain.

Magazine Popeye Issue

2010-04-23T13:08:00.005-04:00

This is the second issue of my Publication Design class project, a magazine on cartooning and comics. It's a feature on Popeye's "Thimble Theater" re-issues. Work still in progress. I did NOT create any of the content, including photos, drawings, and the article itself. The authors of their respective work reserve their rights to it. Also note that this is not a commercial publication, but a project for class.

Magazine JohnK Issue

2010-04-23T13:00:00.004-04:00

I'm designing 3 issues of a magazine for my Publication Design class. The magazine is about cartoons and comics. Here's an issue currently in progress, on John Kricfalusi. I did NOT create any of the content, including photos, drawings, and the article itself. The authors of their respective work reserve their rights to it. Also note that this is not a commercial publication, but a project for class.

Photoshop Exercises

2010-04-22T13:23:00.004-04:00

This is a collection of my Photoshop exercises. I did not get to choose these images, I just performed editing.

This was my second exercise, simply selecting and placing objects in photos and performing some color adjustments.

This was a class on manipulating text.

This was a class on text paths.

This was a photo collage that I had to assemble and adjust accordingly, using pre-chosen pieces.

Movie Poster, Monkey Notebook

2010-04-16T11:57:00.006-04:00

This is for Photoshop class. We had to design a movie poster that included a picture of ourselves. I had an old image that I had taken with a bad digital camera, that came out kind of noirish, so I used that. I wanted a film noir/50s psychological thriller kind of feel.

We had to do a product design for our Illustrator class pattern, so I did this up in Photoshop.

Finished Products

2010-03-29T09:51:00.002-04:00

I had to make a "Do Not Disturb" sign although I sleep in a double-ended room

2010-03-28T17:18:00.004-04:00

People can walk through any time. It's more of a hallway.

Witness my shoddy cutting skills. Edgy indeed, and I don't mean the bloody blade. I hope we have a fresh emery board somewhere, because the sand paper is pretty dull.

Monkeys and Robots

2010-03-28T09:49:00.001-04:00

Robots and Monkeys

Some work from school

2010-03-22T19:06:00.012-04:00

All of these are works in progress.

This was for Photoshop class. We had to collage together various scans of fabric to create a summer scene. The boy and the monkey are from an encyclopedia on the events of 1970, and I had to color them because they were originally in black and white. The rest were embroidery with various filters or color gradients applied to make them look more like a naturalistic scene.

This is for Intro. I guess severed limbs are becoming part of my style.

For Adobe Illustrator class, we had to make a building to demonstrate our knowledge of shapes, grouping, and color swatches. I created the double curve on the onion dome by layering two circles over the dome and turning them the same color as the sky, and the arched windows with more circles over rounded rectangles. The soda bottle is a stretched circle. The crescent moon is two circles, slightly displaced. The chain link fence is a group of rounded rectangles. The pennant string is a warped ellipse. I went crazy with the curves.

For Adobe Illustrator class we also have to design a pattern. This is one I did today, inspired by the "Monkey Vs. Robot" song. Oh crap, I just realized the video was made at Coney Island!

Last from class -- Alphabits

2010-02-20T00:08:00.003-05:00

There was this really annoying girl in my class. She was loud and complained about everything. One day she shouted at me when I had headphones on, wanting to use my scissors. Then she complained to her friends that she felt like she was in kindergarten. I was inspired to use crayons on this project because she annoyed me so much.

The professor wanted us to redesign the Alphabits cereal box using only type. It had to be fun and creative, too. Unfortunately, eating Alphabits for breakfast comes dangerously close to being in school when you're a little kid, so it ranks rather near raisin corn flakes on the fun-o-meter.

When you're young enough to be eating Alphabits, you don't KNOW any good curse words yet, and your mom would yell at you anyway if you tried to spell them out.

I racked my brain thinking up what I enjoyed about learning to write and read as a kid. I decided that the best part was that learning to write was like drawing. You got to scribble around and make cool shapes. I decided to make a crayon rubbing of the cut-out Alphabits letters, so that things were scribbly and childlike yet still legible. Later, I decided to superimpose the cut-out letters on the rubbing, to make the letters stand out more.

Originally, I had also diagonally glued a scrap of notebook paper with childlike penmanship on the whitespace, but my professor hated it. I thought it looked cool and dada, but he complained it made no sense in the design. I had added it to drive home the point that my design idea was about little kids learning to read and write.

Some more from class

2010-02-07T01:32:00.009-05:00

This is a collage for my first project, which was to create a figure out of characters. He is a Xerox dog. I like the bad-copy textures on the D, but my professor wanted me to blacken them for my portfolio.

This was for my second project, which was to design a sign for a Coney Island business. Have you been to Coney Island lately? The only rides left are the Big 3: the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, and the Parachute Drop. It is not very inspirational, to say the least. Before, it might have been run down, but now it feels completely gutted.

Looking at this drawing reminds me of how much I hate working in color. I have no knack for it. I had fun with the inking, though. I had to rush the building and the professor hated it.

This was my third project: redesigning the Ford logo. I haven't been keeping up with the news, but I'm pretty sure Ford is heading the same way as Coney Island...I tried to set that aside as I created this. I wanted to convey the ideas of grace and speed, which are things I like about riding in cars (to be honest, I hate cars and don't even have a license). Originally I had the single Garamound f with the road stripes substituting for the crossbar, but I decided that was too confusing, and added the little flash across the f to adequately express that the f was a letter and not just a weird curve. It also makes the logo less static, I think. I had to use the copier's negative function to create the black, because my markers weren't giving me an even color.

Chateu de Dada

2010-01-09T23:58:00.007-05:00

Welcome to the Chateau de Dada.

Here, have some of the house wine.

Grab a marker and recycle some art.

Or maybe you'd be more interested in a hands on approach?

Cats, like art, are quite useless.

This man doesn't know how ugly he is.

This woman is reenacting an old Japanese wood block print involving an octopus.

You can see video of some art recycling right here, at the Chateau de Dada, an event featuring collaborative collage, creative destruction, video viewing, John Cage on VHS, and delicious cheesecake.

Ink stuff

2010-01-08T10:13:00.002-05:00

I have to say, Blogger's NEW AND IMPROVED image upload manger is a piece of shit.

It's made creating this post an incredible pain in the ass, but for some reason I can't load up the old manager's web page.

I don't know why web designers like to destroy anything simple, quick, and straightforward, and replace it with clumsiness and complication. Were the masses really clamoring for a slower and more awkward way to upload images?

Anyway...I'm taking a class in Experimental Typography, which is exactly like Typography except I need the credits from the second class to graduate. That's pretty much the main difference: between graduating (HOORAY) and not graduating (damn).

Here are my inked works for my first project, which is to use type to illustrate a figure or object or subject or whatever. I inked them using my new fountain pen, which was a lot of fun but kind of tricky, since I'm still learning how to use it.

This is a goofy goat that I went a bit overboard in illustrating, because other people couldn't tell what the hell it was supposed to be. I thought using the E as a body and the g as a head was absolutely brilliant when I sketched out the concept, but execution made it hard to distinguish from a dog. Or a horse. Or a cow. Really, I didn't settle on it being a goat until I added the extra serif as an ear to the g.

This is the concept of a drink can illustrated two different ways. The can with a B as a pull tab was done first, but it seemed lonely, and I had finally figured out a way to draw a can using the letters of the word, with a bit of thought. The B can wasn't colored in to balance its thick letters against the other can's lighter typeface. B can's a mish mosh of typefaces, but CAN can(?)'s Futura, because I liked the geometric shapes of the letters. They seemed perfect for a cylinder, a circle, and a triangular punch hole.

This is a Franklin Gothic kangaroo. I came up with him after reading an article on Russian constructivism. I think his name is Olaf. It's too bad I can't ink his big A in red.

End of school special

2009-12-15T16:36:00.006-05:00

This was for an aborted typography project. Obama looks like he's swallowed a canary.

This is a sketch from last post, colored. It illustrates the idea of families being mostly cobbled together from dead body parts, string and tar.

This is another colored sketch, illustrating the idea that crows don't like to ride the bus, but Sniz from Nickelodeon's Kablam show is pretty much ok with it.

This is an idle sketch from illustration.

This man's fingers are melting due to his cigarette habit.

Sketches from Illustration

2009-11-25T20:56:00.005-05:00

These are some pen sketches I did in Illustration and Illustration Style.

And this, which is for 3 Cups of Tea, a book that reads like an early 20th Century adventure novel. It's about a guy who goes climbing in Afghanistan and winds up wanting to build schools for the poor people living there. I don't think this came out too awesome, though the girl looks like a cross between a purple ninja and a Medieval Virgin Mary.

Transgender Day of Remembrance & EcoFest

2009-11-10T13:45:00.006-05:00

I made this targeted at people who don't know about the holiday and who aren't really aware of any problem, so I kept it really simple. I didn't intend to make a dichotomy between being trans, and being gay or straight, and I hope it isn't read that way. Queer would have covered things nicely, but it is often taken as a slur and would have been confusing. I also know there are many shades of lavender between the binary of boy/girl, but how to put that across as quickly and easily as possible for people who don't? Nuanced yet simple? Very tricky.

This is for my college's annual environmental festival. This year's theme is to be food and a sustainable New York City. Those donuts were delicious, by the way.

The Jungle Book

2009-11-05T19:44:00.008-05:00

This was for my children's book project. I wonder if I made Mowgli look more African than Indian, though giving him dreads made sense to me. I mean, I don't think a kid raised by wolves would have silky straight hair. It would get frizzy and lock up in spots even if he were Chinese.

Some depictions of Mowgli are quite pale. There's a lot of variety in skin color with native Indians, but a pale, European-looking Mowgli is weird to me. I mean, one of the cool things about Mowgli is that he's an Indian boy, not a English dude like Tarzan. He's not foreign to the village near his jungle. And there are lots of children's stories about English kids, not so many about Indian ones.

I originally used red to denote shading on Mowgli's body, but then I decided it was better to use a 6B pencil. Pressing harder on a regular pencil gets you darker, but with a colored pencil it just makes the color more saturated, which doesn't work well for shading. In fact, I went back over Mowgli and added yellow and pale brown (same as the tree) to his skin, after the intial round of red and 6B, to correct my problem with saturated shadows.

The second problem I had with Mowgli is that I inked him after coloring him, and it looked bad. I thickened his outline, then selectively thickened the lines within his body along more raised forms, like his cheeks. I still think his eyes need work.

I used black ink for Bagheera to distinguish his black fur from Mowgli's dark hair and pencil shadows. I think that was a good choice, because otherwise there would be too little contrast.

The two layers of jungle are cyan with green over it, and yellow with green over it. I didn't have access to much variety of green pencil, so I had to mix it on the paper.

Urban Animal Alphabet

2009-11-04T14:12:00.008-05:00

I had to design an alphabet for my typography class. I had many ideas, such as a hair alphabet, and a face alphabet, but the professor liked my drawings of animals.

There are a lot of alphabets based on animals, but I tried to base mine not on exotic jungle beasts or zoo animals or farm animals or anything like that, but on the pets and pests we have in New York City. Originally, I used a human as my Z, but my professor insisted I keep my alphabet "consistent".

Sometimes it was tempting to get a bit uncommon, with bats or red-tailed hawks or owls, but I restrained myself. The least urban animals I included were a chipmunk for C and a pet ferret for N. I regret not saving a spot for a roach, but they're not very evocative of any particular letter shape. It was hard enough coming up with a different animal for each letter (though I did include 3 dogs).

The animals are, in order: Rat, pigeon, chipmunk, possum, hornet, dragonfly, squirrel, raccoon, millipede, grasshopper, mantis, mouse, spider, ferret, earthworm, moth, bulldog, house fly, cat, tern, centipede, chihuahua, ant, two-winged thingy, Asian long horned beetle, and spaniel.

Inking this was a bit tricky, because the figures are so small. I usually use a two-tipped marker to do everything, but this time I needed to switch to a micron for the finest details. I used the finer point of my marker for outlines and thickened my micron line for features within each figure's body that could use it, like mouths or tails. I was inspired by the original guy who did Spy Vs. Spy, who I heard created varying line widths using nothing more than an unvarying technical pen.

This is a Xerox of the original, which I have to mount on matte board tomorrow.

I hate Christmas

2009-10-17T00:19:00.006-04:00

However, I've been assigned a Christmas card project in 2 separate classes. Joy to the world!

This was the third version I painted of this damn scene. I had to make the colors very saturated so it could copy well, but I don't think it made for a good picture.

This is for Quark. I'd like the photo's colors to be flattened down to black, white, and blue, but I've been having trouble getting it right.

Major Fair Poster

2009-10-12T22:54:00.002-04:00

More school stuff

2009-10-09T23:01:00.006-04:00

This is a detail I scanned from my Brooklyn Book Fest Poster. I'd hve to digitally stitch the whole poster together because the scanning bed is too small.

My Typography prof wanted me to use this scribbly frog design for my latest project. The frog is a P that turns into an R when he sticks out his tongue and eats a bug.

This got completely screwed up when I accidentally got red paint on it, and tried to remove it.

This is the finished witch. I think I don't like the black marker strokes. Maybe next time, I can brush on the black with poster paint or ink.

Progress

2009-10-02T21:02:00.006-04:00

This is an incompletely colored drawing I did of a witch. I'm thinking of doing some Halloween cards to sell at Everything Goes Book Cafe.

This is a copy of the inking job I did on my Illustration project. It's the same project I was discussing in my recent post on inking. It is currently fully colored, but the copy machine didn't do such a good job of preserving those colors, so I'll be taking a photo of it soon. Unfortunately, scanning it isn't an option yet.

This is quite ancient. Remember when I entered the major fair poster contest and placed second, and was going to take a photo of my fully colored poster? Well, I never got around to it until just now. But that OTHER poster I was just talking about, you know...that'll be TOTALLY different!

Here's a sketch for my next Illustration Style project: a poster for my college's EcoFestival. New York has an annual City of Water day that promotes green initiatives in the city. There are actually kayak launches all around NYC. A boathouse in Manhattan even provides free boats and training. I went to a session once or twice, but I just wound up arguing with my friend a lot and drinking too much afterward.

This is a...version...of my Computer Art ad. I say "version" because I actually did half the design on a copy machine, instead of using Quark. It's really frustrating to me that I only have 4 hours of class time to work with the program. Computer lab hours are going to increase soon, though, so I'll have my pick of time slots.

Here is a bad photo of my completed watch design project. Notice how the flash is artistically reflecting off the glass!

These are some sketches I did for my latest Typography project. We have to transform one letter into another, and tell a story with it. Here I am, transforming a Bookman typeface-inspired P into an R, by making the letters into a stylized frog. I used Bookman because I had a sheet handy showing all the letters and numbers in that typeface. It's the same one I used for my Brooklyn Book Fest poster, and some of the watch designs.

Where I've been for the past 2 weeks

2009-09-25T13:33:00.013-04:00

Bacon in a Bottle logo design.

These two are for my Computer Art class. We're learning how to use QuarkXpress 8. I've never even used a Mac before, so it's pretty confusing, but I've done print work and know how to use other image manipulation programs, so it's not THAT bad. Right now, my main nemesis is Bezier curves, cuz I want to do some bacon fat white and yellow stripes under the logo text, like the Coca Cola logo.

These are for my Typography class. My professor wants "practical" yet "nontraditional" watch face designs, which drives me kind of crazy, because it seems like she likes my designs better when I just scribble a jumble of numbers together. She would probably disagree with this and say she prefers asymmetry and sophisticated compositions. I missed class one day because I was working the primary elections, so I'm out to sea on what she expects. I just started playing with the numbers for these two and crossed my fingers that she likes them.

Speaking of which, these are some subway studies from Primary Day. I wasn't interested in being very realistic. I just wanted to copy down as many little details as I could.

These three are from my first day of Illustration. We had to wander around campus and sketch interesting compositions. My professor didn't like my compositions very much and said she'd prefer more cropping and asymmetry. I actually think one of my faults is that I often don't include the whole figure in the frame, so I've been working against that to make my pictures clearer. But I agree the mongoose picture could benefit from tight cropping on the two opponents' faces. We actually DO have a stuffed mongoose and cobra on campus, right next to my old Art History classroom.

Right now we have to design a poster for the Brooklyn Book Festival. This is my sketch for it.

These are studies for my poster. The last one includes a sketch I did of Housing Works when I went to see Dr. Frank at his book release show for Andromeda Klein. MC Chris was there, too, and was awesome. There were also a bunch of other folks, including a pretty good band that played 2nd. I never caught their name but they rocked.

Finally, this is the latest version of my first Illustration Style project. We had to paste our images on to the article. My professor recommended I add gray to the background. She liked the grassy texture I used for the gray. I think I should have grayed in the foreground, too, but oh well. It's turned in.

Inking and line

2009-09-24T00:49:00.003-04:00

I've been working on a poster for my Illustration class, for the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2010. I unfortunately don't have a scan to post, but I want to write a little about inking and line.

I don't really have a settled method for inking, but I do know that having everything look stiff in the final makes me crazy, so for this poster I tried to get all the real drawing done in the inking. I did a really rough sketch just so I would know where everything was, then went over the general shapes at a lightbox and used the original rough sketch for guidance.

In inking, I did the foreground characters first with a thin marker point. I wanted them to be attention getting, much moreso than the background. Tonight I went over the lines I already inked, selectively thickening them and adding detail, on the theory that it would make them stand out more and be more interesting to look at.

Then I went over the background, using a thin, unvarying line.

I originally thought it would be better in general to have a bright foreground over a greyish background...I think it comes from my days reading MAD, where very often the backgrounds were a gray ink wash. However, after poring over old cartoon stills and Frank, I think I'm much better off with dark foreground figures on light background. They pop out more. They don't even have to be black, though areas of black are really attention-grabbing, especially if they surround white areas like mouth or eyes or hands.

Illustration Style homework

2009-09-11T22:14:00.003-04:00

Professor asked us to illustrate an article from the NY Times about the criminalization of poverty. Cities and counties are increasingly cracking down on the homeless and imposing tough fines that disproportionally burden the poor, partly to fill the coffers during these "tough economic times". What strikes me in particular about this issue is that the law is tying people down to being poor, creating obstacles to a better life and being sternly self-righteous about it to boot. The original article has a very stark illustration of a shopping cart with prison bars, but I consider my strength to be more in cartooning than in creating really designy, symbolic images.

The border around the cartoon is quite sloppy, and I worry that the greys on the poor vet blur together and make him hard to make out clearly. However, I'm happy how the policeman came out. The line work and the background especially owe something to my studies of Frank.

Preston Blair studies

2009-09-09T08:53:00.007-04:00

Preston Blair was an animator at Disney and MGM. Among other things, he worked on Fantasia, doing parts of the Sorceror's Apprentice and the hippo ballet.

He also wrote a series of animation books. They're a how-to on drawing cartoon characters. Over the past few days I've been working on some exercises from his 1rst book, which was published long ago but is available online at the Animation Archives: Preston Blair's Animation First Edition.

I also did some tracings of panels from The Portable Frank to study how they work and absorb the ideas into my brain. My aim is to draw funny animal characters as skillfully as the cartoonists I admired growing up.

This line of study has been inspired by JohnK's Cartoon College.

The pages I've been studying:

Construction of the Head

More Construction of the Head

St. George Sketches

2009-09-05T22:29:00.001-04:00

Some creepy Don Knotts guy.

2009-09-01T11:24:00.003-04:00

Ghost World is a "graphic novel" by Daniel Clowes, which was made into a movie in 1999. One of the most striking things about the book is that all of the panels use a cyan wash for shading, as if the characters are perpetually sitting in front of a TV set in a darkened room. Or maybe you're the one in front of the TV, watching the characters...both the book and movie have a patient, voyeuristic tone.

The graphic novel has the guy above as a psychic who hangs out in a suburban cafe Enid Coleslaw, one of the main characters, frequents. She calls him "some creepy Don Knotts guy". In the movie, Steve Buscemi (who kind of looks like Don Knotts) is cast as Enid's middle aged buddy.

Various Stuffs, Mostly Bad

2009-08-30T04:46:00.010-04:00

My last life drawing class ended in May. I'm actually not required to take any more drawing credits to get a degree in graphic design/illustration! Isn't that incredible? I understand that designers aren't draftsmen, but you'd think a basic art skill such as drawing....perhaps THE basic art skill...would be considered very important to design, even in this day and age.

All of my design projects have required lots of drawing. It isn't really fair to students who are weaker or less experienced in drawing that this is so. Nobody insists that they practice at home. Art classes don't have the drill-style homework science and math courses do, and, in fact, I've had teachers complain about me working on projects at home. There's this big disconnect between the reality of being an art student (requiring constant practice, study, and observation on your own hours to get the good grades), and how things go in class (4 hours a week of art in a class of 10 to 20 with techniques taught more by print outs than one-on-one instruction).

Don't get me wrong...I think having to please a professor and work within their limits has helped me push myself and get better. But the art instruction I've encountered seems to rely too heavily on the student being knowledgeable already. When you take math in the lower grades, you're made to do hundreds of calculation drills...and then, when you have to solve your first equation, you're prepared. Primary school teachers make you do spelling and grammar drills so that when you write something original, you don't look like a total doofus. It seems to me that teaching art should be no different. Before a teacher asks you to design or illustrate anything original, you should have had the practice under your belt. Homework: fill a sketchbook page with hands drawn in various positions, cubes in perspective from many different angles, gesture drawings of your family and friends...that sort of thing.

I don't have that sort of intensive practice, and I feel worse off for it. But I do doodle a lot and keep extensive notes. Also, this sketchblog helps to organize my progress chronologically: I can go through it and see how I've improved, what my mistakes have been, what works, and what doesn't.

Skill is a tool. If you are not skilled, it is hard to make something good. Even if you ARE skilled, it's hard, but at least you have the tools handy. Schools should give you the basic skills you need to be good, before asking you to be original and then grading you on your skills or lack thereof.

These are some doodles and sketches from the past 3 weeks, as I've ramped up my drawing in anticipation of the September school term.

These dinos were for another GameFAQs request topic. I tried to find some funny shapes for the bodies and heads. Dino anatomy is bizarre to us modern mammals.

Birds are just dinosaurs highly adapted to flight, and their anatomy fascinates me too. A Kentucky fried chicken doesn't look much like a bird anymore. Figuring out how your meat once articulated into a living, moving animal can be very puzzling if you're not familiar with how the animal is put together.

This page is from a minor league baseball game I attended. I tried to sketch without looking at the paper, but the players were just in constant motion, shifting around, swinging, looking around, etc. Most of my sketches were pretty bad.

This is a self portrait I did in my attic. The lighting was tricky for me. I don't know whether I should lighten or darken the face.

This was just some fucking around, trying to silently express a story...with a dumb goth thing on top.

An idea I had in my head, not composed at all.

I obviously am not well versed in drawing architecture.

My room mate is fun to draw because she's very pretty, and pretty goofy.

These were also for a request topic...trying to draw girls with guns without making the girls stereotypically sexy types. One kind of looks like Pippi. One kind of looks like Peewee from I.C.U., this Brooklyn band. One kind of looks like Doug Funnee...

A goofy animal drawing, trying out appealing shapes for an elephant. Teeth are funny.

Screaming Yellow Something

2009-08-05T10:34:00.003-04:00

This guy needs a Xanax.

I think the background should be cooler...

I used a yellow watercolor pen for the body, then went over it with a green pencil for shading. I like the effect.

More cards

2009-08-01T07:57:00.003-04:00

You can buy my cards here: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=7773105

You know...if you want.

GameFAQs requests, cooperation-style

2009-07-29T05:38:00.005-04:00

I sometimes take drawing requests on GameFAQs.com if I'm feeling bored and want a challenge (you can see some others if you click the "GameFAQs" label on the sidebar). This time around, I decided to take the first 4 requests and chunk them into a single image. It's easier than coming up with 4 separate images, because in that case, you need to create a context for each one, and it can get kind of overwhelming if you're impatient like me.

So far I've done 5 rounds of drawings. They're often quite sloppy because I was trying to get them down as quickly as possible.

Round 5, a wooper fighting a bear over a shot gun, and that guy from The Offspring eating pretzels, fighting a giant pineapple monster with a ribbon sword, while underwater...Requests from geeoe, the moonlight knight, Cosmic, and da_gee_man:

Round 4 was me eating hands in the middle of a Zerg rush with a pear tree in a partridge. Ideas from Chimpy 4 (it was a slow hour) and HyperRyun:

Round 3 was a hamster riding a penguin while smoking a cigar that fires lasers that turn into flapjacks, with the Spy from Team Fortress 2 disguised as a penguin about to backstab the hamster. Requests from Valkskorn, twinkie daddy, DR583V3, and Lloyd1992:

Round 2 involved a giant catgirl (meganeko HAHAHA) wielding a giant frying pan and a jetpack, a raptor on rollerskates with a flamethrower, a macaroni cheesecake eating a slurpee with a fork, and the user LastExile...yeah. See. Ideas from Lastexile0, the moonlight knight, KageShinobi, and Googloplex.

Round 1 featured a dinosaur, the Heavy from TF2, and the Tank from L4D on a barbecue grill, with the dinosaur firing lasers and the Heavy attacking the Tank, and they're all talking on headsets. Thanks to RE4penguin, pizzaman95, Lifeless, and bigtwo.

Chicken

2009-07-27T02:07:00.002-04:00

Felix monsters

2009-07-23T19:29:00.003-04:00

This sketch is based on a dream I had a year or so ago. These horrible, cat-eyed aliens were eating people and trying to collect genetic samples for a human farm.

Pikadeth

2009-07-23T02:20:00.004-04:00

Game Boy ad

2009-07-13T03:52:00.007-04:00

July 31st marks the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy's North American release.

The Game Boy was designed by Gunpei Yokoi, the same guy who created the NES Zapper, the Game & Watch, the directional pad, Metroid...and, um, the Virtual Boy, which was somewhat less successful and led to him leaving Nintendo 2 years before his death in a hit and run.

Gunpei had been with Nintendo since the 1960s, back when they were a dying playing card company. He moved up from maintaining the assembly lines to becoming one of Nintendo's principle idea men, when he came up with an idea for an extendo-grip toy called the Ultra Hand. It was a big hit. Nintendo went on to focus on children's toys, and later, electronics.

He followed a philosophy of using mature technologies in innovative ways, in order to keep costs low and products less buggy. He called it "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technologies". The Game Boy's green screen wasn't cutting edge even in 1989, but it allowed it to run on 4 AA batteries for many hours at a time. Competing game systems like the Lynx and Game Gear couldn't touch it.

Summer school projects

2009-07-09T17:21:00.013-04:00

I'm taking a graphic design course over the summer. Right now we're on our third project, redesigning an ad. You can see the ad I'm using over here: [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Game Boy is Twenty.

The inked board with all 3 concepts.

Our second project was the "black and white problem". We had to design shapes in silhouette to express images or ideas. These are my sketches.

This is the final.

This is my first attempt at the black square problem our teacher assigned to us as our first project. I gave it another shot, but that copy is currently being graded. The images represent, left to right (first row) order, increase, playfulness and (second row) congestion, instability, and floating.

Begz0r cat

2009-07-09T17:13:00.007-04:00

We have a cat.

He's always begging for food even though he's enormously fat. His name is Chomsky, but Pikadeth christened him Begz0r cat.

End of School Special

2009-07-09T16:59:00.006-04:00

Some scribblings from my notebook.

These guys were for an idea I had for a game. The stoner would have special Earth majick powers. The pierced guy would have fire/knife fight majix.

This was an idea for my dinosaur collage. Ancient Greeks plus ancient animals. Ancient gods and legendary animals like the sphinx (man head on lion body) already make no sense, so a dinosaur head on a breasted human body makes even less sense and is even better.

This was an early sketch for my major fair poster.

This was my take on my housemate Pippi's "scary butterfly" cloth book.

Coney Island

2009-07-05T16:38:00.017-04:00

I went to Coney Island yesterday. I figured it would be a good place to take pictures. I went to the Mermaid Parade in 2008, and there was lots of great, folky art around. And the parks are going to be knocked down for condos very soon.

I missed the hotdog eating contest, but I did see lots of interesting things. As a matter of fact, there was so much to see, hear, do, taste, and smell, it was a little overwhelming.

2009 Staten Island Gay Pride

2009-06-06T18:35:00.004-04:00

Day de Dada Dollar Dalliance

2009-06-06T18:27:00.005-04:00

Toothbrushes and Leeks

2009-05-31T15:35:00.001-04:00

The Return of the Revenge of GameFAQs Requests

2009-05-24T13:57:00.008-04:00

For Koffinine

For W0Wfr3ak

For Zophness

For The_VG_Guy

For Mumplefink

For Kieran and Mumplefink

For Rojo Scrolls

For Jen2

For Emerald Hammer

Exhibited

2009-05-24T11:47:00.006-04:00

Top left. That's Pippi!

Fishy Car Purple Door Jesus Christ

2009-05-24T11:38:00.004-04:00

Collage and Ironside

2009-05-21T10:50:00.004-04:00

Cacophony at Snug Harbor

2009-05-16T03:43:00.008-04:00

Cacophony...what the hell? See, this was a performance/protest at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, so-called focal point of the arts on Staten Island. The site has become gutted of most of its "culture" (such as it is on Staten Island). Yet they have this big-ass party every year called the Neptune Ball, to congratulate their donors. So these arty types from Sicolab decided to protest outside by making lots of noise and playing instruments and making art. Hence Cacophony. Coverage here.

Conte Crayon Day

2009-05-09T19:06:00.003-04:00

More Staten Island street art

2009-05-07T10:57:00.007-04:00

More stuff from class

2009-05-07T04:43:00.007-04:00

So the bunny picture from April is finished. Trees are scary!

I'm so used to drawing in cramped notebook margins, I have to remind myself not to crop things unnecessarily. Like the top of this guy's head. I like to draw ear whorls accurately when I'm sketching from life. They're not particularly important to establish a likeness, but everybody's is different.

Our drawing classes have thrown us into the deep end with nude models. I had a hard time with her. I couldn't seem to get everything down within her 15 minute poses, and then she'd shift a little for the next round.

The naked guy was somewhat easier. I walked into class late, but I basically had this drawing done by the end of my first 15 minute session. Once again, I cropped out the figure unnecessarily.

I don't think this is as good as the first, but the pose is leaning less and he has some feet.

Design I Assignments

2009-04-24T10:05:00.006-04:00

This was my first project for Design I. We had to use stipling, which I despise, so I picked a high contrast image with lots of black and white. It was traced from a photo in Natural History, a magazine I loved to read as a child. Stephen Jay Gould wrote monthly essays for 'em. The original had 2 more birds in the middle, which I removed for clarification.

This was my second project, based on a sketch I did of my housemate, Pippi. The assignment was "line". My teacher insisted I do the contour drawing, although I had second thoughts about it and wanted to work on the below project instead.

This is still in progress. The trees are from a photo I took of Battery Park; the rabbit is from Teniel's illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I had wanted to do this one instead of the contour drawing because I like creating textures and shading with line, and also the Pippi drawing just seemed too easy and simple.

Murals of Port Richmond

2009-04-19T12:58:00.009-04:00

Port Richmond is a neighborhood on Staten Island. It is on the west side, facing New Jersey. It's one of the older places on the island, and was once an important center of activity on the Island. Then the Verrazano bridge got built and it kind of died.

Nowadays, a large number of Mexican immigrants have moved in and are revitalizing the neighborhood by opening shops and restaurants. There's even a chapter of Make the Road by Walking out here. There are lots of old industrial buildings scattered around, so it kind of reminds me of Bushwick, Brooklyn. It has a similar abandoned vibe to it.

Many of the buildings in Port Richmond have murals on them. They're pretty different from what you'll see on the rest of the Island, where if a piece gets let alone at all, it's usually something patriotic. Here, there's a lot more variety, and in a rather concentrated area. These were mostly taken along a 10 block stretch of road.

Then there's this tag on a dumpster, which I just think is pretty funny considering our borough's proud history of being New York City's personal landfill.

Pictures of things you might have seen 2 months ago if I had posted them

2009-04-16T23:18:00.006-04:00

These turkeys are outside the South Beach Psychiatric Center. I think it's mean to keep incongruous wildlife on the grounds of a mental hospital. If you saw a turkey anywhere else in New York City, you'd swear you were hallucinating.

Nice fence, dude.

Dunkin Donuts throws out garbage bags full of perfectly edible food every night. Here is the evidence. Delis, bakeries, and supermarkets do this too. Then there's the store near the ferry that had to dust off the price tag on the product I brought up to the counter...

Pictures of things you might see in New York City (Is Winter Over Yet?? - Edition)

2009-04-16T22:51:00.011-04:00

This is the Whitehall ferry slip. It is on the very very southernmost tip of Manhattan. I like the weathered wood along the slip. The Brooklyn Bridge is...ok, I guess.

He is on a wall west of the Callen-Lorde medical building. Callen-Lorde provides medical services to the LGBT community, particularly to those with HIV or whom are transgender.

Battery Park can look pastoral if you crop things right.

This proud tree stands in a muddy field that is much less beautiful than depicted.

A self porttrait of dubious repute and also a skeleton drawn too lightly

2009-04-04T23:42:00.005-04:00

Our drawing teacher is a Brit who emphasizes getting correct proportions on your paper using a ruler and L-bars. It has been very helpful to my drawing from life. Using the L-bars as a window helps me ignore the subject as a figure, and think of it more as shapes and shadows in space. In class, I mark my paper into halves or thirds along both axises, and use these rough blocks to transfer what I see to paper. I usually start from the bottom left, then switch to the extreme right or top of the figure before I get too caught up in details. This forces me to keep the proportions throughout the figure right, because if I screw up in one area, the pencil in the other areas won't look right at all.

For the skeleton, I first roughed in the general position of the limbs, then went back over it more carefully. Often, I had the angles correct, but the length and shape wrong. I also often had to go back and make the bones blockier at the tops and curvier along the shafts. Sometimes I had a hard time making sense of what I was seeing, like with the rib cage and the bones of the feet and hands. I did those last, and would have filled them in better if I had more time. I spent about two hours just working on the legs.

This one was improved drastically by shading, despite my preference for line. I had a very hard time figuring how to handle my glasses. Not in the drawing...on my face. I pulled the mirror up real close and took them off for half the drawing, then finished the contour lines and shading with them back on.

Major

2009-04-01T20:03:00.004-04:00

My college is holding a poster contest to promote one major or another. My original idea was some shitty watercolor concept involving fishies. I bought illustration board, I took out a book from the library on painting, I practiced, I did a wash, I sketched in the elements I wanted, I colored it in with pencil over the paint...and I hated it so much I started completely over.

Look, I don't like to paint. I like drawing cartoons. So I decided that the best concept would use the fact that that I can draw in ink halfway decently. It would also have to be something I cared about. Not fishies. I mean, I like a nice lemony tuna or salmon, but mostly I don't give a shit.

I made the original sketch for this in art history class. Then I did an extremely rough, light sketch directly on the paper I was using, shaped it up a little, and inked it, without transferring it or doing any more preliminary work than the notebook drawing. I've been reading John K's blog, and I am impressed by how he preserves spontaneity in his final drawings. He does construct his characters, and very carefully, but they never come out looking stiff. I also kept in mind his theories of how to draw facial features and expressions as I inked.

I attempted to give some idea of hierarchy by using Sharpies of varying width, but I think I could have done a better job on this. The monkey's hands should have been done entirely with a smaller marker.

I tried digitally coloring it, but it didn't work well at all. The colored pencils I used instead were surprisingly good. I'll take a picture of it later.

Another Lesson and a Rant

2009-03-27T12:00:00.005-04:00

My Journey to Manhattan and the Scary Birdmen I Encountered There

2009-03-20T22:36:00.002-04:00

Odds and Ends

2009-03-19T19:00:00.003-04:00

My Adventures with Mr. Scarrimoncci

2009-03-18T13:27:00.016-04:00

This is what I did to the Massive Creature collage packet.

I really did wake up late for class today. I decided to work on the packet so the day would not be a total waste. I have been super meticulous working on my design project, which is simple black and white, no drawing, only geometric shapes. This is...the total opposite.

My housemate has created several small homemade books out of fabric, and I used to create comics, collages, and zines when I was little, out of composition notebook paper. I also had in mind my MSPaint comix (being deliberately primitive) and my cut-up project. Finally, I had read Art Out of Time some months ago, and my favorite comic out of the bunch was Jack Mendelsohn's "A Visit to the Circus", from his Sunday comic, Jacky's Diary.

The covers are Entenmann's cake boxes.

Lessons

2009-03-15T21:26:00.001-04:00

Some Photos

2009-03-13T13:47:00.008-04:00

Scribbles (moreso)

2009-03-12T23:58:00.003-04:00

For the school paper

2009-03-06T14:18:00.006-05:00

Inked.

Pencils.

Rough.

Idea.

Idea.

Original sketch.

Massive Creatures Project

2009-02-23T17:02:00.009-05:00

I went to the Really Really Free Market yesterday. It's a monthly event (3rd Sunday of each month) in Manhattan (Judson Memorial Church, 55 South Washington Square) where you can pick up really really free stuff, eat some really really free food, get a really really free haircut, etc. While there, amongst other things, I picked up a collage packet from this art collective in Bushwick. They were also running the free tarot readings.

Anyway, they are encouraging people to use the packets to create art and mail it back to them for a roof top showing. There were many different packets, but I chose the one with the creepy monkey.

Back:

Front:

Scenic Bayonne, New Jersey

2009-02-16T23:24:00.007-05:00

I was goofing off yesterday and decided to test the flash on the camera by taking a night shot of the Bayonne Bridge. It came out jet black, naturally.

But I really liked the little pin points of light in the picture and decided to fool around with it a little more.

We got a nice camera

2009-02-04T12:47:00.006-05:00

Which means that my pictures of my projects will no longer be grainy and blurry (lighting may still be dodgy). Hooray!

These are some happy crochet critters made by my housemate.

This is a cool dragon trophy created by Steve from Every Thing Goes.

This is a sketch I made of a chalk mural I was planning for the crappy plaster on my wall.

This is the actual mural.

From Richard Avedon's "In The American West"

2009-01-22T09:10:00.009-05:00

Yesterday I took out some art books as references to draw from. It's hard finding somebody sitting still long enough to draw them. On my way over to the 42nd street library, I did a sketch of a sleeping girl on the ferry:

However, the weather's so cold that I don't want to go out unless I need to. This limits my choice of models to...my roommates.

So I took out two books on Richard Avedon. He's a photographer, and you're always warned not to work from photographs. But his photos are very detailed, black and white, and printed big. My thinking was they'd be very suitable for drawing from.

I also took out a copy of Disney's Pinnochio on VHS. Don't tell anybody, but nostalgia only goes so far...the backgrounds are beautiful, but who watches a movie for the backgrounds? The characters are very, very dull.

This is from a photo of Debbie McClendon, a 16 year old carnival worker. My first attempt was a little too doe-eyed.

This was my second attempt at the same photo:

Ever more requests

2009-01-21T09:45:00.008-05:00

These are some more drawings I made for the "good" *ahem* "people" um of GameFAQs. These were pencil sketches built up from basic shapes, clothed/furred, and inked. I think the last time I bothered to go through so much trouble was for my Howling Black comic, still unfinished. However, I've gotten a lot faster at it.

I enrolled in CUNY for art courses this March. I'm really excited about it!

DR583V3 wanted a giant pitbull fighting a roided up badger.

User Cosmic requested "A turtle dressed up in a cliche'd detective's outfit."

Humanizing Design

2009-01-16T19:57:00.008-05:00

This isn't actually by me, I just found it pretty funny.

This was the front page of the Home section of the Staten Island Advance yesterday.

The article is about how home appliances are being designed in a more user friendly manner. However, the cold, angular kitchen they used to illustrate "Humanizing Design" almost looks like an editorial cartoon. There's absolutely nothing cozy or human about it! Even the typeface on the headline is cold and angular. Wonderful irony there.

A teddy bear being chased through a field by Conan O'Brian while flaming pieces of toast fly overhead.

2009-01-15T22:40:00.005-05:00

As requested by KiddotheKid, on GameFAQs

Even more GameFAQs Requests

2009-01-14T16:57:00.012-05:00

My drawing request topic on GameFAQs.com got some more posts from the kids and weirdos over there.

Applepieman3 suggested I draw "a woman with large breast lifting weights, but the weights aren't normal weights, they are large pieces of ham."

DrFail asked me to draw him, but I have no idea what he looks like, so I drew JD from "Scrubs" instead. He doesn't have a beard because I hate the beard he has this season and I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist.

Punisher1 held true to the Internet's unsavory reputation and asked for a naked Smurfette.

SecuROM_ asked for some "anime-style" characters.

I don't really hate anime...that much.

A bunch of other people asked for stuff, but I decided to be lazy and ignore them. Maybe I'll get to them later.

EDIT: Friend and MrZopo both wanted me to draw them, and they got what-for. MrZopo in particular is proof that I occasionally watch anime, since I drew him based off of my weak remembering of Mr.Popo (how did he EVER get past the censors?) from DragonBall Z.

More GameFAQs Requests

2009-01-14T04:45:00.009-05:00

My topic on GameFAQs.com continued with more requests from the hordes of geeks and teenage boys who populate the site.

ExRacerJames wanted a sad hotdog caught between a very angry mustard and ketchup.

Porobin Hood wanted a "hyena-dude built like a linebacker staring down a hedgehog girl with a look like 'you're food :3'". I think he MIGHT be a furry, but then again he didn't specify that the hedgehog girl be slutty and naughty.

Fenrir the Wolf was a wiseass and wanted me to draw fried milk...but I delivered.

Notes

2009-01-14T02:42:00.003-05:00

These are some sketches and notes from my real life. I went to a meeting for SICOLAB, which is a Staten Island arts collective made up of people who are mostly 100x better than me and have grants and exhibits and shows.

GameFAQs requests

2009-01-14T02:03:00.011-05:00

I made a topic on GameFAQs.com asking the geeks there to make drawing requests.

Jesustime (yes, Jesustime) wanted sword-chucks.

Desert_fox7 wanted a drawing of himself...only naked. I don't know what he looks like, but Internet people seem to like their naked foxes slutty and naughty, so I went with it.

KageShinobi suggested "ninja lesbians breastfeeding", which sounded great but was too high concept. I mean, ninjas pretty much wear slim-fit burkas, so how can you tell that they're lesbians or see their breasts anyway?

Finally, Vampire HunterC127 wanted the Pope shaking a cow's hand, or hoof, or appendage.

Crocheting from Life

2009-01-11T23:18:00.008-05:00

This is also Pippi. She is crocheting a critter. I drew her face using the "don't look at the paper" method, and it worked. Then I tried to draw her hands and the wrinkles on her fleece using the "obsess over every detail" method, and it didn't work so well.

Some practice for the top drawing. I like hands, and trying to draw them while she was crocheting was a challenge. I exaggerated too much. Wrinkles are worse, but I think I did ok and am even surprised by how well I captured the form of her leg underneath the clothing. You can see an earlier drawing I did of the wrinkles in pants here.

As you can see, I did the first drawing on the back of the second. I once showed a teacher from Snug Harbor my sketchbook, and she told me not to draw on the backs of pages in case I want to display a drawing by itself. Well, I listened to her for a while, but then I decided I never display my drawings like that, I just scan them. But it looks like it's still a good idea, since the paper in this book is so thin, having drawings on both pages doesn't scan well.

Pippi and Poster

2009-01-11T03:31:00.010-05:00

This guy's name is Avi, I think. He is sitting in an alley, but I am too lazy to draw in the brick wall. I did a lot of underdrawing and erasing for this one. First I sketched out some ideas of him sitting in a box, looking up at the poster. Then I decided it was too hard, and decided on a triangular shape for his sitting position, with his nose pointing at the poster to get your eye to follow. This guy's face is hard to draw because his bushy eyebrows tend to get mixed up into his messy hair. I need to remind myself that people tend to have foreheads.

This is Pippi. She probably looks nothing like this.

More doofs

2009-01-07T19:20:00.006-05:00

HA HA HA

Practice.

I don't know why I drew him wearing Converse All Stars. I hate Converse All Stars. All the cool kiddies wear them as some sort of statement, even though they're expensive, kind of ugly, and made out of canvas that frays and gets soaked when the weather is bad.

They're just easy to draw, I guess.

The Derivative Mr. Doof

2009-01-06T19:10:00.004-05:00

Bored during the census test

2009-01-05T17:55:00.004-05:00

This was drawn on the back of a list of locations for math finals, which I ripped off a bulletin board before the test began.

Howling Black in color

2008-12-27T22:05:00.001-05:00

New Sketchbook

2008-12-24T16:40:00.005-05:00

The itty bitty sticker in the corner is the logo for Heritage of Pride, the organization that plans the Gay Pride march every year in Manhattan. The design is, of course, by Keith Haring.

Nerdykes

2008-12-22T00:59:00.003-05:00

Arm

2008-12-11T18:51:00.003-05:00

Tarzan With Scissors 1

2008-10-29T02:10:00.003-04:00

Tarzan With Scissors: Work in Progress

2008-10-25T03:36:00.010-04:00

The cut-up is a literary technique popularized by the Beat writer William S. Burroughs. You take some text, cut it apart, then rearrange the words into a new text. While I initially found Nova Express, one of Burroughs' cut-up novels, hard to read, once I got into it, it was gripping.

I'm fascinated by the chaos factor in these rearrangements, and the idea of physically touching and fitting together a text appeals to me; Burroughs has been often been misquoted as claiming "Writing is fifty years behind painting". In an interview posted at http://www.gorgeaway.blogspot.com/ he clarified: "I did not write that. Mr Brion Gysin who is both painter and writer wrote 'writing is fifty years behind painting.' Why this gap? Because the painter can touch and handle his medium and the writer cannot". The most enjoyable and interesting part of painting, for me, was always the physicality of it...getting the color on your fingers, changing textures to represent fur or a leaf. That's why, when I came up with the admittedly silly idea of doing a Tarzan cut-up (combining Edgar Rice Burroughs with William S.), I knew I needed the physical pulp novels to do it.

Spam mailers use cut-ups all the time, taking public domain texts and running them through randomizers to beat email filters. But doing so for this project would be beside the point. It would be extremely trivial and downright boring to do. Cutting apart the text of these books was a pleasurable experience, and allowed me time to think about how I wanted things to look in the end. I toyed early on with adding Running with Scissors, by yet another Burroughs (Augusten X.) to the mix, and the universe gave me the A-OK. I found a copy on sale in the West Village upon taking a wrong turn while looking for a subway station.

My Tarzan cut-up project includes the first chapter of the first three Tarzan books: Tarzan of the Apes,The Return of Tarzan, and Beasts of Tarzan, as well as the first chapter of Running with Scissors. Additional text includes title and copyright pages of these 4 books. The text of these books was cut apart in various ways, including line-by-line, single words or phrases, and paragraph chunks cut in half. They're currently being glued onto 5 sheets of typing paper I glued together, end to end, to form a single sheet of paper approximately 50 inches long. I intend to make the text into a wall hanging.

Running with Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs

The "title page".

Howling Black

2008-10-16T18:13:00.004-04:00

This was supposed to be the title panel of a comic I was working on.

Cut Up Project: Tarzan by Burroughs

2008-10-14T15:40:00.003-04:00

The Tarot card.

The books I destroyed.

The Tarot: little bits of paper, chosen at random, used to divine the future.
The cut-up: little bits of paper, chosen at random, used to divine the future...at least according to William S. Burroughs.
Me, I rather like the visual pun.

Flyering @ the Ferry for the Lighthouse Museum

2008-09-29T12:24:00.005-04:00

Beer Bear's Friends

2008-08-15T14:25:00.002-04:00