HOORAY! I sort of finished something!

"Now, when the day goes to sleep and the full moon looks
The night is so black that the darkness cooks
Dont you come creepin around - makin me do things I dont want to"

Peter Green - The Green Manalishi

Money money

OK, so heres a topic to discuss. How do people here who self publish, get the cash to do it. blood, 2nd morgages, grants, paper routes? cough up the secrets if you gots em.

A is for Arf!

Here's one of a handful of letters I did for Craig Yoe's newest Arf, Comic Arf. With these as inspiration I'm going to do a full demonic alphabet with a variety of odd monsters tormenting people from A through Z.

Pickled Punks

Greetings folks! As always, outstanding work here!! Anyhows, I just realized I hadn't posted here in awhile. It was suggested earlier that I post some pics of my 3-D work, so here's a couple photos of some of my pickled punk sculptures. These are all under 10," not including the jars, and are made from air dry and polymer clays and painted with acrylic.

some sketchbook crappo

more older drawings

"Self Portrait with Cat and Nubs" - late 90's?

Lid Gussels

sodaplay

Just stumbled across this amazing site where there's different critters to play with....
check it out!
http://sodaplay.com/

Also thanks to all the Duckers who've sent stuff for the VV book, all the work's in now and we're busy putting it together.

Volke Splande

This is a tshirt design I've done for The Wire magazine. The design's called 'Volke Splande' if anybody's innerested it's available from here:

http://www.thewire.co.uk/shop/items/446/

Dawuvn

Hey people, killer stuff lately.

Check out my dear friends Mujercitas Terror's Myspace page, Rock From the South End of Nowhere!

Something(s) old

I had a four-panel strip that was no good. Drew it. Hated it.:

PANEL ONE -
Doctor is unwrapping patient's bandaged hands.

DOCTOR: Unfortunately we did have to amputate. We were, however, able to find a donor in time for a transplant. A Mr. Paul Lee Riley.

PATIENT: (Shocked) PAUL LEE RILEY!?!?

PANEL TWO -

Close up of patient's face.

PATIENT: Isn't he the infamous river-side strangler? You gave me the hands of a killer!!!

PANEL THREE -

Doctor is still removing bandages.

DOCTOR: Oh, no, no, no. Not to worry...

PANEL FOUR -

Medium shot of patient with "hands" unwrapped. Patient is disgusted.

DOCTOR: ...he only dontated his kidneys.

Anyway, here's a drawing of Muddy Waters from about 5 years ago and some 10-year-old drawings. Meh.

Who What Now

I've been really caught up in my Beasts! Book 2 stuff lately but will soon be returning to a series of small paintings that I almost finished last fall. I've taken a lot of inspiration from miniature paintings from the 14th - 15th centuries and plan on exploring some additional small painted compositions, possibly on wood. And I have another series of larger paintings I've been thinking about for awhile of demon/devil faces on black backgrounds. I have some really awesome devil masks that I've made from bent wire which I'll be adding materials onto and covering in some lacquer like stuff and painting. The goal is to have a few of those finished to sell around this fall for Halloween. And I have my fill of digital visions and bits of Hob Bob stuff here and there that fill into the cracks. I'll be posting some paintings in the next week or so.

Also, I've been listening to a lot of music off of www.lovefingers.org The mixes on there are always amazing. If you're making some art, throw this on http://www.lovefingers.org/mp3/snow.mp3 The INXS Mediate/drum beat mix halfway through is especially good.

Eaten By Ducks Zine

Okay, so i'm going to throw together an EATEN BY DUCKS ZINE. I'm debating about whether it should have a theme or not. But the above image is the cover, done in my new "SINCLAIR ZX SPECTRUM" style. There will be a color back cover, & color inside front & back, so let me know if you want to do one of those. It'll be standard half-size, so final work should be black & white, bit mapped, 300 DPI tiff fitting to 8"x5", whatever page orientation you want. Deadline, soon.

Quickies

I did these very quickly with a bamboo stick and a Japanese brush. Maybe it's the beautiful spring weather, but I have been having a hard time working on long-term projects. Just the idea of working on something for so long drives me insane. Anyway there's some pieces coming up that, when finished, should be pretty cool-or maybe not.

No Graven Image

Thanks for the comments on my last post everyone. Since Sean and Chris brought it up again, I think I need to clarify a little why I'm not doing the pychedelic/abstract approach with my Cthulhu portraits. In this instance I'm not so much interested in illustrating what Lovecraft tries to convey in his stories. I've written elsewhere on this blog(*), and here I completely agree with you, that I see a great problem with finding imagery for the cosmic existential horror that is at the core of HPL's vision, exactly because it is meant to be indescribable. Portraying it only limits its scope and makes it something familiar. Kind of like there's a prohibition for likenesses of god in most monotheisms. I'm not saying it hasn't been done successfully btw; Aerons photoshop monstrosities are but one example.
But I'm taking the opposite route, starting with Lovecraft's description of a statuette -

A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings [...] It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence...

- and playing around with what the creature which is portrayed here, might look like. It may sound paradoxical, but the series as a whole is basically a comment on how none of the portraits actually can come close to the "real" thing. The series started off when I was playing around with an idea for a comic featuring Cthulhu (as a person, not a nameless horror) and made several sketches of him. The first ones were more or less the stereotypical images you find all over pop culture, so I tried to come up with as many anatomical permutations as possible. Of course, some of them are closer to the description and some of them are fairly different, but you could imagine humans making a statue of something they can't describe more "anthropoid", simply because they're humans themselves, misinterpret antennae as wings and so on.
I'm thinking of making a little book out of the whole series at some point, maybe silkscreen with an additional color or something.


* as far as I remember as a comment to Luke's post about Clark Ashton Smith, which I can't seem to find - was it deleted for some reason?

Grafitti on Non-Euclidean Walls

Cthulhu sketches:













I've added some more finished Cthulhus to the Human Mollusk blog. Here's one I did several months ago and didn't like back then. Perhaps I thought it looked too much like a medieval demon instead of a Great Old One. Looking at it now I don't think it's all that bad, but I'm still not sure it if I should include it in the series.

What's it all about?

Ok. Sean and I were talking yesterday and I got to thinking. I am a part of the Art Dorks Collective which has kind of pittered out. The site began as an open forum and portfolio site for anyone who liked the drawing. The collective formed and later decided that the galleries were not going to take us seriously due to some of the commenters on the forum so it became a closed thing. Then it all just died a bit.
So here we are at the apex of a new blog. do we want this to be a little inbred thing where we all stroke each others egos or do we want real discourse about art, comics and images. Art is not just pretty pics. It has meaning, even if we don't know what they mean. It has context and relevance to the culture and time we are living. I really want there to be some tough discussions about what we do. This might mean we talk about things some might not know anything about or that we criticize our work for its content, execution or relevance. This is what makes it tough. Egos get bruised, intellects get stretched out of shape. But isn't that just great?
So here it is, the big question for all of you.

What do you want this to be?

Are you willing to let it grow into something challenging or do you want to play it safe? Whaddaya say kids? Ready to play with the big kids toys?

Spore Horder

-A few examples of what I've been up to lately. More like glorified sketches than anything else. Feel like the dam busted over the last couple of weeks, and I have that feeling again about drawing.No preparation, no figures, really, just draw.
I haven't quite cracked the code with this stuff though.It comes to you as you lay down to sleep after staying up way too late drawing- 'Oh, shit, that's exactly what I shoulda done...'


Listening:

Ocrilim
Catacombs..In the Depths of R'lyeh
Krohm
Portal


Reading:

Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker
MInd Control, World Control, Jim Keith
I Am Alive And You Are Dead- bio of Philip K. Dick
Everlasting Man, G.K Chesterton


-Stay tuned for super-secret-special post in the coming weeks..

Deep Beast

Deconstructing Murphy

Here's a preview of my Voida Voida contribution. In the Zine the images will be "colored" in greyscales though.


Avid followers of my internet exploits might notice that it's kind of a follow-up to my contribution to the first TCJ narrative corpse. For all you not-so-avid followers out there, here are some links to the corpse pages in question:
page 1
page 2
cover