Unicorn Tea Party

of selecting the light that gives the most grace to faces

So, last weekend I got to drag out my watercolors and make something! I got to spend almost three days with all my crap scattered over the dining room table, and do basically nothing but work out experiments. It was pretty nice! Life is good like that these days and I get to spend almost all of my time working hard on drawing and painting, and thinking about drawing and painting!  This is pretty much exactly how I like my life to be so I must have made a correct choice at a crossroads at some point, somewhere. 

You guys, I have decided I’m going to start up a new webcomic, (you may have seen me mention Cherry Spaceship before?) because I really miss the fun of doing comics. It’s in my blood and won’t come out.  HOWEVER, for this time I have to write it myself, and writing is a pain in the ass. BUT in this case it is necessary to persevere, so I’m making myself write sentences every day, and things are coming together. It is going to be a long form webcomic like Busted Wonder was, online on my own site. (I refuse to give up my independence, I accept any hardship that comes along with that decision.) Cherry Spaceship is a story about finite biological organisms living in an infinite universe. There will be robots, spaceships, and fights.  It will be up soon-ish. This year. I will try to remember how time on earth works and plan accordingly.

In the mean time, I decided to start up a tumblr:  http://www.penciltool.tumblr.com

If you are on tumblr, please follow me so I can follow you back. I don’t think I’m going to re-post the art I make for there here, so you may want to grab the rss at the top. (I will re-post it on flickr, if you follow me there then you are good).

HERE I will continue to post things that I make that are not done with the pencil tool in photoshop, including more writing.  I still haven’t told you about my wedding, and I have a thing I want to write about Naruto. I apologise about the legarthy that has been living here since I got married, but I have been angry about the fact that in the united states of america in the year 2010, the gays are not allowed to marry each other, so on the best day of my life I have to feel vaguely like shit because I can enjoy a civil right that my friends can’t? F-ed UP, PEOPLE OF EARTH!  EFFED UP.  But I’ll keep that for later, thanks as always for your kind attention and support, & let’s all keep moving forward in a positive direction!

All this was very loose guessing, and I don’t pretend it was ingenious or scientific. I wasn’t any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I have always fancied I had a kind of instinct about questions like this. I don’t know if I can explain myself, but I used to use my brains as far as they went, and after they came to a blank wall I guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty right.

– John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

In Salvador Dali’s “Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”, he mentions that painters should not live in a land filled with green. If you are going to have green let it be the peaceful silver green of olives and myrtles, as the screaming oxygen vomiting chlorophillic greens that surround us here in western pennsylvainia will suck the painters will right out of you.  Also flowers, also the sea. Painters are delicate and thier eye is fragile. Too much breaks things, so have a care what you turn your eye to, painters!  Dali, savior of painting, talks through his moustache at us, you are meant to paint, not drown, so don’t drown it in it!

Late July is my favorite time of year for flowers, the tail end of daisys, the full glory of the orange day lilies, and the queen anne’s lace just starting to wake up alongside the less common, but prettiest when it happens cornflower blue flower that pops up on the edges of the queen anne’s lace. The corn is high and vibrates that green screaming noise over the rolling hillsides, and most days are sunny and blue and full of fat fluffy clouds.  I spend my time motoring around in my tiny silver car, drowning with a smile.

Life has not always been as good as it is now, and sometimes it feels like, never mind the green and the flowers,  I’d be fine drowning just in how greatful I am.

My grandfather passed away last month. My grandfather and I had been sadly estranged for the past couple of years, because of the evil curse my family labors under, but the last thing he ever gave me was a golden book of Dali paintings. It sits by the treadmill in the basement, as I like to put it up on the magazine rack and stare at Columbus Discovering America as I sweat out my three miles. It feels good, and I’m greatful.

My sister put on a world class bridal shower for me this past weekend, followed by a night of epic partying with our ridiculously awesome friends. In little over two months I get to marry my best friend, and it’s all starting to feel like the countdown to christmas.

This week I get to wait out on amazing news of a dear friend of mine possibly being prego, and there is a new issue of Phonogram out.  (buy it!) You may notice my name in there, as this is the issue my backup Indie Dave short runs. It vibrates weird in my head like an inside out mirror, but there it is. From the first time I read something of Kieron’s writing and he called all the trees sluts, I knew we would be jolly friends. Without him I never would have made it over here to this land where everything I see is wonderful all the time, and I will never forget the lessons I learned fighting by his side in the comics trenches. Long live Comics and Dali and green growing things that scream!

Every word has to be carefully chosen.

You remember my last entry when I mentioned the spaceship comic? It has a logo now! It will be a few months before it starts up properly, sorry, but in the mean time I’ll post bits as they become postable.  Yesterday I wrote the first chapter, and I have to tell you… it’s awesome.

Fake Palindromes

PHONOGRAM 2: THE SINGLES CLUB #4 (of 7)
written by KIERON GILLEN
art by JAMIE McKELVIE, DAVID LAFUENTE and CHARITY LARRISON
cover by JAMIE McKELVIE

They’re the Single Club’s DJ ogres: Seth Bingo and the Silent Girl. But do sensitive hearts beat within shallow breasts? Hell, no. Join us for a story of sarcasm, extreme sarcasm and solipsistic snobbishness. Remember: they’re laughing at you. You may as well laugh at them. PLUS two back-up stories showcasing the dazzling art of DAVID LAFUENTE (Patsy Walker: Hellcat) and CHARITY LARRISON (Busted Wonder).

March 18 • 32 pages • FC • $3.50

The way things are going, this is probably about as close as my artwork is ever going to make it to a comic book store.  I’m pretty psyched, because I mean look, if you are only going to get to be one somewhere, this seems like the best somewhere to be.  It’s where I’d pick anyway, so I’m glad it worked out!

This is my favorite review of issue one.

You better kick ass tomorrow night or else

Here is a 5 page preview of Phonogram 2 – The Singles Club by Kieron Gillen and Jamie Mckelvie. Penny is a cutie face isn’t she? I’m really looking forward to this run of Phonogram. The first time through I already knew the story, this time I get to be surprised every month, which is way funner.

Anyhow, If you keep clicking through, you eventually see my name, and page one of the B-side Kieron wrote for me to draw. I’m super amazed to see my work hanging out in such splendiforous company.

Now is the time to mention to your local comic shop that Phonogram 2 is starting up in December, and you would like it very much please if they would order a copy for you.  They’ll probably be grumpy about it and turn up their nose, but that’s half the fun of the comic shop experience, isn’t it?

Who has time to draw the Reichstag from scratch? My life is half over already!

title grazed from Jason Lutes blog post. I think it is nice that Jason Lutes has a blog, and that it is called Coyote vs. Wolf.

My table is messy these days. It has been more of an adjustment than I planned, not having BW to work on any longer.  I grabbed this book off the shelf because it looked small. It made me angry a lot of times, but it also had glittering abandoned martian cities, empty spaces and firebirds. I do have a question though. What is it with old school SF and whores? I am starting to sense a pattern. Not just bradbury, but all of them that I have been reading lately. A woman comes onscreen and you can bet two seconds later she’s deliberately using her bosom as a weapon. I don’t know, mabye it is because I am not a good looking person, but it just seems like such a ridiculous way to behave.  Also, there was like five failed missions before anything happened. If only we really behaved that way.

I guess, unrealistic, annoying, but still sticky is the final verdict. I’m not sure what I’m going to read next, there is a book about Saturday Night Live that has been whispering my name for the past couple months, well see if it gets through.

In the mean time, I am drawing a b-side for Phonogram 2, and then picking up one of Kieron’s orphan scripts, which is insane, so things are moving along.