Saturday, July 28th, Giant Robot, Los Angeles

 After a whirlwind adventure packing up everything I own and moving with my family to Montana , I got to have a little down time to finish up a few final pieces for my solo show that's coming up this Saturday at Giant Robot. I'm flying down to LA tomorrow to hang the show. It's my biggest show yet. Nearly 70 pieces! I'll be in LA just long enough to enjoy the opening party, then it's back to Montana to house hunt.

Small Press Expo

I just finished drawing this flyer for the Small Press Expo. If all goes as planned, I'll be there at the Secret Acres table with my new comic, The Understanding Monster Book One! 

Missoula

This is a photo I took of the Rattlesnake creek in my home town, Missoula, Montana. I'm about to move back there with my family. Both of Griffin's Grandmothers live there and it feels important for us to be around family right now. We're also excited for the slower pace, the mountains, and old friends. I'm hoping to finally be getting a studio again and become more prolific than ever with my books and art making. I'm going to miss a lot about Portland. Especially the amazing friends I've been lucky enough to make here. I'm already planning a trip back in November for some book readings though, and I'm hoping to get some of my Portland friends out to Montana for some big collaborative art projects.

Griffin and Mortimer

 When we first brought Griffin home I wasn't sure how Mortimer would take to him. When I held up our new baby so he could have a look, he smelled his forehead for awhile then rubbed his face on each of his tiny hands. They've been friends ever since. Griffin's totally crazy about him, and Mortimer is amazingly patient with having his face grabbed. They've both been great company to me while completing my upcoming book and working on all the pieces for my solo art show that's opening later this month. These are good times!

Griffin celebrates his first summer with a maple tree helicopter mustache!

photos of importance

To me, these are some of the most beautiful photos ever taken. They haunt me and make me want to create my own costumes inspired by them.

man witch and antlered purple were-thing

I just re-found this photo of Sean Christensen and I from last Halloween. I'm the one with the antlers, obviously. Good times! It's crazy to think about how my son, Griffin was still floating upside down in his mother's inner-space back then. Everything's different now!

Caravan skateboards

I did two designs for Caravan Skateboards awhile back and they've finally come out!

Coming up!

sneak peek at my upcoming show at Giant Robot

 Portrait of Special Agent Rogbert.

 Natural House Formation

 Ghost Seer

 Turtle Base

 Personal Treasure Spirit

Leaf Dog Rider

back in stock!

I've got some final copies of Sleeper Car up for sale in my Etsy Shop. It's been sold out for awhile now, but Secret Acres was able to send me copies from a hidden stash of them that they recently unpacked.

The Sudden Amplification of Certain Senses

I have a solo show at the Giant Robot Gallery in Los Angeles opening on July 28th! More about this soon!

Singing Ghost

Some people I know

These are a few little panels from The Understanding Monster Book One. It looks like it's finally off to the printers now! If all goes well, it will be out in time to be released at the Small Press Expo (SPX) in late September!

On the wall

my piece from the Game over show at Giant Robot is up for sale now. It was good to see that they hung my little piece directly under a dinosaur and a tiger. It's definitely worth checking out the whole show. There's some great work by some excellent artists.

Game Over show at Giant Robot

 I did a small woodcut character for the Video Game themed art show that's opening in a couple of days at Giant Robot. Obtaining extra lives by ramming floating crystals with your head is an important concept to me, so it felt good to create a visual rendering.

Nether-Moon Dub EP-from Space Cadets

I got this in the mail from England a little while ago. It's a lot of fun getting to design all these covers and then have the actual physical objects show up at my door. The music is great too.Perfect sounds to have in the room while drawing. The next ones are going to be in full color.

The Understanding Monster Book One

 As of last night, I'm completely done with all of the art for book one! Pictured above is the first page of Book Two, which I kept propped up on my drawing table, standing guard as I worked to complete the first one. The title page and the entire contents of Book One is stacked below. I ended up overnighting all the originals to Secret Acres, which was pretty scary after all that work, but they reached New York safely and now I feel much more confident that it will look nice in print. It's all fully hand colored and the originals are much larger than I've ever worked. Drawing larger than I'm comfortable with really helped me explode my sense of what the comics page can be.

This book launches my attempt at creating a long form comics narrative, but right now I'm just focusing on the first four books. For awhile I was working on them all at once until I finally figured out how it could be divided up just right. It was pretty chaotic for awhile, so it feels extra satisfying to finally have something readable. More soon!

More inspiration

These are a few more images from the inspirational slide show that plays when my laptop goes into screensaver mode. A huge majority of the images are ancient, tribal, and ceremonial, though there's also plenty of work from cartoonists I love, as well as photographs of outer space and caves. These images, to me, are so full of a mystery, intensity, and vitality that's missing from most modern art I see. Looking at these pictures makes me excited and inspired on so many levels. Embodying creatures from the subconscious and organizing thoughts into word-symbols and story-drawings is what I want my daily work to be. Art connects the imagination to reality through the intensive act of doing. I wish I could know exactly how these artists thought and felt about the world as they created these works.

collaborative doodling

I kind of fell off the map with posting for awhile, so I thought I'd jump back into this little room I keep in Internet-World by showing you this drawing I made with Joe Lambert and Sean Christensen while hanging out at the Secret Acres table at Stumptown last month. Sean's already my favorite dude to collaborate with and it was an extra treat to get to draw with Joe during his first ever visit to the West Coast.

Stumptown Comics Festival this weekend!

I'll be at the Stumptown Comics Fest all weekend helping run the Secret Acres table along with Joe Lambert and Sean Christensen. We'll have all kinds of great publications to check out and we'll be ready to converse with friends and strangers alike on a wide range of topics. Come on out and keep us company.

In other news, I'm painfully close to finishing The Understanding Monster, Book One! Really, I should be staying home all weekend to work on it. It feels pretty crazy finally be so close to delivering the pages to Secret Acres.

Grid Lords begins!

There's a new, monthly comics reading called Grid Lords at the Waypost in Portland Oregon. This first one is to kick off the Stumptown Comics Fest happening this weekend. I'll be reading some new work along with Jesse Moynihan, Malachi Ward, Maria Sputnik, and August Lipp.

Time Travel Postcard

I designed a postcard for 826 LA, a non-profit writing and tutoring center. Every city that has an 826 has a different themed gift shop in front. The Los Angeles one is Time travel themed. You can get my postcard and help support an incredibly awesome place here

inspiration

I've been collecting pictures that I love into a slide show that plays on my computer when it goes into screen saver mode. It's nice to be able to look up from my drawing table and see images that keep me charged. It's made my computer become less of a stressful object and more of an inspiration machine. Collecting these images has made me realize just how floored I am by native ceremonial costumes from all over the world.

The Asaro River People, New Guinea.
Koskimo Dancer, North West Coast of America.
The Bapende People, Zaire