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

Griffin: Owl Ninja

Owl hat, hand made by Allie Tiedeman.

The Ghost Show

I have one piece in the Ghost Show that's opening at Pony Club Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
I brought my unfinished piece for the Ghost Show with me to my class at ArtFest. I discovered that a lot of students don't like having to introduce themselves at the beginning of class, but it helps me feel like I can put a name to their face, so I decided to pass my unfinished ghost around the class and have the students introduce themselves to my art instead. The fact that every one of my students has held this ghost and introduced themselves to it feels like an important part of the piece now.
I brought it home and colored it just in time to give it to the curator, Jennifer Parks, to hang in the show. It's the ghost of an Ancient Multi-Dimensional Earth Native, just in case you couldn't tell.

Imaginary School

I was really excited about how my workshop at ArtFest went this year. I had a room full of amazing students and they were a pleasure to spend the day with. In my Imaginary School, we covered such topics as Mind Technology powered Disbelief Suspension Suits, hand drawn Multi-Dimensional Doorways, and cut and paste as teleportation. They all did so well! A lot of people asked if I would be teaching this class again. I'd like to. Teesha and Tracy Moore are the ones who first encouraged me to teach and I took up the challenge as a way to get more involved in the amazing world they created with ArtFest. I haven't taught anywhere else. Now that ArtFest is ending, I'm not sure where I'd teach. They created the perfect environment and made me feel like I could put myself out there in that kind of way. I think it'd be fun to teach at their studio in Seattle, The ArtFest Annex sometime down the road. Getting to see my students drawings take shape and getting to know them all a little over the course of the workshop was truly thrilling. I wish I could've gotten better photos of everyone's projects. Here's a couple of the clearer photos I took at the closing gallery event:

Front and inside of Sylvan Bourgette's piece from my class.

Front and inside of Stephanie Arildson's piece from my class.

Off to ArtFest

The whole family is hitting the road tomorrow. We're heading to the final ArtFest up in Port Townsend, Washington. I'm teaching one all day workshop and setting up a table of my work at the vender's night. Then I'll get to spend the rest of the weekend exploring the hills and beaches, giving Griffin piggy back rides, and hanging out with everyone. There's so many people I can't wait to see up there. Teesha and Tracy Moore know how to put on amazing events, and their attitude and views on creativity are the most refreshing around. I'm sad that it'll be the final ArtFest, but I'm excited to see what they're going to do next. They're always up to something. The picture above has to do with the class I'm teaching, and it also has everything to do with my book. I'll write more about that sometime.

Sparkplug Forever!

Sparkplug Books is doing a fundraiser over at indiegogo.com to help them publish their next three books: www.indiegogo.com/sparkplugbooks I highly recommend going to the site and checking out the excellent short video they made about Dylan Williams and his vision for Sparkplug. Dylan died last September of Leukemia and his wife and friends are hoping to publish the three books that he was working on releasing as well as hopefully continuing on to publish more books in the future. Sparkplug is a publisher that's really important to me. It's done a lot to redefine what comics can be, and helped give voice to unique and unusual artists. Dylan's absence has left a huge hole in the world of art comics, but I love the idea that Sparkplug could keep publishing new books for years to come.

Reading for Sparkplug

I'm going to be reading from one of my comics at the Waypost tonight at 3120 N. Williams in Portland, Oregon as part of a fundraiser event for Sparkplug Comics, to help them to continue publishing awesome comics after the passing of our good friend and Sparkplug founder, Dylan Williams. They're raising money to print the next few books that Dylan had already planned to put out, and they're all books I've been excited about ever since Dylan first told me he wanted to publish them. Sean Christensen, Julia Gfrorer, and Aron Nels Steinke are also reading. All of them are great cartoonists and I'm looking forwards to seeing what they're going to read tonight. The event goes from 7-10pm.

facing facebook with my face

My Wife finally convinced me to get a facebook account. The above werewolf child combed his hair to celebrate. Do you want to "like" me? http://www.facebook.com/TheoEllsworth

giant comics and secret books

The Understanding Monster is the comics series I've been quietly working on for quite awhile now. If all goes well, the first installment will come out in October. Finishing it on time is my ultimate art goal this year. This book begins a story I'm hoping to tell for a long time to come. Making this comic has been the weirdest and most exciting artistic process I've experienced by far. I've been pretty secretive about it so far, but as I get closer to finishing it, I'll probably start talking about it more.

This is one small panel from a page in the book depicting some room mutation. There's a lot of room mutation going on.
This is a book of stream-of-conscious drawings and writings I made leading up to Griffin's birth. He was actually born the day after I finished the last page. Filling this book was a valuable process for me, and I feel like it mentally prepared me to become a dad. I haven't really shown it to anyone. I should probably make it into a little publication at some point, when I have time.
This is the back cover. The mummy and the library will also be seen in The Understanding Monster.

one page spread from My Thesis on Multi-Dimensional Brain Travel.

Logic Storm is another stream-of-conscious drawing book I made while trying to get my head around some of the concepts I've been working with in The Understanding Monster. It's a "Thinking" book, and making it helped me figure out a lot of things that I couldn't have figured out just by thinking. It's weird, my first instinct when I finish something like this is to put it away and not show it to anyone, but I'm also trying to make a living with my art so I can keep making art all the time. My desire to share my art with the world and my weirdo reclusive side are constantly at odds. Secret Acres offered to put this out as a pamphlet comic, and I'd like to take them up on it. I'll probably make a new cover if I do.
This is a 12 page comic I made for an upcoming End Of The World themed anthology that's going to be published in English and Spanish. I decided to fold and staple my drawing paper and work on both sides of each page so that the original became an actual book. I made a color cover, mostly just for myself, but if I can get around to it, I'd like to make it in to a little handmade mini comic as well.

Thanks for looking.