Wedding In The Woods.

I am getting married! It is a funny transition to make in some ways because it isn't a huge shift in my sense of commitment or love for Lindsey (we have been together for almost 6 years) but it does make me feel more grown up for some reason. Lindsey asked me to doodle up a wedding invite to send out asap. We're getting married in a state park near where she grew up. The logistics are complicated, but since I am not a church-going man and she likes trees, the woods seemed like the best place to have our ceremony:

She wanted something more simplified and cartoon-like without being a cartoon. I think she was leaning towards a 'folk-art' type of illustration so I tried my hand at that using (ironically) photoshop so I could adjust the colors to match what she was looking at for inspiration. I like the foxes and I hope you do too.

Chicago For A While

Lindsey and I went to visit our friend Michelle Alba in Chicago last week. It was great! We went to the Field Museum, The Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium where I took many photos of historic astrolabes, armillaries and orerries; if you read my web strip then you know I'm that sort of guy. I am also the sort of fellow who LOVES pancakes. There is no better place to get pancakes, in my opinion, than The Bongo Room. It is highly recommended; it make what most people call 'pancakes' unworthy of the name.

I fit in a few sketches. Otherwise we were having too much fun and absorbing the great sights and company offered only in the Windy City.

This sculpture, located in in Millennium Park, is officially titled 'cloud gate' but colloquially it is called 'The Bean.' there is a constant swarm of people around it because it is beautiful and irresistible. The construction of this fine object is really worth reading about.

This was a family eating at Giordano's Pizza. One of the kids was busily mashing buttons on his gaming system, the parents not acknowledging each other and the other two boys just stuffing their faces with famous stuffed pizza. It seems quintessentially American so I did what I could to capture it. I was drawing while enjoying my own stuffed pizza with green peppers and, a rare treat, a root beer; it was wonderful.

The Spoils Of Stumptown

This year I got a last minute table at Stumptown Comicsfest. It was a good time overall but, my hasty preparation, throwing poor Lindsey into the deep end of assisting me on the show floor, a diet comprised almost exclusively of doughnuts and coffee, appearing in the comic art battle, the inconsistent traffic of day 2 combined with my exhaustion from work and being fresh off the energy of ECCC made for a near-breakdown by the end of the festival. I did make some nice commissions (mostly on day one) and here they are:

I make T-Rex red. Maybe it is a latent affection for devil dinosaur that I'm not paying attention to.

This was for a 'super-pets' themed sketchbook. I like the Green Lantern and I love cats; this produced Meow Jordan.

I think this might have been done on day 2. The theme of this sketchbook was batman villains. I always liked Killer Croc and Poison Ivy so I did a quick doodle of them both.

I had a hard time deciding on a pose and I don't know the Sandman characters very well but I get the impression it is a really enjoyable series. The people who like it show a rare devotion to the stories and the characters. I like drawing fish even though I'm not great at it.

Here is my darling Lindser and me posing in a rare moment of mental composure. I think she is a gem.

Commission Missions

I love being down at Periscope in the morning before anyone else gets here. My studio mates are dear to me but there is something fun about being in a 'bat cave' of my very own for a little bit. I suppose Batman would be drinking something a little less flowery than vanilla flavored coffee but that is probably the only difference between the two of us. On a different note, here are a few of my ECCC commissions:








Lindsey loves to play various Iphone games and surprisingly 'drawesome' is one of them. Every now and then she lets me play a round when there is something fun to do or she needs a break from her 1,000 app-game commitments. I love Zelda; I know Link is not Zelda but he is most closely associated with the game franchise (along with the triforce) so here you go:

Sketchbook Adventures

Here are a few items from my sketch books. Keeping it short and sweet with lots of pictures. Lindsey says people like pictures.



I played a rare solo show and opened for these fine fellows. Then I did a drawing of them.



The one on the left was done while we waited for pancakes to come to our table. The painted study on the left was done with gouache but I did it over acrylic gesso so it's a bit streaky. I just got some 'watercolor ground' to try out. We shall see eh?



More Lindsey. I started by sketching with the gray brush and added the ink after. It was fun. This preceded pancakes as well. I eat pancakes every weekend if I can. It is my favorite treat.



These are my amazing friends Matt and Cathy Hastie. They just got back from Peru where they were living for 7 months. Matt was helping local people to improve their water quality. Cathy was working with kids at a Peruvian school. You can see their fantastic adventures on their website. I did these drawings while they were giving a forum on their experience at the Mc Menamin's Kennedy school in the public room.



I found this sketch I had done for a fella at a comic book signing event. No sketch post is complete without a little Star Wars.
And there you go...

Busy Bee, Busy Me

Tragedy series and a veritable cornucopia of commercial work have kept me very busy. This is mostly great yet, also, a bit overwhelming in other ways. In the next few months I'm only focusing on a project for Oni Press written by Paul Tobin and the Tragedy Series. Everything else has to wait!

My friends at the studio, in response to the very kind reception my daily strip has received, have prompted me to start an Etsy store mostly focused on Tragedy Series and it has been doing very well; thank you to those of you who have purchased prints! Below is a host of sketch cards that I sent out with those first orders as a bonus to show my appreciation for my initial customers' patience with my inexperience in E-commerce and shipping logistics.


More work including prints of images seen on this blog and tee-shirts are coming soon to the Ety Store.
Here is an hour-long study of poor Lindsey who was feeling sick and watching movies. She was wearing a slowly fading cosmetic-cream facial mask and doing crosswords part of the time. I love her and I really enjoy having her sit because she is patient and, to my eyes, very pretty.


This was done with a limited palette and some clunky brushes but I like studies (even more sometimes) when I know they are done under less than ideal conditions. This reminded me that I miss painting and that doing it from life is where it is most exciting for me.

Hear Ye Hear Ye: More Sketches!

These are some recent pages from my observational drawing sketchbook; it is mostly drawings of Lindsey! I also keep a sketchbook that is for working out more complex images in a rough, nuts and bolts way. My next post will be some of those more clunky sketches and the (eventually) more streamlined results that follow from them.


This is Lindsey on the day I proposed (August 19th) and getting her hair cut in proximity to a girl who had raccoon/tiger stripes in her hair.

These are the food carts right across from where I work. The one on the left is everyone else's favorite but I go to the one on the right because they are 98 percent as good and 60 percent faster.
I have been working very steadily on a host of commercial projects lately. Most of them unfortunately, come with an NDA that prevents me from sharing that work here but I have been sketching in my little observational journal when time allows. I thought I might post a few of my doodles until I can get some of the flashier work approved for public consumption.

Tragedy Series Breakdown

I thought it might be fun to do a walk through of how I make my posts for the tumblr I started in recently. Hopefully this won't ruin your enjoyment (if you do enjoy them- I shouldn't assume) of the 'tragedy series.' It would be a shame to ruin it for you like when I found out that Rivendell is a bunch of foam and Christmas lights and now I can't stop seeing that.


If you want to preserve your neutrality on their development and execution you should stop reading now!

Number 222 is a good example of how these little notions I get can become a thing I was proud and surprised that I made. First I try to think of a subject I haven't done yet that falls within the parameters I've set for myself (that I will spell out more clearly in a bit.) As I progress it gets a bit harder but generally it can prompt something unexpected, since I'm trying actively to avoid clear repetition.


In this specific instance I had thought of a news story Lindsey and I saw while we were in Lincoln city, for our anniversary, about a safari park here in Oregon where they have lions that like to play tug of war. That image is enough in and of itself! once I have a self evidently odd or funny situation then I try and compound that comedy if possible. In this case I tried to imagine what sort of opponent would be funny. It occurred to me that a group of kids in a scout troop might do but they had to be capable or else it would be too close to something genuinely sad (the first of the tenents I try to uphold; No genuine tragedy) At that point I write it down to be addressed later.


I generally do a little drawing (like the image of #57 seen above) if I can't fully imagine it but in this case I had it pretty firmly in mind. It is at this point that I will do an image search to find good refrence that coincides with what I have sketched. I lucked out and found these two images:


Even though I had the elements of the final image, the phrasing wasn't quite there yet though and I went through several iterations of what would work best. I often ask Steve Lieber for advice; this questioning runs the gamut from 'should I buy a house?' to 'what sort of pen do you use to ink nostrils?' He is also a super funny guy who gets how to translate humor into drawings because he has studied it extensively for his own development so I go to him first for comedy.


I had written out a bit about 'ragamuffins' challenging a hungry lion to tug o' war but that seemed too plain. It struck me that a 'rematch' would be funny but it didn't quite fit yet. Steve said "Rematch is funnier if there is evidence of the previous encounter...make some of them amputees." I was hesitant to go there but the more I thought of it the more I realized that he was right about the necessity for notes from the first lion vs. kid showdown. I put a few shoes and scraps around the lion and Steve added the cherry on top the sundae by suggesting that I wrap the ragamuffins in bandages and give a few of them ragged clothes. He was so right! Once I did it the whole thing came together and I got this:


There you go. Thanks for sticking with me through that description. Also much gratitude to all of you out there who support my tumblr and read this blog. I am a lucky guy.

Wednesday Sketchplosion!

I love doing observational drawings of people who aren't holding still. It is almost always difficult but conversely enjoyable when you get things right. I thought I might share a few them with you:

My dear friend Scott Barkan was in town for a few days on tour with Alaskan songsmith Marian Call and I was able to capture them over the course of two delightful sets.
Lindsey's family had a get together this last weekend. Part of her family lives in Idaho and it is a rare treat to see them. I tried to capture as much as I could. For the most part this is pieced together from several configurations as people traded chairs and went in and out to get food and mind adorable babies.
I was asked by friend Chris to draw his band 'The Wishermen' at Jimmy Mak's last night. From left to right: Adam Schwietert on Alto, Special Guest Elysia Strauss on Tenor, Cyrus Nabipoor on Trumpet, Grant Sayler on Guitar, Chris Friesen on Bass and Barra Brown on Drums.
I also started a new tumblr that you can check out for yourself here:

tragedyseries.tumblr.com
It covers all manor of absurd silliness and I post once a day. Tell your friends and family if they are the sort of people who enjoy vaguely Victorian schadenfreude.

Thursday Sketch Party!

My sketchbook still has a couple hundred pages left in it and I'm trying to close that gulf so I can start my next sketchbook with the really nice paper in it. I bought my current Moleskine (my first) without realizing that there were different varieties of paper and formats to be had. The good news is that because the paper is gentle I approach the sketchbbok with a preciousness that I don't ordinarily embrace when 'sketching.'

I love drawing from life because it hones that mechanism for preserving and recalling information that is so necessary as a comic book artist.
In some cases I will coat the pages with Gesso so that one drawing doesn't bleed through to the preceding or following pages. I did that on this set of pages but I'm looking for alternatives because the surface gets too 'slick.'
I bought Lindsey a sketchbook yesterday so that she can have fun too. I think everyone should try it. Sketching teaches you to look at the world with a discerning eye and pick those parts that stand out as important in a virtual sea of possible information. It's a nice thing to 'edit' the world with your eye.

A Blue Shell Attack Means You're #1

I'm not huge into video games but when I do play I almost always enjoy a solid racing game. Mariokart was one of the first digital realms that I ever felt like I had some mastery over. I loved to play the original on Super Nintendo, then 64 and most recently Double Dash (I'm a console or two behind.)

I LOVE Mariokart. The 'Boo Pipes' are my favorite kart for heavy racers
Lindsey and I often race. I took it super seriously for a while and the first time she beat me I kind of freaked out. since then I've scaled back my enthusiasm to a reasonable point and it's just good fun; the way all games should be. I hope you find my little tribute worthy and an accurate portrayal of the fun and excitement that is MKDD.

Here are the inks just for fun. Color does a lot to make it Mario's world

Chalkboard Musings

For Lindsey's Birthday I got us a mini-vacation at the Kennedy School in NE Portland. We have a special relationship to that place in various ways so we like to revisit it when we can.


The room we stayed in had a huge wrap-around chalkboard and some white chalk to play around with so we played. It was fun. I got Lindsey to draw a little bit at the end.

I used my covert skills and snapped a picture of her.
I call him 'angel-bear' because he loves the baseball team in Anaheim...

Yes; I put Star Wars in this too

This is Lindsey's portion. Aliens have come for a man and he is gleefully going with them.

Dewey's Tuesday Grab-Bag!

I have a few 'targeted' blog posts coming up but for now I have some drawings and points of interest that I'd like to share before I forget! The first of these somewhat unconnected offerings is a little painting I did of my cat in anticipation of a project that I'm developing with writer Paul Tobin. More on that front as it becomes appropriate to divulge details.

I'm really enjoying the qualities of Gouache. I might even make a painted comic, of modest length, as an upcoming project.
I played a show with my friend Josh Malm at the Aladdin Theatre on the 11th of this month and I was able to do a little drawing of one of the opening bands. All I had was a sharpie and a 0.05 micron. It's like having a broadsword or a scalpel when you want to spread jam on your toast.

These guys knew how to work a crowd but they were a little crass backstage; I suppose that is rock n' roll for the most part.
Here is another drawing of Lindsey that I did while we were eating at a restaurant. We went to Genie's to try their breakfast fare. I liked Lindsey's French toast but I was not a fan of my own pancakes. I think it was probably a fluke because the rest of breakfast was great. I think Lindsey is very pretty and I like to draw her.

My current sketch book has really thin paper so I didn't add a wash behind her; I still like this image as it is with the tints of white pen on the off white paper.
I've got plenty of drawings in process and lots of projects in the cue. Come back and visit. Feel free to tell me what you think and what sorts of things you might like to see on the blog. I'm open to including suggestions and stealing your ideas! Happy Tuesday. Thanks all!

Banner Fun.

I'm progressing along making my blog better and trying to get other aspects of my life in order. My first order of business was to make some appealing headers/banners. Lindsey suggested that I do a different one for every month like another blogger she reads. I started with a space theme featuring Lindsey herself but I decided that I need to repaint it because of proportion issues.

Here are the banners in various states of finish. The top is the redrawing of my 'Lindsey in space' banner. The bottom is the current banner before I added ink and highlights
This is the June banner in it's un-cropped, finished state.
I've got more ideas to come. You may have seen one in a previous post that involves woodland creatures. I several planned: undersea, old West, dinosaurs, rock n' roll, scientists, friend portraits, cats and more! Keep checking back to see what is happening.