Print-At-Home Zine

You want a small, easy to manufacture zine you can make yourself? Great!

Here's how you do it!

Step 1: Save the 2 images below to your desktop.

Step 2: Print them back to back on one sheet of paper. That's double-sided printing, y'all!

Step 3: Fold the final printed paper into quarters. Feel free to use the handy-dandy fold lines already on the page! If you done did it correctly, all of the drawings should be right side up. 

Step 4: You're going to need a pair of scissors (get your parents' help!) to carefully cut the top two folds, so you have eight individual pages!

Step 5: Staple the pages together in the center of the crease between the 4th and 5th page!

Boom shaka laka! - You Just Zined Yourself!

Technical notes: The above images are scanned in at 300 dpi resolution. They're not going to look as spiffy as the originals, but remember, it's free! Also, the images are provided for the free zine activity only. Don't take one of these images and stick it on a t-shirt or a throw pillow or a pair of pasties without asking me first. Pretty please?! Thanks!

 ALSO: Please send me pictures of your finished zines! I'd love to see what configurations you get, putting what panels as the front, back, etcetera. I certainly had a plan when I started it, but you can get a few different permutations with this setup. Which drawing is your favorite? Why? LET ME KNOW!

Gods & Monsters 2022

I have been invited to participate in the Otherworldly Arts Collective of Minneapolis's "Gods & Monsters 2022" Halloween art show! An open invitation was placed online and after submitting digital samples of my work, I was chosen to participate. There is a two piece maximum per participating artist, due to space restrictions. The actual show is in October, and I'll post more information regarding that later. 

The two pieces I'm bringing to the show are posted below.

"Tombyard Troubadour" acrylic on gessoed cardboard.

Music plays a large part in my life, and obviously, as a result, is something I draw a lot of inspiration from. "Tombyard Troubadour" is the result of a number of colliding influences. I enjoy country, country western and "hillbilly" music from the 1920s through the early 1970s, and believe it or not, there's a lot of darkness to the genres. Aside from seasonally appropriate novelty tunes like "Tennessee Hill-billy Ghost", which has been cut by Eddie Arnold, Red Foley and others, there are a lot of suicide and murder ballads as well. I had the idea of a sort of guardian ghost musician wandering around a secluded backwoods graveyard, strumming out spooky tunes on a coffin shaped guitar. I wanted something that would fit perfectly on a bubblegum card, a bright, poppy image that would sort of tell a whole story or set the tone for a whole visual world in one image.

"Zombie Surf Punk" acrylic on paper.

I love comics, but one of the biggest missed opportunities in the comic page/panel layout, as far as I'm concerned, is how artists don't do anything with the word and thought balloons aside from plotting out how they're going to position the artwork around them. In the world of the comic cartoons, so much of the page realty is taken up by the dialogue bubbles, that you'd think at some point someone would treat them like a functional part of the reality and incorporate them into the action. That's why my risen-from-the-surf Surf Punk Zombie's speech bubble is draped with seaweed and dripping water. Our undead friend has surfaced, potentially to attend a Circle Jerks show or something, and his words have risen with him, thus they are subject to the same ocean detritus that he is. 

The Otherworldly Arts Collective can be found online at their facebook and Instagram accounts. 

Jensen Lake Trail (And Backyard)

 Below are some photos I took with my camera at Jensen Lake trail, part of the Lebanon Hills Regional Park. I went for a hike there last Wednesday. There are two pictures–the first one of a frog (or toad?) and last one, which is a Cooper's Hawk–were taken in my backyard.