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. 

A Few More Drawings

Space Tiki!

As you may or may not know, I've been trying to do a "doodle-a-day" drawing exercise. I've found myself sitting down to the old sketchbook and ending up more frustrated than productive. I think the major barriers are: A) Coming up with something I feel deserves the time and paper, and B) Trying so hard to make something I think I'll feel proud of, that it stymies my attempt to do anything at all, which is counterproductive and antithetical to the whole sketchbook idea in the first place, right?

Spectral Luchador!

So the whole idea of my doing a doodle a day was to help loosen myself up and just engross myself in something that only had to be as fleshed out as it ended up being, using whatever medium I felt like, with whatever subject matter rattled to the front of my little mind. I know I tend to have a variety of styles, in that sometimes I like to do more comic book-y cartoonish illustration, and other times I really like breaking out the pencils and trying to do something a bit more "arty" if that makes sense.

Anyway, here are some more recent doodles.

The Curse Of The Ghost Of Dracula's Skeleton!

Ugh!

The Bling Of Death

Here's an unflattering scan of an acrylic piece I've been working on. The washed out purple parts – the aura behind the coffin headpiece, the highlights on the folded bat arms and on the left side of the face, etcetera – are supposed to actually be a brilliant bubble gum pink. For some reason my scanner is washing them out, but, to quote The Ramones, "What can you do?" 

Until I get a proper snapshot of the color-correct version, this'll have to do.

**Update**

Here's a picture taken with an iPhone. It's still not great–it looks very orange now from the lighting in the room, and the phone's camera, but it's definitely a better representation of the colors used.