Sack Lunch Drag Race

If you find yourself in the magazine aisle of your local grocery, look for the September issue of Nickelodeon Magazine (there is a smiling cow on the cover). In addition to lots of other fun kids' stuff there is a weird "back to school" themed drawing that I drew for the cover of the comics section (pictured above). Inspired by some Sharpie/White-Out drawings I did on French cardboard, the editors suggested I do some drawings on (American) brown paper sacks. Here are my first rough and real stupid ideas:At some point I decided to do a drawing on a 3-dimensional bagged lunch rather than flattened sacks and here were some ideas on how that could've worked ...... and then (of course) I decided to turn it into a hot rod! Actually two dueling hot rods, one full of gnarly bad-for-you bully foods and one full of wimpy good-for-you foods. WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?! The first step was to stage the little drag race scene by stuffing a couple of sacks with me and Jenny's actual lunches and position them on the blue tile floor of the St. Louis Science Center's gift shoppe. Then our pal John took lots of nice pictures with his fancy camera. Thanks John!
I got rid of the sweet note from Mom and changed the tile to a nice puke-green back-to-school color. Speaking of wimpy, at some point I realized that I wouldn't be able to do the drawings on the bags themselves so went toward a more layered photo/illustration combo method. Bottom-line -- it was light-box and tracing paper time:
After a bunch more boring computer voodoo this is how it turned out (below). Now get back to shopping or your ice cream sandwiches are gonna melt!

VICTORY

Another summer at the Saratoga has come to a close, and with it another gold pin for the Handsome Brothers' trophy case. It was tough, having narrowly edged out the Heisenburgs, 3 J's and a Z, and team Whoa! Yeah! for first place in the final week. Luckily there were some sharpies laying around for me to deface our loot (pictured above) with. I love drawing at bowling.
In case you haven't seen one of us strutting down Manchester in our team colors, here's what our logo looks like:
And here's an action shot of me. It should look familiar to purchasers of Private Stash. The pin is probably hiding a gnarly 4 - 10 split (the lanes were real graveyards last night). For an indication of how old the Saratoga is, count the stars on that flag.
Look out Fall League!
UPDATE: See Billy K's sandwich blog for another view of this magical night.

Local Color

In case you didn't hear, me and 3 pals of mine were recently elected by St. Louis Magazine some of the "Coolest People in St. Louis". I know what you're all thinking: "St. Louis must SUCK!" But the fact remains that we got to party with Murph-Drrt and Bill Keaggy. And we did the above collaborative drawing to accompany an article about us. From L to R: Kevin H, me, Ted May, and Mardou.

The Sunny Side of Dan Z.

(Drawn during thesis reviews at my alma mater the week my wisdom teeth were removed and I had a surprise root canal. It was too dark to ink the page I had snuck into the auditorium with me and I was in a bad mood. These made for good catharthis though, as did the white castle fish nibblers I ate on the way home. I was ashamed of both in the light of the next day.)