Himalaya: An Appreciation

Here's an illustration I've got in this month's OXFORD AMERICAN, The "New South Journalism" Issue, for a story by Kevin Brockmeier. The 7th grade character in the story travels to the midway of his local state fair, eats fried pickles, and fantasizes about floating around the carnival rides. Sketch:

My favorite ride is and will always be the HIMALAYA. Something about the combination of an obnoxious carnie DJ blasting classic rock and the centrifugal simplicity of they physics makes it PERFECT. Then the DJ shatters your eardrums with air whistles and reverses the direction. WOOOO WOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

I love it aesthetically most of all though, especially at night. Its fluorescent neon glow, its arabesque lettering rendered in metal and light bulbs, its incongruous Bavarian sport-skier/Nepalese sherpa theme, its fluorescent glow, and shimmering metal-flake paint job on the cars make it outshine every other ride on the midway.

Here's another Himalaya drawing, from an unpublished comic strip:

And here's another, in the lower left-hand panel from another unpublished (state fair themed) comic:

C'mon people! The louder you scream the faster it goes!
ps. I also drew portraits of Dolly Parton & Bull Shannon for the Oxford American story. Check it out!

Bacon Library

Hey! There's a new t-shirt for sale at Shirt.Woot! featuring this pig-tographic design of mine. Buy it here!
Eagle-eyed/Bacon-hearted scrutinizers will recognize the design as one of the gazillions of pieces of custom vector clip-art I've been drawing for Woot as part of this icon library project (above). The initiative was partially sparked by this page in my sketchbook:

Keep your eyes peeled for more!

Feast Day of St. Louis IX

Here's a new poster I printed up for this year's FEAST DAY at my favorite local tavern & restaurant The Royale , feauring a new beer by my favorite local brewer The Civil Life. 4-colors (including metallic gold) on wheat paper, 24" x 18".

Inspiration for the poster was drawn from this book --

-- specifically these kind of gilded age engravings featuring bird's eye view renderings of breweries and flowery (and barley-y/hops-y) type:

Some early sketches:


More developed sketches:


Map reference for the area of South St. Louis generally transcribed on the print:

A color study:

A tight under-drawing:

Finished lineart:

Finished vector art:

Hope to see you at the Royale this Saturday, ready to celebrate the eponymous patron saint of our town in frothy fashion! Also, I heard there will be live accordion.

Keep America Weird Week

I sure hope you're keeping up with Keep America Weird Week at Woot! this week. Here are some banners I made to advertise and commemorate this great event.

Lots of great discussion of American Weirdness and Weirdos. I especially like this one about Baseball Oddities (literal ODDBALLS).

I was also proud of this 'WEIRD' font I drew, although now it looks more like 'GREEN BACON' font. Which I guess it still pretty weird.

Tonight! Reading/Signing/Party at Star Clipper!

7 - 10 pm! Party! Free* hand-printed BIRDSEYE BRISTOE bookmark containing an instructional diagram on how to build your own birdfeeder out of items you may have around the house. *just say the code words: "I want to learn how build my own birdfeeder out of items I may have around the house".

Art vs. Lovecraft

Here are a few more pages from The Shadow out of Providence project I've been working on. There's only a couple days left on the Kickstarter campaign - get in while the gettin' is good, and help make this weird/wonderful book a reality! 

I'm contributing a bunch of production sketches and monster costume designs for the HP Lovecraft meta-play "Facts Concerning the Late Eadweard Thurston and his Family" by Ezra Claverie. The costume designs are inspired by the work that legendary cartoonist Jack Kirby did designing costumes for a 1969 production of Julius Caesar:

Here are a couple of drawings detailing a sequence in which a decomposing ghost/corpse character stumbles on to the stage, then is manually disemboweled by demonic stagehands (called Night-Gaunts) using crude puppetry:

(note Kirby hand!)

There are several other great artists involved in The Shadow out of Providence, including another legendary illustrator - Erol Otus, pioneer of fantastic gaming art.

 I'm honored to work alongside him on this.

So yeah, check it out! Phnglui mglw nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah nagl fhtagn.

Book Launch Parties

Kevin H. and I are doing a couple of book release / signings in conjunction with our brand new comics -- GLORIANA and BIRDSEYE BRISTOE -- coming out this month from Drawn and Quarterly.

This Friday, June 15th, we'll be at Quimby's in Chicago. Next Friday, June 22nd we'll be at Star Clipper here in St. Louis.

 

We made a fancy collabo-commemorative 2-color screenprint (top of this post) to give away to anyone who comes to the parties and buys the books. 

Hope to see many of you!

The Shadow out of Providence Kickstarter

I'm honored to be a part of this new project currently up for funding on Kickstarter: The Shadow out of Providence: A Lovecraftical Metatext.

I'm contributing production drawings, costume designs, and set diagrams for the play-within-the-book FACTS CONCERNING THE LATE EADWEARD THURSTON AND HIS FAMILY. Here are some sketches for the sketches:



I know everyone has been dying to know how I would handle illustrating a work of Brechtian Anti-Realism. You'll have to fund the Kickstarter to find out! Hint: it involves a lot of creaky gears, wires and dudes hiding inside crazy monster costumes.

This is a different project than I've ever worked on before, so please think about contributing to help keep me in india ink, bow ties, and smokes: