Zine Time at SCAD

So yesterday was the Zine fair at SCAD. It was held in the Student Center, and was filled with the usual trip-tastic light show on the ceiling in the main room on the second floor. Thankfully the table I was at was under an overhang and so we managed to avoid the vertigo affects and general annoyance of the light shifting. (In truth I think it's a neat idea, but I don't know why they don't make it less... night club or opium den like.)

This is what my table set-up was like. Tucked in a nice little nook, but with wall prominence behind me. I managed to make some sales, though I didn't have all the product I wanted to have out. Oh well, that just means more for the Shoujo Phonebook Artists' Alley. That's on May 19. I intend to have a full sketchbook, as well as some bookmarks, and print outs of everyone's favorite of my tarot card images.

I'll say this about the zine fair. I learned a lot about laying out a book and how incredibly difficult it is to do double sided pages on a computer without doing straight photocopying. And, I think I missed putting page one into the booklet. O_o Talk about strange and unusual. That sucks for the people who got it. Oh well. The new booklets will be the whole 11 pages. For the sake of the booklet I killed the splash page on page 8 and made it a promotional stand / cover image instead. I also didn't have covers on the booklets, and they were horribly stapled.

I've got a list of things to do better for next time. Including coloring the display that was behind me.

But that's all on that for now. I'm off to do some yoga before a long day of inking.

Regina Spektor @ Trustees - My First "Concert"

So somehow, even with a degree in sound design, I managed to skip out on the concert-goer experience as an audience member. I did plenty of work for concerts, backstage and the like. Once I was a human wall at one where some kids were dancing like retarded pre-schoolers, but other than that I spend most of my time behind the speakers rather than in front of them.

Well last night I got to go and see the Regina Spektor concert at the Trustee's Theater. (Yeah, more Silent Cloak And Dagger stuff.) The opening "band" was Only Sun. Unfortunately I didn't manage to get too much of his info. Some of that was like watching the future of music. It was just the lead guitarist (frontman?) of the band who came down from New York. The "band" that accompanied him was on his iPod. While I think maybe it needed a better mix to it, the idea of having your band being that portable is, well, very modern. Plus, 'Only Son' was a very good showman. (Notwithstanding the stupid fangirls screaming from the right of us that were offering sex to the performers.) He ended with this musically interluded, almost slam-poetry ode to the way that our posters rocked on the way in.

I liked him. I can't wait to find more of his music.

Now, having never been to a concert before, I was nonetheless comforted by the set-up on stage. A piano, a guitar, two chairs, and several microphones and monitor speakers. Well, notwithstanding the musician's need to be drowned out by their own voice coming back at them, I seriously think the monitor speakers were LARGER than Regina Spektor. If not, they at least had to weigh more. From the balcony, she looked kinda tiny. Very "cute" according to my companion.

Savannah as an environment had to be a horrible environment. She mentioned John Cage's comment on "what's more musical? The conservatory, or the truck passing by the conservatory". (She's really referencing his quote: "What's more musical, a truck driving by a music school or a truck driving by a factory?" Snitched from here.) She not only had to combat some truck backing up through an entire song, but also a fireworks bass drum accompaniment.

On the other hand, Silent (Screaming?) Calamity And Destruction had to be very welcoming. She said, after her opening acappella singing, that it was nice to be somewhere "artsy fartsy", and she called us all SCADalicious. It was very cute.

If you haven't heard Regina Spektor's music, I can say this for it. The entire package is appealing to me. The words are interesting, perhaps a bit kitschy, but the music backing it up is an all-around pleasing experience. (But I may just have a thing for Russian musicians. Anyone ever heard Zemfira? She sings in Russian. My favorite song is "Sums".) There's something very honest and occasionally raw and highly emotive about the way she vocalizes the words to her songs. Ever since hearing Rachael Yamagata (and, I'll admit, Ani DiFranco before her), I've been highly appreciative of the sensation of a singer (who usually happens to be female) having a quality of emotion to her singing that isn't necessarily pop standard. Don't get me wrong, some pop music still turns me on, but for long stretches of focusing I need someone to be experiencing something and not just bouncing out of my computer speakers in the background.

So, in conclusion, there are definitely worse concerts you can go to than one featuring Regina Spektor. As a first concert experience (for me, the sound snob), it was entertaining and musically pleasing in a way that I find many concerts lack. It was neither overpoweringly loud, nor too quiet to hear from the balcony where I was sitting. The only thing I didn't like was the screaming idiots who need to find boyfriends instead of idol worshipping visiting performers, and the stupid girl in F11 to our left who kept taking flash photos. Both of which were ignorable.

And onnn with the show.

So I was doing some non-page work last night after I got in from seeing 300. (I recommend it. I thought I was going to hate it, but I ended up really enjoying it. That could have been the company, but there was something really great about the movie.) I found something noble about the whole band of brothers fighting together thing. I liked it.

But anyway, I was coloring this old sketch of mine that I did a while ago, and I thought I should post it here as well. It's also up on my deviantart page: here

Some people get curious about how I do the textures on the images like this one and the set of tarot cards I did before it. (This character is from the Queen of Swords image that I did. It was everyone in the class's favorite, and I did that one first and spent the most time figuring out the technique I was using for it.) I'm thinking of explaining it as a tutorial for Julie Collins-Rousseau's Scribbleclick which is shaping up to be quite a wonderful little website filled with tutorials, reviews, and the like.

I'm also slated to do a "how-to" on word ballooning for comics for Advanced Manga this quarter (at some point), so I may turn that into a tutorial as well.

Lots to do, it seems. I'll probably start the ballooning demo(n -add the 'n', word balloons can be demons, yes they can) this weekend when I re-thumb and re-create my pages in a more manga layout. That starts tonight, actually.

Anywho, peace and pie for everyone.
I'm going back to doing my Lunar Boy fanart. (For anyone who doesn't know Jarrett Williams, you should. You really, really should.)

And, if no one's yet discovered Wonderland, I also suggest you check it out. Not only is the webpage superbly graphic in its b&w design, but also the tones are really well done, the inks hold up, and the story has me fairly hooked and we're only on page 2.

Shiny new blog...

Is it just me or is there something terribly strange about the word 'blog'. Just think about it for a minute. Say it out loud.

Well, even if you don't, I find it a bit creepy.

So this is my new blog. I'll probably be posting artwork and maybe some writing chunks as well. It may (or may not) be where I leak information about the webcomic I may (or may not) be working on. *gasp* I bet if I tried I could even make this vaguer.