BKLYN Recycle
Here’s a drawing I did this weekend of the stoop of my old apartment building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Here is an actual piece of dialogue that transpired on these steps some time in late ’06, early ’07:
Thug: Heymanyouliketoshmokeitdown?
Everett: What?
Thug: You like to shmokeitdown?
Everett: … … … WHAT?
Thug: Weed, man. Do You Smoke It?
Everett: Oh. No.
Thug: … seriously?
I’m trying to get better w/ the crow quill pen, but I think I’m going overboard. When every surface is peppered with detail, it all flattens out into an indecipherable mess. Next time, stronger blacks and whites to set off the grays.
Read More24-Hour Comic
On Saturday, April 10th, I stayed up for 24 hours straight and drew a 24-page comic (that’s one page an hour, for those of you keeping track at home)! It was an incredibly intense and exhausting, but also immensely rewarding, “experience,” in the most hippie/psychedelic sense of the term. This was at Cosmic Monkey Comics in Portland. About 8-10 other people also participated, although I think only four of us reached the 24-page goal as laid out by Scott McCloud (whom we can credit/blame for devising this perverse past-time).
The art is definitely a little rough around the edges, but the artificial constraints on its production render me invulnerable to criticism! I can excuse bogus anatomy, warped perspective, and spelling errors with the catch-all rebuttal “I was sleep-deprived!” (Clever, huh?)
After catching up on sleep, I also made a fancy cover and back-page image for the printed mini-comic version. Comic below – you can read my irrelevant commentary at the bottom if you still want.
To quote Wayne’s World, “let’s do the super-happy ending!” This story was based on a screenplay idea hatched years ago by me and roommate Turhan Sarwar. We wanted to pitch it to Disney and envisioned Cuba Gooding, Jr. in the lead role. (I still do.) But was the world ready for a Katrina Komedy?
In 2007, I think the answer was no. But now I’m not so sure. Melancholy is a totally valid reaction to catastrophe, especially in the immediate aftermath, but it is not the only reaction. Some of the sickest, blackest and most hilarious humor comes out of unthinkable tragedy during times of political turmoil etc. It’s another way to cope!
Not that FotF is really black humor. If anything, I think it’s pretty tame satire, and that approach is potentially even more tasteless. I preemptively apologize to any Gulf Coast readers offended by it. The hurricane let my family off so easy (comparatively) that I truly have no right to complain. I tried to work in an empowering message of triumph through adversity, recovery, etc. etc. that hopefully balances out the questionable humor. I also hope it counteracts what strikes me as a despairing attitude of victimhood in mainstream Katrina-coverage.
I guess I was a little tired of the morose treatment of the storm’s legacy by well-intentioned outsider artists. As usual, the South serves as a vessel for the rest of the nation’s angst – nothing new there. I have been away from the Crescent City for most of the rebuilding process, and so I don’t exactly have my finger on the pulse, but something tells me that the city that invented jazz funerals has a more nuanced view of what it means to pull through a disaster.
Read MoreLet There Be Art Blog
Much smarter people than me (namely, the wonderful artists at Periscope Studios in Portland, OR, where I am interning) have suggested that I start a blog to show my art. You ought to have some kind of web presence, they say, and a blog is preferable to a typical gallery site for this reason: a potentially intere$ted per$on who reads your blog knows how recently and how frequently you are coming out with new art, and can easily trace your improvement. A gallery site only shows that at some point sometime in the past you did some art. For all the gallery reader knows, you haven’t done anything new in years
Which for me was sadly true, for a few years after college anyway. But 2010 has brought a new period of unprecedented productivity which I might as well share with the world. Read this blog to see what I’ve drawn recently. For all my eagerly waiting fans (I know you’re out there), I’ll also be posting occasional sneak previews of my still-in-progress “graphic novel,” Savage Nobles in the Land of Enchantment.
To kick things off, here’s a drawing from about a week and a half ago, “Temptation.”
What I like about it: My first use of hugely popular grayscale markers was not a complete disaster, mainly because I limited myself to only two. This was also the first time I did a digital layout for a drawing. (I printed that out, penciled over it, scanned that, printed it out in non-repro blue, and inked that. Phew! Don’t think I could do that every time!) The goat-face was directly inspired by my favorite art-blogger, James Gurney.
What I don’t like: I wasn’t sure, but Periscope “floating assistant” (i.e. power behind the throne) Ben Dewey almost immediately spotted the essential problem with this type of image. An intentionally flat “stained-glass”-style layout, however appropriate to the subject matter, jives poorly with the minor hints of three-dimensionality and modern perspective (on the chair, the censer, etc.) Better to go with one or the other. Also, the chair is jabbing the demon’s armpit.
My church choir makes us launder our own robes, which gave me the opportunity for photo-reference!
Stay tuned!
Everett
