Deadline Fever

Once again, the hot new blog is Art Evolved -- come for the ceratopsians, stay for the art.

Well, I'm just about crawling out of my skin. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines, and as usual it's only the immediate threat of blowing them that gets me working effectively.

There were the deadlines for Art Evolved. I did two drawings for the Ceratopsians Gallery, as shown in the logo above. Have I mentioned Art Evolved?

Art Evolved.

There's also the deadlines for the Thinking Big show, my initial foray into the world of fine art. I just got my canvas in to be framed today and I'm going to be sliding in just under the wire on that one.

My class assignments? Three prints and the initial version of my promotional packet for the Bonelands series of prints have been done just in the nick of time.

I'll be able to start breathing and get back to writing soon. Sorry to have been off the blog for the last couple of days.

I also owe an apology to M.L. Heath -- I forgot to mention his poetry reading at the LitPunk show. I'm correcting that post but still... Sorry, man. My bad.

It'll Be Hard To Write Titles Without Cussing or A Special Day, Sort Of

Tomorrow, the mystery shall be revealed!

Well, it's dawning on me that the Special Secret Event that's gonna be unveiled tomorrow is going to affect the way I write this blog in an unexpected way. Since it involves having the header image, title, and the first few words of text from this blog appear in what I suspect will be a family-friendly venue, from now on I'll be hesitant to use titles like, "It's My Motherfucking Forty-Fifth Birthday."

There is a certain tragedy in that.

I'm pretty pleased by the last year. I'm tempted to go over my little triumphs point by point, but a) if you're interested, you probably already know about them and b) I may as well save the energy for real masturbation. Let's just say I took some decisive and effective steps toward achieving my ambitions and received unexpected kindnesses from people who helped further my cause.

So what do I want out of the next year?

I want to get my novel off to an agent. This is under my control. I want to get an agent. This, not so much -- but given the quality of the work I'm doing it's not unlikely.

I want to figure out a good venue for my art. I'm not convinced that the fine art scene is where I belong. I'm usually not happy doing work based on specific requests, though, and I'm becoming addicted to seeing my work in large formats. So regular commercial illustration isn't the place for me either. I need to find a way to do what I like and be able to sell it.

If I were to be given a free hand to do illustration and design that would work for me -- but I'm not sure how one winds up in that position. 's what I do for Swill, but that's a special case.

Speaking of which, I want to try and get Swill better distribution. I hate that marketing crap, but it's a really good magazine (he said, eschewing false modesty) and it deserves a wider readership. Right now I'm tentatively trying to get copies to people I admire who I think might like it, since my doing so in the past has produced startlingly positive results, but I want more. I'd like to see it picked up as an annual anthology by a small press publisher with established distribution channels. That would at least put us in a position to throw a few bucks at the writers we publish. The lack of name writers makes the magazine nifty in one way and hard to sell in another. We'll have to see.

I want to develop my drawing skills. The trouble with having so many areas of creativity is that when you ignore a skill set it degrades. My drawing isn't what it has been, and drawing skills provide the basis for much of what I'm doing these days.

Ditto graphic design.

I want to have some kind of product in the marketplace by the end of the year. Nothing wrong with Swill or any of the other fine publications that carry my work, but I want something that people give me money for. It's not a good year for it, I know. And I'm not imagining that I'll be making a living at it. But I want to make that step.

To be more specific, I want to have two calenders available next year. One based on the Bonelands series of prints or the next series of pieces I'm doing for Swill, and one based on the paleontological drawings I'm doing for The Big Secret Project (to be revealed tomorrow!).

I want to have short fiction in at least four different venues.

I want to make some kind of sally at cartooning. An ongoing strip or a comic book is probably too ambitious, given my other projects, but I want to at least take a few stumbling baby steps.

Which is part of a larger long-term creative goal -- to start figuring out how to take my art and my writing and use them in conjunction with one another. I have a big project coming up where I want to use a technique that draws on both illustrated prose and comics... We'll see.

And finally, I want to toughen up a bit emotionally. I am a delicate hothouse flower. I'm polite to the people around me and expect courtesy in return. I've been dealing with a few snotty passive-aggressive creeps and it takes a lot out of me. Some of this comes from the occasional anonymous commenter on the blog -- but most anonymous commenters here are pals of mine. I'd rather deal with the occasional turd than cut my friends off.

So I need to learn how to rise above that shit and shrug it off without resorting to tracking them down and cutting their fucking guts out with a cheap steak knife so I can whisper endearments and prod at their ruined bodies with the dirty tip of my boot and laugh at their screams as the dogs feast...

What am I saying? That's crazy talk. I don't need to grow hard and callous in order to be able to live in the world. I just need to get better at finding these people. Anyone got any tips?

And if you want to meet me, I'll be at the LitPunk reading tonight. It's at the Makeout Room in San Francisco (3225 22nd Street at Mission, about two blocks from the 24th St. BART station), 7:30 to 9:30.

See you there!

Another Tiny Step: A Business Card

So the idea is that this is folded in half, with the eyeball logo in the front and my contact information in the back. When you unfold it you find this...

It's been adapted from the big print I posted a while ago. The practical nature of vector illustration comes into play here -- all the elements in this are separate objects that I can cut and paste and manipulate to my heart's content and they'll print cleanly at any size. Rock on, Adobe Illustrator.

I've got to say that I have had a few thoughts about whether or not it's really a good idea to have a business card that features, well. Gore.

But if you can't handle a dinosaur fight you probably shouldn't think about working with me. Right?

Right.

A Revelation In The Early Morning.

The digital drawing assignment mentioned below involved doing a set of color exercises. When I was done I liked most of them but three were just not strong enough for me to want to print them. Here they are. This one makes me think of either Shaggy from the Scooby Doo cartoons or artificial fruit flavoring.

So I was up in the middle of the night as usual and I was hit by an inspiration as I examined my most recent work for my digital drawing class. I liked it. I was thinking about printing it. I wanted to see these compositions at a large size -- and that's the benefit of Illustrator. I designed eight of these compositions on a letter-sized space and I can print them at any size I want.

But the idea of turning out a series of eight prints based on the work of a few days seemed a little odd to me. If I was going to try and market these as prints... Hmmm. My intuition told me that I just wasn't working hard enough to make these worthwhile art pieces.

The process of generating a print digitally, then printing it digitally seems too easy. What would make the print seem as though it were a real artifact, not something just rolling out of a machine as a standardized unit of production?

These, on the other hand, are unremittingly drab and were clearly done to get the monochrome composition out of the way fast. Next!

And then it dawned on me. Someone in class had printed onto mylar, then mounted the transparency on a piece of textured paper. I thought about Ruth Leaf's prints and how much attention she paid to the paper, to texture -- to the print not simply as image but also as object.

Perhaps this is one of the key differences between the artist and the illustrator. I am going to explore the idea that making the digital print is only one step in the production of an art piece. I want to find ways of using constructive techniques to create artworks using my images rather than simply printing them.

I'm going to start talking to the people in the print lab about printing on paper other than that provided in the lab. This will involve treating the paper with an emulsion that will accept the ink. For now I want to print on some nice Japanese print paper with plenty of foreign objects and irregularities, nose around and see what else is out there.

The assignment here was to depict an emotional state using color. Could anything be more obvious? More clumsy? More maudlin? The van-art gradients aren't helping.

But that's just the start of a possible avenue of exploration. I could decoupage my work onto plywood or chipboard. I could create multilayered shadow boxes. I want to learn about papermaking and bookbinding. I need to find out more, think more about what can be done, physically, with printed images.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Attention! Any Writers Out there? Here's Your Big Chance!

Here's an early version of the cover for Issue Two. You've seen quite a bit of my work from Swill if you've been following the site -- having to illustrate the son of a bitch is the main reason I'm back in the visual arts.

Swill magazine is now eagerly awaiting your submissions. If you write fiction please give us your consideration. Swill is a feisty literary magazine and while it is small of press it is large of publication -- it's printed at magazine size and carries as much wordage as a decent-sized book.

There is no payment. I've been working on this thing for three years now and I haven't seen dime one and probably never will. That's not what the magazine's for...

Swill has received praise from both the literary and the genre fiction communities and is part of the permanent collection at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

We did get a bad review once but they complained about things like gratuitous violence (if someone could explain to me how something as inherently rewarding as violence could ever be gratuitous I'd be interested in hearing your position) and plot while another review said that while we published some genre fiction we were a "necessary corrective" to the current literary scene.

Here's what we're looking for. First and foremost we like stories. Stories with characters, plots, settings, themes, beginnings, middles, and ends. This is why we've been accused of genre-ism -- genre is the last true bastion of conventional fiction.

Look, the moment of quiet epiphany has its place. No doubt. But to see it dominate literary fiction to the degree that it has reminds me strongly of the stranglehold superheroes have in the comic book world -- and a lot of the time people invested in literary or academic fiction respond to a story driven by plot and character the way a lot of comic book fans respond to a work that doesn't feature steroid freaks and boob jobs wearing leotards.

And it's not as if that's all we publish. If we like your piece we'll publish it -- we've published experimental fiction and poetry quite cheerfully.

What do we like? Action isn't a bad thing. Make us laugh and you've won our hearts. Mean what you write. Transgression is always popular with me and Rob -- the best story in our first issue got in partially because it offended both of us, which is quite a trick.

If you're interested go to the site and check out the submission guidelines. (For some reason -- probably having to do with frames -- I can't link directly.) You might want to take a peek at the section labeled "Sean Speaks" as well. If you're a fiction writer it should confirm all your worst fears about what happens to your story once you put it in the mail...

And if you're a reader go wander around. I swear, Swill ain't half bad. I recently wrote to Rob and asked him why doing Swill has turned out to be one of the smartest things we've ever done.

He sent an internet sigh. "It's not like it has much competition."

Fair enough.

Blogcessive Compulsive.

Ruth Leaf taught me how to make linoleum cuts. You can find her site over in my links -- check it out and get an eyeful of some real art. Not everybody gets a mother-in-law of this caliber.

So I've had a problem over the last few days. On Sunday I installed a hit counter on this page and, well...

I can't stay away from it. It's like having a loose cuticle or an itchy scar -- I keep picking at it. I figured maybe a couple of people were looking at this, maybe I was talking to myself. But there were a few more people here than I was counting on -- and the next day there were more. And more.

Then I started posting the Jurassic Fight Club review and on my peewee scale the numbers went through the roof.

But the numbers are deceiving -- it looks as if most people are here for zero seconds. So the typical citizen takes a quick peek and hits the back button when their eyes start to blister. On the other hand someone in Texas was on for more than nineteen hours, so I'm assuming he (or she, of course) left his computer on while he crashed and then went to work.

The map function is ultra hypnotic. Someone in Singapore took a peek? South Africa? Puerto Rico? (Speaking of which, I really want to eat in Singapore and Puerto Rico, while South Africa's Permian fossils call to me...)

Anyone who's curious is welcome to take a look at the numbers -- just click on View My Stats under the hit counter.

So. People are starting to notice this. But who are they? What do they want, aside from more TV reviews?

And more importantly, when the time comes for me to conquer the puny Earth will they heed my call to arms?

Inquiring minds wish to know!