The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles probably had more of an impact on me than anything else I can think of, and yet I never think to sit down and draw them.
Well no more! From now on I will periodically draw a ninja turtle! And why not some muppets too? Ands some greys.
Here are more old sketches from my previous sketchbook. At the time I had just bought a Pentel Brush Pen, and I was still trying to figure out how to ink with a brush.
Thanks to practicing with a brush pen, I’ve actually started using a brush for a lot of my comics.
My process is now as follows: pencil, brush, G-nib, crow-quill, a pin with a speck of ink on it, microscopic laser etching, erase pencils. And you’re done!
Here are a couple of sketchbook pages from my backlog of sketchbook pages. I was drawing Super Mario while watching Purple Rain with some friends, and I’ll be damned if Prince didn’t sneak his abusive ass into the page.
If you haven’t seen Purple Rain,I wasn’t really paying attention, but it’s about Prince not compromising his artistic integrity by slapping women or something.
I’d recommend the Mad Magazine parody, “Purple Acid Rain” instead.
There was a week or two before SPX when all I did was complain about how busy I was. My apologies for those around me who had to listen to my whining. I had taken on way too much work between illustration gigs, reprinting comics, and starting my second year at the Center for Cartoon Studies, not to mention spending time with visiting family members.
It was worth it though! Sure I may not have finished the weird little comic I wanted to sell at SPX, but I did get to do a lot of work for Prairie Dog and Planet S and their big Back to School special.
A friend of mine started a cooking blog, and she asked me to design the masthead for the site. BUT it’s a sassy cooking blog called Sassy Simmerings, so the masthead looks like this:
Gone are the days when thirteen-year-old Dakota would attempt to draw sexy ladies, then erase them, then crumple up the paper, tear it up, and toss out the pieces in several different garbages so that no one could ever possible reconstruct his terrible, dark secret. So needless to say, I was a little out of practice, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. If nothing else, I was reminded that looking at and drawing women in various states of undress might sound like a cakewalk, but it’s difficult work. I also want to mention that I’m really trying to avoid any inadvertent double entendres right now.
Anyway, if you like recipes that are easy to make, tasty, and often vegetarian, vegan (or at least possible to make them so), OR if you simply like to to be frequently reminded that sex exists, then this is the site for you!
Also, here is the page where they say nice things about me and my alleged virility.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a proper post on this dusty old blog of mine. Classes at the Center for Cartoon Studies have been keeping me pretty busy, and I’ve been preparing to table at the MoCCA Festival this weekend in New York … not to mention the top-secret side project I’ve been working on(!)
Leave Luck to Heaven is a 32 page minicomic about the two gamers who occasionally show up in my Dailies. Take a peak inside…
Did I mention that there’s a colour spread in the book and that the whole thing looks like an NES instruction manual? If you feel like you’re not getting enough spiritual and aesthetic fulfillment from your video games, this book can help.
Also debuting at MoCCA is Holy Shit: A Comics Anthology. This is the book I did with Amelia Onorato, Moody, and Sean K., last year, and it’s finally available to all who are holy or shitty. This book is 64 pages, with a gold screenprint cover, faux-gilded edges, and a ribbon bookmark to keep your place as you read through our reactions to religion.
Also available at this show: Fable Funnies, and a full colour mini with 24 of my favourite non-autobiographical Dailies!
So, to my tens of readers out there, if you’re in New York on April 9th and 10th, I hope you’ll take in the comics madness that is MoCCA. I’ll be at table M-1 with Andy Warner, Billage, Melanie Gillman, and Nate Wooters. In fact, there is going to be a metric ton of CCS pals it this general area. Just think, an infinite nunber of cartoonists all under a single roof…
Hope to see you there!
In my other life, I do improv. There’s a nation-wide high school tournament in Canada called the Canadian Improv Games. I played on my high school’s first team in 1998. Since then I’ve volunteered for the Games, doing everything from delivering workshops, to hosting and helping to run the tournaments in Regina in Montreal.
Since about 2001, I’ve done illustrations and/or designed the poster for the Regina tournament. Here’s the poster for this year’s tournament:
And of course, you can’t have a tournament without tickets!
The Improv Games are often referred to as a ‘loving competition.’ And if the 1980s taught us anything, it’s that love is best personified as a bear shooting laser beams out of its stomach.
I’m really sad to miss Regina’s tournament this year. This will be the first time since 1998 that I won’t be present at a Canadian Improv Games tournament. Hopefully I’ll still be able to feel the tummy lasers from across the border.