Year End Round-Up!

This is the blog post where I publicly acknowledge that I am quite terrible at blogging, and that I missed a bunch of art and publications that I did.

First up, my work on the Honestly, Dara column for Experience Life, by way of fantastic AD Lydia Anderson, which I've not posted the last 5 times I've been published there. 

The Cure is in the Kitchen, September.

Tapas Party!, October

A Caloric Evolution, November

Consider the Raisin, December

I also am the proud creator of an emoji.  If you buy the Game of Thrones emoji pack from ...somewhere, you can be the proud user of the George R. R. Martin emoji, to pep up any sort of text or online conversation where such a thing would be applicable.  While I myself never use emojis, preferring to write out me emotional states longhand, this is available via the proud folks at Random House, AD David Stevenson.

And I can't forget the funnest job I've had all year, illustrating the poetry section of WHURK! magazine.  Since the magazine is free to read online, I can include the entire print page on my blog!  Ha ha, the future is great!

I even did the cover for the November issue, highlighting the Khan family a la American Gothic.

I'm on a bus

More specifically, my art was chosen by the fine folks at the Tom Tom Festival, and by my slavish social media followers, to adorn the side of the #2 bus, which goes to Wegman's.

Possibly my entry was the only one driven by spite, as I have been wanting to draw me some feathered dinosaurs ever since Jurassic World made a debacle of anatomy and science on the big screen and no one else cared quite as much as I did.

So now you can see that Velociraptor was a fluffy, knee-high predator, Stegosaurus held its tail far above your puny head, and Spinosaurus had stumpy little legs like a toddler crocodile.  Also, Protoceratops looked like a pig, and was probably delicious.

Here's the press release, written up by my studio-mate Madeleine Rhondeau.

Missiles-- Engage!

The biggest news out of my and Cameron's trip to France was that we got to see Victor Hugo's house, whose portrait is pictured here:

Also, we happened to get engaged.  Here's a blurry picture of the ring:

Cameron has probably written extensively, and betterly, about it on her blog, found here, but I thought I would add my side of the story, a few weeks later.

I had been planning to propose to her when we took vacation, since we never really got to go on vacation together last year.  And it just so happened that we decided that Frrance was the best place to vacation in April.  Scratch that, October.  It was originally April, but life got in the way, and I couldn't complain, since I didn't get around to buying a ring until August.  Thank you, mom, for the stone.  I'm sure my wallet would have committed suicide if I'd had to buy a diamond too.

My plan was to duct tape the ring to the inside of my wallet and chain that to my pants once we got through airport security, and then somehow secretly untape it and present it to her on the first full day of our trip, at Monet's Garden, on the Japanese bridge, or maybe a little off the bridge, since I was very, very scared of dropping it in the water.  I also planned to shanghai some unsuspecting tourist into filming the proposal on my phone.

The lesson I took from that first day is you don't make plans, because they will all go to pot and you'll miss the train to the place and waste $60 in unrefundable ticket fare, but it was probably for the best because it rained most of the day anyhow.  We bought tickets for the following Monday.  And I STILL had to walk around Paris with a very expensive piece of jewelry in my wallet, sending invisible signals to all the pickpockets in the area.  At one point, Cameron lost her credit card at Shakespeare and Company, which is a great store where they speak English, so I didn't mind going back there at 7 to retrieve it.

Since it was plain to me that first day that the trip was clearly destined to be a series of ever-wackier and more expensive misadventures, I decided that the sooner the ring was on Cameron's finger and out of my pocket the better.  The cafe we ate dinner in was too small to properly propose in, so I procrastinated until right before we were about to go to bed, and after thinking really hard about what the most romantic thing to say would be, softly blurted out, "marry me?"

She said yes, and made me untape the ring from my wallet and we found out I'd gotten it a size too big, but the rest of the trip was pretty good and when we finally got to Monet's garden the sun came out.  Here are some pictures.

The Streets of France

In other news, I went to France in October with my now fiancé.  The two biggest thins we didn't see were the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, on the reasoning that they are big, and therefore hard to walk around.  Since Cameron documents most of the exciting tourist stuff (the link goes to her photo-heavy blog) I took it upon myself to document much of the street art we passed that I insisted we stop and take pictures of.

This was in the 10th ...district.

Next to the Pompidou.

Montmartre, near where Picasso and Van Gogh used to live.

Also in Montmartre, closer to the Moulin Rouge.

Near that cemetery where Jim Morrison isn't buried.

Next to one of the canals by our Airbnb.

On a side street, near the Academy of France.

Inktober

In celebration of Inktober, here is a selection of the drawings I did during that month.

Ambidextrous Me

After a chat with my good bud Russ, who is a permanent studio artist at the McGuffey Center, I have decided to sort of attempt to try to be ambidextrous.

My work is extremely loopy, and I've noticed over the past few years that I definitely have a tendency to make everything slant to the right because that's the way my right arm moves. Trying to balance it tends to make everything look stiff, so the best solution is clearly to learn to draw with both hands, and possibly also my feet.

I haven't yet done any finished art with my left hand, but I do have a pile of sketches I've been working on.

In other news, I just finished two zines, which I handed out sporadically at the Small Press Expo two weeks ago, and which I will be debuting at the Richmond Zine Fest this weekend.