Obscura Estetica

I am participating in an exhibit along with Kristilyn that we have named Obscura Estetica at the Millenium Restaurant, 3094 Washington Street, Boston (Eagleston Square in JP). We're having an opening reception on Thursday, March 14, 6.00PM-8.00PM, so feel free to stop by! The restaurant is nice and informal and has good food. I will exhibit pages I illustrated for Dave Kender's The Ragbox, chapter 5 ("The Salon"). If you can't make it to the opening reception, the pictures are up now and until March 25, so you can check them out!

What else is new? I have stuff for sale at Society6 in case you are looking for some prints, phone cases, and even throw pillows, cards, t-shirts and hoodies. Here are some of the items you can find there:

Voyage Fantastica

This is my very latest illustration, designed by Troy Minkowsky to accompany his steampunk story, Voyage Fantastica, a brilliant adventure story about a boy genius and a cast of unforgettable characters.

Based on Troy's descriptions and mockup-version of the poster, I put this illustration together using a mixed media page as a base (old pages from a book, plus gesso and acrylic paint). I drew the stage part, including the characters, air ship, island and ocean, with ink, then colored it in with watercolor pencils and acrylic paint before I cut it out and stuck it onto the base page. I rubber stamped half of the stars, and then I scanned the whole thing. Because it was a large piece, I had the worst time trying to get it scanned using an oversize color scanner (not a flatbed, but the ones you feed the image into) on short notice. Some places would not let me do it myself, either because that was their policy, or because their scanner was broken. Since I was leaving for Denmark the next day, I didn't have time to wait the few days it would take the places to scan it, so I ended up scanning it in pieces on my own little scanner, then patching the image together in Photoshop.   I used Photoshop to create the rest of the image, including the altered clip-art horses, the color adjustments, ornaments, fonts and the rest of the stars. The original artwork is therefore very different from the finished illustration, as it remains very "unfinished."

As you can tell by earlier blog posts, this is by no means my first project with Troy Minkowsky. Another piece of good news is that Troy's version of the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, which I illustrated earlier this year, has been selected for Gurukitty's next anthology, Once Upon a Time, and will likely come out at the end of this year/beginning of 2013. More on that later!

Another piece of information: my drawings at the Brookline Town Hall will stay up for one more week, as the next exhibitor in room 103 has scheduled to put up her work on August 7th. In this way, there won't be a gap in the continuing exhibits on the Town Hall walls. So if you still want to see the drawings, but just haven't gotten around to it, there is still time!

Hellbound and More Comic Art New England

Happy Halloween! Above is the result of some playing around with pens, paper and Photoshop last night.  Otherwise, I have not been very involved in Halloween preparations this year. However,  several members of The Boston Comics Roundtable got together to create a horror anthology, Hellbound 2, which is out now. To purchase a limited art edition, order your copy here. To read some Hellbound 2 press coverage, click here.

The Comic Art New England exhibit (the art exhibit that opened in connection with MICE and went through October 16th) has been extended until November 19th. This time, the works are on display at NEIA Gallery 303 (New England Institute of Art) right here in Brookline! I am very excited, because this is literally right down the street from me. Opening reception happens this Thursday, November 3, 6-8 PM. New England Istitute of Art is that ahem...modern building across from the Brookline Village t-stop, 303 Boylston Street in Brookline. BCR has a write-up on the exhibit on their web page.  I hope to see you there!