The Dangers of Sappiness

This is a hastily drawn joke between me and a certain person, who finds it impossible to avoid getting sappy on me, which led to me imaging what would happen if he did, actually, get sap on me. (There would be blushing and a huge amount of apologizing, no doubt.)

Sketches from blues dancing

I'm in Portland! As you may have noticed, my art output tends to decline sharply when I've got an exploded tour all over my hands and am trying to make my way cross country. But now I'm safely landed, in Gaylord's Paradise (not a slang term for Portland, in fact, but the name of my house) and I have the opportunity to Make Things again. This is exciting.

Tonight, I went to support one of my oldest friends (who I seem to inescapably keep ending up in the same cities with) at a blue dance competition she was participating in. The environment itself made me hugely uncomfortable- it was like walking into a room where heterosexuality was so thoroughly coded into the action I felt suffocated and overwhelmed by straight people being capital S Straight. The close quarters didn't help much either, of course. I mostly focused on the queer couples and scribbled in my sketchbook until my friend was done dancing.

Text reads: "Planet Queer (is very far away from planet blues dance)". My usual coping mechanism for uncomfortable spaces continues to serve me!

Trapeze

Another one from the sketchbook I kept in Sao Paulo. I went through a pretty difficult time for awhile in Brasil, and as usual, my aerial work helped keep me grounded (....heh) and sane. Sometimes, when I'm in particularly dark places, I feel like my trapeze is all that I'm clinging to to keep myself together.

In pleasanter aerial news, I have a performance in Manhattan this Saturday! It's this event at Santos Party House. I'm excited and nervous-I haven't had nearly enough time to prepare for it because I don't have a studio to rig in back East and I've been relying on the kindness of my friends at the Baltimore Free Farm who let me practice in their warehouse. Send me all the luck on Saturday night, and if you're in the New York area, come out and see me!

Tank Genderqueer

Okay.

Updating daily while in the midst of bringing a show into existence and splitting my time between four cities may have been....ambitious.

But! Here's a sketch I did in Sao Paulo, while watching Tank Girl. It's a gender ambiguous tank creature, who enjoys wearing hot pink tops and whacking things with it's equally ambiguous weapon thing.

It uses it pronouns and enjoys all things neon.

PS. Hundred and first post!

Metanol Recording Session 2: Brian

Apologies for the radio silence- blogger.com went down for a few days, conveniently at the same time that I was consumed with rehearsals. Universe serendipity?

Taking a break from my shameless circus promotion to return to my last days in Sao Paulo, here's the second piece I did during the Metanol FM recording session. My dear friend Brian, of Catharsis and more recently, From the Depths, did a live performance with Vanessa on air and it was....brilliant. Transcendent. Shiver inducing. Over the week I was lucky enough to spend with him in Sao Paulo, Brian explained to me how in the cartoon version of his life, his dreadlocks are highly animated and reflect whatever current emotion he's feeling, so I made an attempt at giving them some life in my drawing.

Metanol Recording Session 1: Vanessa

During my last week in Sao Paulo, I had the ridiculous good fortune to get to sit in on a live radio broadcast at Metanol.fm that two of my friends were performing on air for. I was armed with my sketchbook and a single fine point pen, and spent the three hours of sitting Very Quietly and Listening scribbling away at my impressions of the session. This first one, which was done during Vanessa's set, was an attempt to capture a little of the feel of broadcasting over Sao Paulo and the sense of connection with the city that Metanol created in that tiny space.

I filled in the yellows and blacks with prismacolors later, partially to lose myself in filling in vast amounts of white space with big fuck-off markers, and also to cover up my thumbnail sketches in the top right. The colors ideas came from a set of yellow and black speakers in the corner of the recording room and I was trying to draw disks surrounding the figure as if they were shiny black plastic speakers, to not-quite-accurate effect.

The art of the Wandering Dream Circus, Pt 3

This is the last of the Wandering Dream Circus sketches I did during my trip back to the US- if it hasn't been abundantly obvious by now, I get suffused with creativity when I find myself in any sort of limbo with lots of time on my hands. I'm less enamored of this one, though I like the positions and posing that came out of my initial thumbnail sketch.

Drawing these has made me very sad that I don't actually have a giant moon to do aerials on (or trapeze boots that go to my thigh, or hair that actually looks like that). Being as the hair and boots are unlikely to come into my life outside of drawing, I'd settle for a Moon's Eye for all my future airborne play.

Too Much Coffee

Another in my series of "this is what I've been up to while traveling" comics. The aforementioned coffee (which was DELICIOUS) is actually responsible for three other comics aside from this one because I couldn't sleep for the LIFE of me that night.

I am slowly learned how to shade with some amount of skill. I brought my set of greyscale brush pens with my on vacation, and they're getting a workout.

That's my "going to a nice restaurant better femme up" look, btw. I didn't actually own any girly heels until about a month ago when my friend Dan gave me a pair of his for my birthday. Dan's a rockstar like that.

Reading Bubble

I need to work on my shading, but the comic journal idea is good practice. I could really use some greyscale prismas making my life easier, but c'est la vie.

James is the reason for this one- James and his stupidly good reading suggestions.

VACATION.

I'm back in Baltimore, which means a veritable fuckload of journal comics from my travels and the craziness of coming back to my high school hometown. Last night I drank a bunch of coffee and inked a mess of them, so more to come on a semi-regular basis.