As Far As You Take Me That's Where I'll Believe

The Smashing Pumpkins - Porcelina of the Vast Oceans

I was listening to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness - this song in particular - a lot while drawing these. The album first came out when I was a sophomore in high school and it really blew my mind. I'm obsessed with the entire early 20th century art style and this album was gas on the fire. It rekindled my love of Windsor McKay's Little Nemo in Slumberland and Frank R. Paul's original science fiction illustrations. Porcelina of the Vast Oceans is - in my opinion - one of their finest love songs and yeah it brings out the hopeless romantic in me. The whole album does and I can't wait for the remastered five disc behemoth to hit this December. Anyways, onto the show...

All the best,

Zak

With Words Unspoken

The XX - Angels

It felt so pure inside when you took my life.

A Place to Bury Strangers - You Are The One


A couple of heres and there's from the past month or so. The newest issues of Midspace are coming along amazingly well. Expect some announcement sooner or later on some other stuff I've been doing.

We are like a wishing well and a bolt of the electricity

Fiona Apple - Werewolf

Lonely ghosts

Pontiak Beardy band - my kinda dudes.

I draw for the Timberline Draw Blog - a bunch of us Colorado comic book artists collective kinda thing. We draw a new subject every week to keep our skills on point & to have some fun. This is Pris from Blade Runner. I've finally had some time to work with them so this is my first one in a bit. As always you can click to enlarge.

Cheers - Zak

Aurora Rise

This weekend I'll be taking part in two very big charity events here in Denver. The first is at 3 Kings Tavern TONIGHT starting at 8pm. You can find out more information about the show and the benefit concert we're putting on at the like here:  RISE!

I'll have these two pieces up that will be auctioned off at a later date in support of the Aurora Families by the Denver Comic Con.

The next big show is Saturday and Sunday. It's called Aurora Rise and it'll be at ALL C'S Comics! I'll be there on Saturday doing sketches and all the proceeds of those go to the charity for the victims in Aurora. So come on out and have a good time with us! Here's some more info:

I've donated this Johann Kraus piece for the silent auction:

Thanks and I hope to see ya there!

I can't tell one from another; I found you or you found me.

Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)

You know the drill - music to accompany the blog post because the two are hopelessly intertwined for me. Although this one is a little different; it's my favorite Talking Heads song. It's one of those few rare songs that makes the entire world melt away. I just sit back and smile.

I was going to write a long ass blog entry but man I just want to let my work speak more these days. So here we go!

These three images are from my previously mention Spacegirls post. I put them up at a gallery show in June.

Business card design for my friend and amazing performer, Ann.

Finally a new portrait ... thing. I've been working hard with texture lately. I've fallen for graphite and watercolor. The Spacegirls were done with both but this is my first time coloring over it. Expect Midspace #2 to look a lot like this!

A couple of quick items - this weekend I'll be doing sketches at All C's Comics in Aurora, CO to benefit the Aurora shooting victims. Steve Niles, Mike Mignola & Matt Fraction will all be there as well so come on down and say hi! Here's some info: Aurora Rise I'll be donating an original Johann Kraus drawing from the BPRD for the silent auction. Having lived near that theater and frequented it a lot in my early days here that all hit way too close to home. So I'm doing everything I can to help them out!

Graphite & Sass

So yeah it's been a long old time since I posted! We've been hard at work on Midspace and a couple of other big rockin' projects! So for now you'll have to feast your eyes on one of three of my pieces from the gallery show this last month. I've been using lots of graphite lately because I love that texture!

So here ya go -- more to come soon!!

I got no heart 'cause a she-devil stole it.

So the time has finally come - announcement of pure amazing!

For the past year my best friend Nick and I have been plotting and working on our own creator owned book called Midspace! Being two nerds that love our space and dirty jokes rife with satire we just weren't finding anything on the stands that really spoke to that. Man there's SO MUCH that takes itself just way too seriously in the comics industry. And if I can just quote Jack Nicholson's Joker on that : "This town needs an enema!" Of course it all comes back to poop jokes... so we decided; ya know what? Screw it. We can do this just as well if not better than anyone else out there! And here we are!

Issue #1 hits on the first day of the Denver Comic Con on June 15th and we'll have plenty of books there and for sale at Bartertown Comics here in town. You can also email about copies and we'll get one shipped out to ya. Signed with a sketch of whatever Midspace character you want. Most everyone is on the cover...

Speaking of! Here's the cover for issue 1!

Sweet balls, huh?! Here's an interior page as well to get your brain going:

I did it all in black and white - the gray tones are all inkwash. No digital crap here kids. I wanted to do a space epic that had the feel of Bernet's Torpedo and McCloud's Infinite Kung Fu. Something a little more nuanced than your typical comics. Don't get me wrong, I love color and we'll definitely go all Ted Turner on this book someday with the color but for now I'm really happy to be working in black, white and ink wash. It's all about the texture for me. 

Anyhoo... so a couple of links will give you more of the skinny here!
Here is my page for the Denver Comic Con: Zak Kinsella I'll be in artist's alley all three days at table #123! We're right on a corner next to all the celebrity signings so maybe that'll mean I can score a date with Lauren Cohan from The Walking Dead. Hubba hubba! Haha anyways come by and say hi. I'll be doing sketches, selling books and probably making sarcastic comments that will piss off plenty of people. 

Midspace has a page! So please click on it to become a fan! We'll be doing some contests for original art coming soon so keep an eye out there!

Midspace

Promote Your Page Too

And FIIIIINALLY we're going to be having a HUGE release party at Unit E downtown with Nick's band Glass Homes, The A.M. Pleasure Assassins, AND one of my favorite artists (Mike Allred) has his band The Gear playing too! That's at 9:00 p.m. Saturday June 16th at Unit E downtown so be there! We'll have copies of Midspace, art up on the walls to dig out and food / drinks to get blitzed with! 

And now that I've written this damn blog I'm going to go brain out to some Grand Theft Auto 4 because I haven't played X-Box in like 5 months. 

Cheers!
Zak 

Spacegirls

Later this year I plan on doing a pretty large size gallery show of my own. I've alway participated in gallery shows but never had my own. I just never knew what I wanted to focus on. Then the diarrhea mess that is my Facebook newsfeed came along to strike inspiration. Growing up a comic fan you're kind of inundated with dudes that just love drawing women with rockin' huge tits and in amazingly skimpy clothing, along with teeny waists and just ridiculous curves. Now, let's just get one damn thing straight... I love the ladies. No questions about that! But I also have my own taste, and let's be honest; any hornball artist can draw pinups with women in nearly nothing fighting demons, or monsters and shit. And I say fighting like... MAYBE slightly striking. A sort of hapless expression on them. Bringing that back to that Facebook... I get to see image upon image of women in pinups. Mostly with awful high school comic art - you know the guys still emulating the 90s Image art style instead of taking what they liked from that and making their own style out of it. And yes there's a huge market for that, but if you've ever had to deal with those people at a table at a con breathing their rotten breath around & talking about nipples showing through shirts you quickly realize it's one no one should have to be a part of. 

At least that's how I feel about it. I'm basically tired of softcore starring the X-Men or Alice in Wonderland. Yeah we get it, you're a pervert. Not my scene & I'm done with it.

So finally I said to myself, you know what? Fuck that! I've had the pleasure of having a rather consistent female fan base (which is super cool - I get some great conversations out of it!) so I wanted to do a series that would not only show off my tastes (Space bonanza!) but hopefully be something women could take home, put on the wall and feel good about in their comic book fandom. Another thing that came along that really inspired this was Beth Phoenix of the WWE. Last year she coined a phrase "Pinup Strong" and I really thought it was an awesome concept so hopefully you'll see a lot of that philosophy in the months to come of these. 

This is the first set of these in various forms of completion (I get them done when I have the chance *cough* slowly *cough*) and I want to add some more shapes and races into the mix. I'm planning on doing between 30 or so, having a gallery show and maybe doing a small print run as a flip book or something. I already have buyers lined up for them too so I'm pretty stoked. It's a personal project I've been wanting to do so I thought why not! So let me know what you all think!

zak

Until We Met.

YACHT - I Walked Alone Yeah we saw YACHT last weekend at the Larimer Lounge. Great show - lots of goofballs there! Loved every minute of it!

Anycrap - coupla things, if you will. Hard at work on these books and freelance so I have like zero time right now. Glarg.

Overcasters shirt - came out great! Band was happy with it so I was jazzed! Go see'em live if you live in Denver. They rock!

Overcasters Shirt by ~spicypeanut on deviantART

This is the playground I designed for a show in L.A. I should have a much better picture of this soon - it's HUGE... way too big for a scanner.

Squidground by ~spicypeanut on deviantART

And finally here's a page from our book which hits in June: Midspace.

Midspace Pg. 2 by ~spicypeanut on deviantART

And hey! A color panel!

Busy bee. More crap to post soon!
Zak

KatyGram vol 1

I have a character I've been saving for awhile. Something I work on in my Bristol sketchbooks. I was gonna keep her secret but she wasn't having it. So here's Katy. I'm gonna update her as Katygrams on my Instagram every so often.

Meet my Katy.

None of These Faces Matter

Faces - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I have not been able to get the above song out of my head for a solid week. That's how music works in my brain. I get obsessed with a song/band - especially if they're lighting me on fire when I'm drawing. Yeah Yeah Yeahs always do that for me. I love dancing to them, aaaaaaaand way to sound like a 22 year old girl.

Anycrap, so there's not going to be any art (gasp!) in this post. I was just thinking about 2012 already being a super busy year already and I never really put down some thoughts on 2011. Kind of a weird thing for big mouth here, but well, I've been busy and slightly too lazy to be all Livejournal. I like to keep this as a blogfolio in lieu of this huge redesign I'm working on for an honest to God portfolio site. But uh, so yeah 2011? Good and bad. I think one of the best things professionally was the offer from Shane Houghton to work with him on a comic series for Image comics. A book for one of the larger companies in comics? Yes please. I also started rolling hardcore on freelancing full time. Working for the NYT and a couple of other magazines as ala carte jobs needed to end and I just wanted to draw all day long. So I widened the net and wow... I have been pulling in tremendous amounts of work! It's been amazing the connections and friends I've made through it. I feel pretty well blessed ever so thankful for deciding to put in the hard work towards it. You see a lot of people never go for their dreams, and ya know what? Screw that. I'm too damn stubborn not to. The bad - well I won't call it a pyrrhic victory but I jettisoned my day job in August after the death of my uncle, Ben. They didn't want to let me go to his funeral in Texas and I wasn't about to take that shit lying down. So I left anyways and when I got back I came back to no job. So it's been interesting since then... but I'm glad I stuck to my guns and chose my family. That's the Texan in me - screw you if you jack with my family. I'll gladly give ya my two fingered salute.

So not having a full time crap job has opened up so much and here's what I'm looking forward to in the 2012. I'll have potentially three book releases. The Image title I mentioned up there is gonna be rad! I have a Calvin & Hobbes style book coming out hopefully by June/July for San Diego Comic Con called Empirically Single that I'm pumped to get to working on here. And finally my "baby" project I'm working on currently with my best bud, Nick. I'm doing the whole book with an ink wash and the only thing I can really say that it's about is space shenanigans. We're letting down our hair and telling our own random story of mayhem in space. I blame Star Wars. Secret lover... Illustration wise I've been up to my eyeballs with t-shirt designs and magazine spread work. My favorite thing I have on my plate is a huge piece I'm doing for a gallery show in Los Angeles based on playgrounds of yore (my youth in the 80s) where they were tall, dangerous monstrosities that parents & lawyers totally ruined in the 90s. Jerks. So we're trying to bring it back in a huge show and the most popular piece will be chosen as something they're actually gonna make. So my mind is exploding with ideas and yeah you'll see some more for that soon. I went a little retro / Futurama space design for it. So fresh.

Right, so that's my 2011 and upcoming for 2012. This year I'll be appearing at Denver Comic Con (June 15-17th here in the Mile High City) San Diego Comic Con (July 11-15th) and hopefully at the New York City Comic Con (October 11-14th). That last one depends on some book deadlines.

So enough about me! Thanks for reading up and all of your support!
Chuckles

Gathering of the Clouds Shirts

Hey, so if you're a local to the Denver area you can buy my shirts and enjoy some kick ass music at the end of February at the 2012 Gathering of the Clouds!

The band Overcasters hired me on to do some tshirts for their kick ass band to debut at The Gathering of the Clouds happening here in Denver on Feb. 23-25th. So like I said, if you're local come on down and get trashed, listen to some great music and buy some shirts! I know you want my sexy skulls on your chest... mmmm sexy.

My buddy Nick's band Glass Homes is the ONLY band that was chosen to return this year so yeah - get on down and see them too!

So here's the goods!

Instagram O Rama vol. 1

So anyone who follows me on the twitter (@zakkinsella oh you didn't know?!) knows I love that Instagram! If you're a user it's pretty easy to find me - my handle is ZakKinsella. Incredible I know. Right, so here's a bunch of Instagram pics of works in progress and stuff I never post on the site here. It'll be fun like that. I've grown a bit of a following from the Suicide Girls on there so you may see a few familiar faces if you're familiar with the site. I also did a gang of Royal Rumble sketches this past weekend... So enjoy and like I said feel free to look me up if you use Instagram!
Zak