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