animalsleepstories: August 2013

The Projects is the name of an annual interactive arts event here in Portland featuring visual arts, music and performance, bringing local and out-of-town artists together in a collaborative atmosphere, with fun workshops, performances, art shows and more! Here are some of my photos from the Projects workshops. At one point I looked up from my drawing and saw at least 60 people totally focused and completely involved in their art projects. It was so cool, every single person I could see was busy making wonderful things!

My apologies on the crummy photos, I am a lousy photographer. If you see your photo here and want it removed, or labeled with your name let me know or if I mislabeled you I'm sorry!

A visiting artist from Mexico painting a mural. If you know his name please let me know!

A bunch of us getting goofy in the jungle photo booth!

Suzette Smith leading a myth-making workshop.

Patrick Keck painting paper puppets for Marsuplala's time-lapse

project.

Manny Reyes (sadly I didn't get any pics of him making wigs!) led a wig-making

workshop. The wigs were super fun and folks looked great wandering around making art

in them.

Sean Christensen led a sexy post-office comics-making workshop.

The amazing artist Edie Fake works on comics beside cartoonist Graham Kahler who was

designing a beautiful book cover for the future zine publication of these comics.

And you can see the back of Nusha Ashjaee's

head as she writes fun words into someone else's comic strip.

Painter, animator and cartoonist Amy Kuttab

paints a paper puppet for Marsuplala's time-lapse

moving painting project.

Bwana Spoons led a driftwood totem pole making workshop.

The cumulative effects of a bunch of folks painting on these things and adding stuff ended up working really well.

Souther Salazar had this great installation there. Tons of tiny details to look at. This photo doesn't even capture the cotton clouds floating overhead or the hot air balloons dangling in the sky.

Edie Fake's new captivating illustrations were up for the event also.

So great!

accidental image

I was working on my animation and at one point my screen looked like this and I really liked it.

giraffe

sax cat

costume making mayhem

me and sean christensen, opera making in progress for the upcoming gridlords event in Portland, OR!

click here for more info.

tree ghost?

collage

wrinklies

Making a silkscreen: phase 1

People often ask me how I make my silkscreens and how long they take to make so I thought it could be fun to document and explain the making of a print from beginning to end.

I started this dinosaur drawing about 6 weeks ago.

I wanted to make a new silkscreen with dinosaurs in it. My first drawing

uses the same dinosaur character I designed for a print about 4 years ago but combined in a new pose with a different background.

I wasn't happy with that dinosaur drawing and decided I needed to come up with some new dinosaurs so I spent the day drawing different dinosaur heads to figure out what I wanted these guys to look like.

Somehow from those sketches I ended up with these guys. Here is an early stage of the 2nd version of the drawing. The composition here is working much better than in the first drawing.

I usually do my drawings on small sheets of recycled paper, so you can see I ran out of room on the piece of paper I was using. I have a collage style approach to developing my scenes so I tested out some variations with different add-ons. Below you can see how I taped them together to make sure I liked how it worked.

At this point I decided to do a little research on plants. I drew a variety of prehistoric plants and also just plants that looked right for the piece.

I ended up using the agave plant I drew above, converting it into a kind of palm tree.

I also used the strange cactus-like rosette shaped plant above a few times in the foreground.

I glued the new parts onto the drawing, added paper to empty spots and filled in the drawing to make it a 12 x 16 inch piece.

This is how the drawing was yesterday. It's almost done, I just have to fill in the bottom left corner and fix a few things. The next step will be designing color separations for the silkscreen.