what i'm working on right now

MINI COMIC !!!

2009-08-24T23:22:00.007-04:00

Hey hey

So Joanna convinced me to throw together a bunch of old rusting electronic music pieces into an EP. But the only way I could bring myself to

share these somewhat embarrassing musical

artifacts with the world was by packaging them with a corresponding mini-comic! That tells a fantastical story of how the music came to be! Sort of.

here are the first two pages (I don't want to post the whole thing here ... you should buy the EP when it comes out!)

BALLET CD FOR SALE ONLINE!

2009-08-05T18:36:00.001-04:00

Hello hello!

my ballet CD is now FOR SALE ONLINE at Etsy.com

you can buy it at

plusothergoodstuff.etsy.com

hooray!

thanks for your support!

proof that I'm still alive

2009-05-18T22:49:00.004-04:00

I haven't posted in a while, but summer is here, and I've been working away at songwriting and comics too. Here's a character sketch, and also a little exercise in inking with a nibbed pen. I think I might be sold on nibbed pen inking from now on. For nice variable thickness lines, anyway.

original sketch:

inked:

colored on the computer:

I'd post some song lyrics (they've been coming out a lot lately), but they're all pretty bad on their own. They need music to keep them from sagging too badly. But that's coming, too.

more soon, hopefully.

more work with digital painting

2009-02-22T13:42:00.002-05:00

so I've gotten totally hooked on my cheapy digital drawing software. I've been practicing painting from scratch in a totally digital environment. Yes, I sketched this from a photograph. But I didn't trace anything. And I'm a fan of the textures, most notably the hair. I've been working a lot on hair lately.

this weekend there was an informal coffee shop-style acoustic jam session at the seminary, and I WROTE A SONG AND SANG / PLAYED IT IN FRONT OF PEOPLE! I've never done anything like it before! So I hope to post a recorded version of it at some point.

Also, I composed a lament psalm for piano and erhu that I recorded and will hopefully post soon.

that's all for now.

sprout head

2009-02-16T21:47:00.002-05:00

i'm growing.

(and I suppose that my mental projection of myself wears contacts)

i recently started fooling around with one of thems real pens. you know, the ones that use ink from an inkwell. that's how I made the lines of this drawing. and then i colored it on the computer.

FIRST BALLET CD IS DONE

2009-02-02T20:48:00.012-05:00

it's been a BUSY couple of days.

But my first CD of ballet music is finally done! I started it over the summer at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, and I didn't get around to doing the artwork until this weekend. But it's done and ready for distribution! [special thanks to my wife Joanna for dancing in the recording studio as I was playing the combinations.] [and extra special thanks to Julie Powell for getting this off the ground]

here's the artwork for the cover / back :

and here's the CD art :

and here's what it looks like in real life :

and here's the workspace in the thick of things :

now I take it to the peoples! tell all your dance instructor friends that they need a couple of these for around the house!

EDIT: THIS CD IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR SALE ON ETSY.

go to plusothergoodstuff.etsy.com

thanks so much!

upcoming projects :

> abstract art on recycled paper / cardboard
> more music! (with guitars!)

we made PAPER!

2009-01-17T23:07:00.007-05:00

tonight, Joanna and I had our first paper making fest in the basement! (it's cold down there; i can't really feel my fingers right now)

but it went well, I think. we won't know for at least 24 hours while the paper dries. I'm also a little afraid about the lifespan of this paper ... from Cradle to Cradle I am reminded about the "downcycling" of paper. The tiny network of paper threads weakens with each successive recycling of paper. so this paper may not last very long. But we'll see. At the very least, it looks really cool.

I'm so excited. I've wanted to do this for a while! I hope we can actually write on some of it ...
we're still learning, though. Already over the course of the night we made improvements in our process.

first music post

2009-01-15T09:46:00.004-05:00

yesterday late afternoon I decided to try to compose some music for the prelude of last night's prayer service. It didn't work out, but I was able to come up with some other stuff. here's a sample:

i guess blogger doesn't let you post audio directly, so I filmed a corner of our second bedroom and put it over the music. enjoy a very strange looped short film as you listen to the music.

final poster

2009-01-14T07:37:00.004-05:00

here is the final poster for Ruminate, spring semester 2009! It was sent to press last night. So hopefully it will be all over the campus of Hope College in a week and a half. Or something.

we decided to keep the rings of the pad on the poster.

Digital effects / text / finishing / clean-up by Noah.

Alif-Bits

2009-01-01T21:30:00.009-05:00

Today my friend Nicki told me that Post Cereal will be discontinuing their classic Alpha-bits cereal. I have several theories for this.

1) today's children are so fluent in technology that they prefer to practice writing binary code by eating bowls of Cheerios and Rice Krispies together.

2) today's children must vehemently prefer image to text. Lucky Charms Rorschach pieces must really be that much more exiting than a good old fashioned game of solitaire Boggle with a cereal bowl full of Alpha-bits.

3) Post cereal is thinking globally. They have pulled Alpha-Bits from the American market in order to concentrate their resources on breaking into other world cereal markets. First market: the Middle East ...

first coloring in an anonymous photo editing software

2008-12-29T21:15:00.009-05:00

I was working on some character design for a story about elderly people, and I decided to try to color one of the sketches in an unnamed photo editing software that I downloaded.

not bad for cheap, sort of free software!

The Signs at the End of a Civilization

2008-12-27T18:10:00.008-05:00

Here is another comic, relatively finished! I am still experimenting with different handwritten fonts, character styles, etc. I like this font a lot; I've been working on it for probably six months now. (off and on, not full-time or anything ...)

I like these birds a lot. I don't want to force too much of a story on them, so I will probably just post a new comic about the birds whenever an idea pops into my head.

I really hope to capture entirely different moods with each story. I don't want everything I do to just be esoteric homeschooler humor, so I have been working on some wordless ideas (it's a lot harder to be obnoxiously obscure when you don't say anything) Stay tuned for more comics!

and PS I will hopefully have a piece of music to put on here by the end of next week. But no promises.

one of the best Christmas presents ever

2008-12-24T23:57:00.003-05:00

so, this does not technically fit under the "posting art" purpose of this blog, but it is indirectly related. today my grandfather somewhat spontaneously gave me one of the best Christmas presents ever. It's a collection of the "Great Books of the Western World", published in 1952 ("with the editorial advice of the faculties of the University of Chicago"). In about forty-five volumes, I now have a copy of selected works from Tacitus, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Milton, Hobbes, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kepler, J.S. Mill, Darwin, Freud, Marx, etc etc etc.

I'm sure that many of the translations are pretty outdated by now, but all of the stuff originally written in English is (obviously) still good, and you can never have too many parallel translations of a text! (Cowper's Iliad is so different from Pope or Fitzgerald or Lombardo, that I can often barely tell that they are the same passage.)

So, that's indirect good news for [my] art, because I've just inherited a bounty of artistic inspiration! The greats, all at my fingertips!

PS Last night I whipped up another one-liner comic. I'll post it as soon as I have access to a scanner.

why is it under the greatest stress that creativity jumps out?

2008-12-17T21:53:00.006-05:00

Even though it's the end of the semester and school has been hugely stressful and overwhelming, I have had an unexpected surge of ideas for comics stories. I have not had this many story ideas since I was probably eleven years old. It's both exhilarating and terrifying. It is such a good feeling to not have writer's block! I would much rather be faced with massive amounts of artistic work than a depressingly blank slate! I've already mapped out the script for one of the ideas, but a bunch of other snippets and storyboards are tacked on the wall upstairs, or scattered all over the floor. They range from totally wordless to very dialogue-heavy, from one-frame theological geek jokes to a [potentially] really long story about senior citizens. And also stories about funny looking birds debating literature in a post-apocalyptic setting. Oh man, if just one of these ideas got off the ground, I'd be happy.

Here's some character / car concept sketches for one of the stories.

hopefully hopefully hopefully I can keep this up ...

The Rēd/or 5000 !

2008-12-07T21:39:00.006-05:00

First comic! (on this blog, anyway)

[click to enlarge]

it's pretty rough, but I prefer rough to smoothed-out digital.

i doodle in class ... but i also try to engage with the lecture

2008-12-02T20:11:00.005-05:00

so in class today Mitch (who sits way in the back) was talking, and as I craned my neck to listen to him speak, I quick sketched the guy who always sits three chairs to his right. I don't know his name, but he has a formidable beard.

I'm still pretty new at this whole drawing thing, so little things still excite me.

first r e a l post

2008-11-25T12:48:00.001-05:00

Alright, down to business. Here's a partially watercolored concept sheet for a Ruminate poster that we would be putting on Hope's campus after Christmas break. >

> now it's off to the man with Creative Suite (Noah) for him to work his magic. Stay tuned for the next stage ...

Welcome !

2008-11-25T11:04:00.000-05:00

Hello.

If you've found this blog, you probably know me. If you don't know me, I would love to work for you. I draw pictures, which can tell people to come to your events or buy your cool stuff.

I also play music, which can enliven the aforementioned events.

If you know me, please come back often, as I will be posting art in progress, as well as sound clips of music I'm working on, and (maybe ...) some short story and poem excerpts.

If you know me and like me a lot, please feel free to comment on whatever I post. Criticism too! Help me get better, or better yet, pester me if I haven't posted anything in a while! I want my art to be for other people, so please, feel free to talk to me in the process.

Thanks again for coming. I hope you leave from my blog feeling inspired (how many times have you stepped away from the blogosphere feeling like you just blew two hours that you'll never get back?)