This weekend I’ll be selling my work at the newly created Grand Comics Festival, at 343 Grand Street Brooklyn.

I don’t have anything new from Mocca to sell, in fact my stock of wares needs to be replenished very very badly. Which I guess is just the right excuse to come to the festival before I completely sell out..I did buy a little display shelf for my books, so there’s that.:)

An old coworker of mine recently commissioned me to do some watercolors of her newborn baby. You can see the results above. I was thinking, as I was doing the watercolors, that I’ve really gotten spoiled with crearing on the computer: you can always undo. With watercolors, if you make a mistake, it’s impossible to fix it in some cases. So I was afraid of “overworking” the watercolors, and that it would end up looking muddy.

Here’s something I’ve been working on and off for almost a year now: it’s a family tree of life on Earth. I first had the idea for it when after a trip to the Museum of Natural History where they had displays showing evolutionary pathways between organisms in some of the exhibits. I went to their giftshop expecting to find some sort of ‘tree of life” poster I could buy and hang on my wall to just stare at, but no such luck. So I decided to make my own. I soon found out that some of the information in their exhibits were outdated in some parts, and that there were a lot of competing theories about where certain animals fit in the tree of life. I spent a good 6 months trying to piece together the information myself. Did you guys know that sponges are thought to be a paraphyletic group by some scientists? I didn’t, and I’m still a bit fuzzy on what that means. So given this and other facts I learned while researching, I decided I really wasn’t qualified to see which information was more correct, and ended up buying a book “The Tree of Life: A Phylogenetic Classification”. Basing my tree off the book (if there’s something factually wrong with it, it’s not my fault, it’s the book’s fault) I’ve been comping up a layout on the computer. My problem right now is how to make everything fit in the tree while making them as big as possible… As you can see in the pictures above, I’m figuring out where to place the branches so everything isn’t so squished in. I’m also kinda fixated on making this evolutionary diagram look like a tree even though it may be simpler to make it look like a subway map. So once I’ve figured out the layout of this tree, I’ll have to actually draw the thing.

This weekend I will be sharing a table with fellow “squiders” Alden and Alex at Mocca Fest 2013. I’m paradoxically not super excited. I feel a bit burned out with festivals, and I really shouldn’t be considering I’ve only done eight over two years. We will have the new issue of 3-arm squid to debut at the festival, but otherwise I personally don’t have anything debuting. Part of the reason is that I didn’t want to repeat my stressful experience last year of trying to finish a new book in time, and with the festival moved a month early, it was going to be even worse to meet the deadline.

I thought about finishing the second issue of my “Alien encounters comic”, and I did finish inking a bunch of pages as you’ll see below, but after getting feedback on where I was planning to end the second issue, I decided to hold off until I had more pages finished. The end I had planned wasn’t exciting enough, and the next exciting beat doesn’t happen for another twenty pages or so…Anyway, I’m personally tired of having this project on the back burner for so long, so this year I’m focusing on getting it finished. It’s going to take a while because drawing ants and especially their legs (they’ve got 6 of them) is hard work.

I don’t usually draw buildings or cityscapes because: 1 Drawing cubes doesn’t interest me, and 2 I have a hard time keeping everything in proportion, but here are some sketches I did recently. I think the sketch with the white sky is the best cityscape I’ve ever drawn. I still fudged up the amount of windows in the central building. Oh, and I also drew an office.

Above you can see some panels from my latest comic for the “Three-armed squid” anthology. The rest of the pages, you’ll have to wait until Mocca 2013 to see.

This second issue is based on the four temperaments and my temperament was sanguine (actually my temperament is melancholic according to an online test). I actually had a rough idea for a story from the getgo, but I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work visually within 4 pages. To be honest, I’m not super proud of my submission. For one thing, I’m afraid it’s corny, and secondly, I really need to sit down and focus on mastering the nib pen. For whatever reason, drawing with the the nib pen is very uncomfortable and my drawings end up looking terrible.

So what I just wrote is not very good promotional copy for Three armed squid. Despite my feelings about my entry, it should be a good issue because we’ve got about 8 contributors for this issue, so more awesome stories to read.

Hot of the presses, a new accordion book titled “Heaven and Hell”. I’ve had an idea for a while about doing a book about love / hate because I thought the juxtaposition would be interesting to see. The idea morphed into heaven and hell, even though I’m not religious at all, because I was inspired from some paintings by Tiepolo at the Metropolitan.

I have to say, drawing hell came a lot easier to me, because I know what happens in hell: torture, pain, eternal torment. I know what eternal torment looks like. Presumably, heaven is bliss, but I didn’t really know what that looked like without going the XXX route. Turns out, in most paintings I found, people just chill out in heaven…which is kinda boring. So I made the people in heaven hug each other…while naked. I figure, your clothes don’t have a soul, so they don’t go with you to the afterlife. Also I’m better a drawing naked people than clothed people (that’s because 90% of the figure drawing classes I’ve had were with nudes).

I wanted to submit this book to Printed Matter , which only accepts editions of at least a 100. I had to make this book simple for the sake of my sanity. Making a 100 books by hand is no walk in the park, let me tell you. The whole book fits on one page, printed front and back. There’s no hardcover, it’s just a simple accordion, although I glued gold paper on the cover for the title. As it turns out, it’s going to take 2 months to find out whether Printed Matter will carry my book, but in the meantime it’s available at Desert Island and Recession Art Gallery.

Below you can see the successive steps of silkscreen printing. I forgot to take pictures after printing the second and third colors.

Laura Tallardy was the speaker for the “app-making fun” section of the lecture. She’s made 4 apps, three of which she built all by herself, and one in which she partnered with a programmer. Her apps have been downloaded 100,000 times. Her apps are for children, three are paper doll-type apps where children can dress and customize a character, and one is a simple puzzle app.

App-making consists of four simple steps: have an idea for an app > create the artwork, coding, and sound for the app > test the app > submit it to various app outlets like the Apple store. Apple will sometimes reject an app if the content is questionable, or more often, if there are bugs in the coding. If it’s rejected, you can just fix the bug and resubmit it.

The lecture didn’t delve too deep into the technical aspect of making apps (like programming and funtionality), the core points were that you needed to draw wireframes, that is to say draw sketches of what the app looks like at different points. If you don’t know objective-c or java, there are some softwares you can use to help you build the app like Corona SDK with the Kwik photoshop plugin. The advantage to using Corona is that it will automatically output the app for all devices curently on the market like Android, the nook, kindle, and of course the iPhone and iPad.

To submit an app to Apple of Google, you need to register with them as a programmer first and pay a fee ($99/year for Apple, $25 for Google). If I remember correctly from the app-making class I took 2 years ago (in which I failed to get a grasp of Objective-C), you can only test your app on your device after you’ve registered with Apple. After you’ve tested the app on your device to make sure it runs as intended, you can submit it to Apple or Google. Usually it takes 1-2 weeks to get a response on the submission.

In order to market your app, you need: a website, demo videos, press kit / press release for app review sites, and look into appropriate keywords for your app so people can search for it. An important point that was made is that the app market changes quickly, so it’s best to spend less than 6 months developing the app. Also, there are a couple of different way an app makes money: by selling the app (Apple takes $.30 from every $.99 cent app), by making the app free but selling items/expansions on the app, by putting advertising in the app, or selling the app to a company. So that about covers what I have in my notes. We were given a handout with some links for further reading, but I haven’t looked into the links yet, so more on that later.

The rest of the lecture was with Momonika Maniecki who talked about creating artwork on the iPad. The two main programs she uses are Art Rage and Paper (by 53). As far as stylus go, she uses the ones from PenGo Creative. Not much to report on that lecture, she did a demonstration of the software, said it took about a year for her to get confortable working on the iPad. Since I don’t have an iPad, it’s not something I’m currently interested in pursuing. Right now, I’m focusing on drawing on photoshop with my lo-tech wacom tablet.

Just returned from Miami. Here are some on location sketches I did of people at the airport, zoo animals, and my dog. Also, hidden in there is a portrait of Christopher Walken I drew from the in-flight magazine. One thing I’ve realized though is that in some ways it’s harder to draw people than animals because with people, you have to be careful not to stare at them too long or else they’ll notice you drawing them and it becomes awkward. Not so with animals. And that’s the reason I drew many people sleeping on the airplane: they’re too unconscious to care.