Boy oh boy was I so excited to be somewhat up to date with technology and be able to watch videos all the time on the computer. But no. Basically I’m like the kids in Wet Hot American Summer, “We’d need some kind of super mainframe computer, and we for sure don’t have one of those.” Streaming videos blow. There’s always some Flash ad in the corner taking up all my bandwidth! The timing of jokes and the momentum between them always gets ruined by buffering! Eventually I figured out that if you press Pop Out on Hulu, you can hide the other window and watch more than a frame per second. It seems like it’s a lower-res version too, which should be easier to find.

Anyhow, I wish everybody could go to cartoon camp. We play soccer on Sundays and we draw comics for homework. There are only three bars in town and one is too snooty (but I work at it, which works out well for tips), and another too scary. So there is one bar filled with cartoonists. Even if it wasn’t for it’s Goldilocks just rightness, I think I would love this place. It’s in a basement and it’s named CJ’s. They do turn the lights on pretty bright for a bar though.

In other news, in cartoon studio, the class, we all wrote down an emotion, an animal and a job and then each got one of each. I got ebullient mouse barber. The consensus was that his ears could be rounder, so as to distinguish him from a gerbil or a Guinea pig. Check check:

So much has happened in the last month, and I haven’t told the internets a thing about it! For one thing, there was a scare going around that people using the older versions of WordPress were getting there shit hacked and all their files deleted. This scare triumphed over my fear that if I updated WordPress it would be incompatible with my old Flash player on my out-of-date Firefox and my what-the-hell-cat-was-that? operating system. Well, it turns out that first fear was well-founded because once I updated my WordPress, I couldn’t do nothin with it.

But! Josh, one of my new friends here at my new school had an old upgrade disk for OS 10.4 – Tiiiigah Styyyyle. Now (you can stop reading if this is too nerdy), since my aging computer’s CD/DVD drive is busted, I couldn’t just stick it in the computer. I had to pop it in Caitlin’s old laptop, start it up in external hard drive mode (which happens if you connect the two computers with a firewire and hold down the T button on the one of them). This worked, and thus the little PowerBook was also an external disk drive! Hurray! But then, while the new printer drivers that I don’t need were installing, the shit crashed. My computer was dead. I installed the Tiger on the laptop and today I did some searching around to figure out what to do. I was able to do the old hookup trick and then hold down the Option key on the big computer so I could tell it how to boot, and lo and behold, it all worked! I feel like I’m in the future with this fancy Firefox 3 and this crazy Dashboard application!!

I’ll try to catch youse up on what else has been going on in subsequent posts. I’ve got plenty of drawings to show you and that’s for sure. In the meantime, here comes one from my first drawing class. We were to draw a man made object in outline, Xerox it thrice, then on one draw in high contrast, on two draw in gray, and on three draw in both. This is the third version of the White River Junction train station. It’s pretty cold up here.

Just before moving away to Comicsland, I had to finish up Guns, Germs, and Steel to give it back to Todd after borrowing it for something like nine months. The whole argument of this book is that the course of human history is basically an accident of geography. Essentially, Jared Diamond fills thousands of pages making a very thorough argument that the only reason Europeans got to kick everybody else’s ass is that crops, livestock and ideas can diffuse really easily throughout the gigantic landmass of Eurasia. He say the grasses that grow naturally in the Middle East (like wheat and barley) helped with a food production head start there, too. Also, the big docile animals in Eurasia didn’t die out as soon as people showed up (as they did in Australia and the Americas), partially because they got a chance to evolve with us as we were just becoming homo sapiens. Seemingly the African animals were on to us from the beginning, and have never trusted our species.

Diamond mentions in the last chapter that had African knights been able to domesticate rhinos and hippos, they would have mowed down sissy European horses and stomped all over the Mediterranean and who knows where else. That def put an image in my head. This was a bottom-up drawing, and the rhino wound up pretty tiny compared to its knight, but I still think it’s cool enough to show youse. As soon as I stopped drawing it, I also thought about how awesome these two would look in full armor, but that’s another story. Rhinoceroses already look like they’re wearing armor anyhow. Maybe Todd will draw them in proportion and with lots of metal plates and leather and muscles and stuff. You hear me Todd? That’s a mission!

The one nice thing about moving away is that suddenly all of my friends want to see me all of the time (and if they don’t, obviously they’re not my friends). I’ve been inebriated at some point of almost every day for the last two weeks.

Before our tearful goodbyes, Dan McCool and I had two days of serious brotimes. On Monday we got stoned, we walked all over the Village, we were this close to getting matching T-shirts at Uniqlo, but there was nothing good in Dan’s size, although we did get cool sunglasses on the street and we also looked at this sweet mural at Houston and the Bowery. As we were chomping down on some falafel, I got called to duty making corrections on not one, but two, illustration jobs. This was a big disappointment because it cut our broday short. We were hoping to have an afternoon Drawing Adventure, but had to go home instead. We made up for it by jammin’ on some comics, one of which is below, the other of which is on Dan’s blog. If you can’t tell (again, that probably makes you not my friend), I kicked this one off, Dan continued it, and backsy-forthsy all the way. We did the two simultaneously so we could both be drawing at once. (If you click it, you’ll enlarge it.)

Well friends, it’s countdown to Escape from New York. I’m really sad to go. I love this place, and I love all my pals that live here. But I’m leaving this Saturday.

I’ve been meaning to show the page below for a long time. It’s from a few months back when I was fleshing out chapter one of Petrified Girlfriend (only available in the impossible-to-read-titled Oak & Linden – I’ll make an Etsy page or something when I move to Vermont if you’re interested in a copy, Blogiverse). You may recall that Caitlin and I stomped around the Museum of Natural History taking reference pictures for it. Well, a pivotal moment occurs in the Hall of Ocean Life, which has had a wonderful lighting effect ever since it was remodeled sometime this decade. The hall’s skylights, which were painted over in the let’s-paint-over-everything 1960s, are illuminated with the blue, shifting ripples that you see on the sand under the ocean water. It’s gorgeous. And it took me a while to figure out just how to depict it, as you can see. This objet d’art features some coffee stains by me and also one of my collaborator Caitlin Martin’s inimitable lists.

Caitlin and I are in the process of moving downstairs. The new place has a bit less square footage, but way more cubic feet cause the ceilings are twice as high. The huge windows bring in more light, the kitchen is a better shape, there’s a little deck on the back, and a marble “ornamental” fireplace in the front. Real estate. New York. It’s pretty nice, but I’ll only live there for a month before I run away to Vermont and Cait finds a roommate. This further solidifies the fact that I’m leaving for real which is quite distressing. Of course, the idea is I’ll be back next summer to do the second year from Brooklyn, but I don’t know. I don’t know how I’ll be able to pay rent here while I’m still in school. I wish at least one of us had rich parents. I don’t even care if that would make me a brat anymore. I just want my twenties to be easier. Now you say, “I’m afraid that’s all the time we have for today. I’ll see you for another session next week, okay?”

All my blog friends have been blogging awesome/hilarious stuff and I haven’t been reading it! Even Devon returned from nowhere. Sorry Devon, I don’t think you’re awesome or hilarious. jaykaying, oh my g! So now I’m writing too.

Here’s the deal. Basically I’ve just been drawing portraits of BFFs lately. One for what’s become the defunct-est artists’ community/blog I’ve ever seen, and the other for, of all places, Slate!

A couple weekends ago Jen played me this song. It roolz. Love the weird operatic soprano.

Well guys, it’s been a couple of exciting weeks since last I wrote on here. For one, there was the MoCCA, where I met a new friend/enemy, Karl Stevens. For two, I’ve got a summer illustration job working on something that involves both computers and fishing, which means that, for three, I’ve been fishing and hauled in a big bass. I’ve also made many excursions to Connecticut for said job, and I’ve gotta say, I don’t think anything could ever stop me loving Metro-North trains. It’s the only way to travel.

For seven, I broke in a new sketchbook:

Here it is: the post you’ve all been waiting for. The previously promised process post. It’s the whole thang, from start to finish, for the cover of issue one of my upcoming awesome anthology, Oak & Linden.

I should say right from the get-go that you can click on all these pictures to see what’s going on a lil’ better. In the beginning all I had was a title, and I needed to make it a type treatment, or a logo, or whateva. As I often do when I want to make a logo, I started playing with Sharpie on tracing paper. This is a sketching technique I learned through Caitlin from her favorite prof ever, Charles Goslin. It really works because you stay loose, you have a really easy time seeing the balance of black and white, and you can also make changes quickly by laying on another piece of tracing paper.

I swear it seemed like there were differences between these at the time.

The title comes from a Greek myth about a couple that takes in Zeus and Hermes, who are disguised as bums. The couple is rewarded for their hospitality by being linked together even after death, as intertwined oak and linden trees. There definitely had to be some wrapping and braiding kinda stuff going on. I landed on a basic concept, and I kept redrawing and refining on various pieces of tracing paper. Then, when I finally liked one of those, I used a lightbox to trace it on bristol with a Rapidograph pen. I scanned that, blew it up, printed it out and traced it again. That’s when I realized I didn’t need to do that last part, and I could just trace directly from the print out onto the big board, which you’ll see soon.

Like so (okay, actually youse can’t blow this one up):

Having settled on the title design, I realized I just might need to draw something on the cover. I turned for inspiration to a dream journal I kept fastidiously when I slept alone, but have mostly ignored ever since I moved in with Caitlin.

What, you can't tell what's going on here?

I was most on my dream writing game when I lived in Bushwick, which is very much like living in the Caribbean, and lots of my dreams involved Carnival or block parties or fairs. There was also a running theme of small rodenty animals whose heads I needed to crush with my shoe. One time I looked closer and the beast was be a cute kitten and I loved it and gave it a drink of water. Once it was a baby panda with human hands. Usually, though, it was a hideous rat-weasel with matted fur and I really wanted to smash it. I guess what I’m saying is, I landed on a Coney Island wrap-around cover with lots of dream elements on the front, and all the characters that appear within the book on the back.

I realized that with all these foreground elements, I’d need to first get a handle on the background:

Then I put on some tracing paper and placed all the people:

I tend to work at “half up,” which I learned from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. In other words, the original art is one and a half times the size of the printed graphics. The shrinking makes the lines tighter and disguises inconsistencies and little stray marks and the like. The standard for comics is to work on 11″×17″ paper and print at about 6½”×10″ and that’s the size I’ve been working. For a wraparound cover with bleed space at this same scale, I needed to work on some 18″×24″ paper. As I said a few weeks ago, I hadn’t done that since in the days of art school. I feel like a big boy again.

Here you can see the daintily traced pencil line on the right half of the page.

Now, it should be said that I’m very bad at drawing lightly. I’ve compensated by using blue pencils (specifically the Copy-Not Non-Photo Blue and Col-Erase Light Blue, both from Prismacolor, and both with an eraser on the end) that don’t reproduce in black & white. For this project I knew I wanted to use colored ink washes instead of my typical Photoshop colors and I didn’t want blue lines everywhere so I I had to compensate for my pencil mashing some other way. So I drew everything with regular pencils on a piece of drawing paper left over from sophomore drawing class, then lightboxed the lines onto a sheet of bristol for the final product. I usually leave my pencils pretty rough and finish the drawing while I’m inking. Well, this case is different, again, because of those ink washes. I figured I wouldn’t have as much leeway as I normally do to throw white (if you’re wondering, right now I use Pro White opaque watercolor) over all the lines I don’t like, because of how the colors would react on top of the paint. Thus, I drew some pretty tight pencils. I even used a ruler for the perspective lines! Almost worthy of being inked by somebody else, like a superhero comic.

But it was inked by me. I ain’t no sellout! (With Rapidographs—if you’re in the market for these technical drawing pens, wait for the back to school sales to get the the seven piece set. Every art store in New York majorly slashes the price at the beginning of each semester.) I didn’t fill in any major black areas because I’m totally into doing that with Windsor & Newton Designer’s Black right now. It comes out really, really black, like black hole black, but unfortunately it’s a guasch, not an ink, which means it’s water soluble. So yet again, I’m compromising for those goddamn colored inks:

An ode to Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay Sapphire inks. Dese. Dings. Iz. Da. Shit. I really love to use em. Every time I make something that looks like watercolor, that’s what I’m using. What I especially love about them is the way you can work in glazes and build colors on top of each other. I never much liked how watercolors will reactivate once you touch a wet brush to them, leaving you with mud colors—at least if you ain’t got watercolor skills, which I ain’t got. But ink is ink; it’s permanent! The colors go right on top of each other, with the underneath ones shining through the on top ones. I really think the outcome is much richer than anything I’ve ever pulled off with paint.

I started by making the background people a nice umber type of brown, since the foreground people would use lots of primaries, especially blue. At first this scene was gonna be in the middle of a nice summer day, but soon I realized that Lawrence the Projectorhead’s Pantone blue was really close to the color of the sky. I was really terrified that a sunset purple would look corny, but once I did it, I really liked the mood it brought of evening on the boardwalk, as things turn from weird to weirder.

And here you have it, the finished drawing. Now come visit me at MoCCA Fest and get yourself a copy of Oak & Linden issue one, which some are calling the Pat Barrett Sextravaganza.

Yay, we did it! We’ve finally made it to part four of the four-part series counting down to MoCCA Fest and the debut of my anthology, Oak & Linden. Do you need to catch up on part 1, part 2 or part 3? Now all that’s left to do is come on down to the Lexington Ave. Armory (between 25th & 26th) this Saturday or Sunday sometime between 11:00 and 6:00 and visit my booth (it’s # 312 ½)! – Pushy Pat

An ode to Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay Sapphire inks. Dese. Dings. Iz. Da. Shit. I really love to use em. Every time I make something that looks like watercolor, that’s what I’m using. What I especially love about them is the way you can work in glazes and build colors on top of each other. I never much liked how watercolors will reactivate once you touch a wet brush to them, leaving you with mud colors—at least if you ain’t got watercolor skills, which I ain’t got. But ink is ink; it’s permanent! The colors go right on top of each other, with the underneath ones shining through the on top ones. I really think the outcome is much richer than anything I’ve ever pulled off with paint.

I started by making the background people a nice umber type of brown, since the foreground people would use lots of primaries, especially blue. At first this scene was gonna be in the middle of a nice summer day, but soon I realized that Lawrence the Projectorhead’s Pantone blue was really close to the color of the sky. I was really terrified that a sunset purple would look corny, but once I did it, I really liked the mood it brought of evening on the boardwalk, as things turn from weird to weirder.

And here you have it, the finished drawing. Now come visit me at MoCCA Fest and get yourself a copy of Oak & Linden issue one, which some are calling the Pat Barrett Sextravaganza.