April - May -June - July 2005

 

::7.06.2005 - Comic-Con or bust!

Ok, again, apologies for the very spotty posting lately. Preparations for Comic-con are almost coming to a close. Ronnie and I are going to drive down to San Diego next tuesday. Road trip! Should be fun, strangely enough this is the first time we do the drive together. Anyway, my new book arrived last week from the printers and it looks great, not one complaint. A few photos follow to give you an idea of what it looks like. The books are available for purchase on the internet, for those of you who can't make it to San Diego next week. SketchCrawling retails for $10, with shipping and handling it will be $13 in the US and $15 everywhere else. If you would like to purchase it, please paypal me the correct amount with your address at this account: casarosa@gmail.com. I will send the book asap.

As some of you already know many of our friends and co-workers will be at San Diego this year, they joined under a collective name: e-ville press. Find out more about each one of them and the awesome books they will have on hand in SD on their blog. You won't be sorry.

Also Ronnie and I have a pretty exciting surprise in store for you in San Diego, for now I can say it involves our friends at Nucleus gallery and another amazingly talented friend of ours ... X) more to come on that ...

Anyway see in San Diego at booth 930-932-934, again we are together Flight, Nazismasher and Nucleus Gallery!

 

 

 

they are numbered! X)

 

    

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:6.09.2005 - Phew

Phew, been a bit of a crazy month. Really busy, forgive me the hiatus from the blog. Work has been in crunch mode for weeks and on top of that I decided to make a new small book for comic-con. Things are starting to slow down again now and I can finally take a moment to write.
World Wide SketchCraw #3 was really great, here in San Francisco we had around 40 people joining in and it was an amazingly beautiful day out. Be sure to check the results in the forums, plenty of beautiful sketches from all over the world. Here's some Cairo crawling for you for example. And Ronnie's awesome sketches and thoughts from the WWSC#3 are here.
The SketchCrawl t-shirts seemed to have been a hit and it was pretty awesome to see our colorful group meandering around the city. If you want to purchase a t-shirt and support SketchCrawl.com send me an email. I've been taking internet orders with Paypal payments ($15 US, $18International). Or you can come get one in person in San Diego next month.

Next for Ronnie and I is Comic-Con, we're starting to get ready for that ... Mr del Carmen has a wonderful little Paper Biscuit treat for you all and I've been putting together a small color book with some of my watercolor comics and sketches (which is now luckily off into the printers' hands, more info on that later...). This year we are sharing a booth with Nazismasher Bill Presing and we'll be in good company with the Flight and Nucleus Gallery right by us. The other exciting thing for us is seeing many of our colleagues and friends getting ready with their own respective books this year. Louis Gonzales, Sanjay Patel, Ted Mathot and Mark Andrews to name a few. So while Ronnie and I were a little burnt out last year, we figured we couldn't miss San Diego this July, it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Here's 3 photos from SketchCrawl day: they were taken at the San Francisco Art Institute on Chestnut street. The kind of art school (they have a huge Diego Rivera Murales) that makes you want to be a student again.

E

 

 

 

 

    

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::5.16.2005 - World Wide SketchCrawl #3

World Wide SketchCrawl #3 is around the corner! The international drawing marathon day is next saturday May 21st ! The site's forum is starting to look animated ... as of now we have artists getting together in several cities in the US and then in Sweden, Germany, Egypt, France, UK and even Peru, Australia and Japan ... Pretty exciting! We also have sketchcrawl t-shirts at the printers, they should be ready early this week. I'll be handing them out to the crawlers in San Francisco, but I'll be sure to set up some internet sales as well for those of you from not around here.
The meeting place in SF this time is at the Embarcadero's Ferry Building , 10am at Peet's coffee. I'll have a map of the route coming real soon. Wherever you are, join in and help us make this the biggest sketchcrawl yet!
Cheers.

E

:: SketchCrawl#3 !

    

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:4.26.2005 - 24 Hours Comic day

Saturday April 23 was official 24 hours comic day. A neat comic marathon idea started by Scott McCloud, which certainly shares similarities with SketchCrawl. The idea in short: without any preplanning, or prewriting draw a comic in one day, non stop. So ... I gave it a try! I figured I'd make a bit of a hybrid: a "ComicCrawl" day. I set outto go around the city all day and record the experience in comic format ... and so I did and it was a ton of fun ... I ended up with 24 pages of a silly biographical comic. Interestingly enough I found out only later that one of the main rules of the day was to make exactly a 24 pages comic in 24 hours  ... strange to hit that number by chance!? Anyway, I am sure I broke more than a couple of rules ... especially since I ran over the 24 hours time limit, slept regular hours and then restarted coloring the next day ... to be precise I finished watercoloring the whole thing around 27 hours after I had started drawing it. The day went something like this: I started just past noon on saturday. Finished drawing the 25th page around 8pm and then started watercoloring. Around 1:30 am I was pretty beat and went to sleep (half way through watercoloring the whole thing). In the morning I got back into it around 11pm and I finished a little before 3pm. So there you have it ... not quite a 24 hour comic perhaps ... but almost. It was a lot of fun and I am eager to see what people might think of it ... it's quite a silly comic, I think I channelled some old style Toriyama (I love Dr Slump). Anyway I figured I'd serialize it here on my site and you can find the first 3 pages HERE, Ill post 3 pages everyday this week! Cheers and let me know what you think.

E

:: N juda line

    

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::4.25.2005 - Tadahiro San

Well, since I just scanned this drawing .... I thought I'd share it with you, together with the memory of getting it from Uesugi San. He gave this to me when I visited him with Ronnie last fall in Tokyo, it was a memorable evening and I couldn't possible ask for a better memento ...
Tadahiro San had tons of stacks of his sketches. I was avidly pouring through all his wonderful effortless drawings. He said he'd often do these on the phone, in fact you can see a phone number in the middle of this one too! X) (Don't try and call it, I changed a number ;)
He told me to choose one and I could have it. I was so happy! But picking one was the hardest darn thing in the world to do !!!! I needed a few hours just to decide. Well, after 20 minutes I chose this page. He didn't think this specific one was special enough ... so he added a little something for me. He quickly drew my caricature on it and signed the page ....
I am still in awe and it's been 6 months! X)
Well, don't mean to gloat or make you even greener with envy with this post but I just thought I'd share.
So here it is ... finally scanned ... my Tadahiro page of sketches ... a priced possession.

E

:: My Tadahiro Uesugi sketch page

    

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::04.20.2005 - Flight show

The Flight art show opening at the Nucleus gallery last saturday seemed to have been a real blast, certainly judging by Kazu's photos here. I wish I had a chance to make it down to LA for the shindig, if I did it sure would've been hard not to buy one of the pages featured below. They are from Catia Chien's story for Flight 2, her work is simply breathtaking and exponentially more so in person... luckily I am already the happy owner of one original piece from her bird people book! X) (turning green yet?).

:: Catia Chien's pages from "Jelly Fruit" in FLIGHT 2 (photo by Kazu)

    

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:04.15.2005 - can't sleep

Do you ever get one of those mornings where you're awake around 5:30am, looking outside the window from your bed, seeing light slowly appear gradually painting the house in front, at first of a nice pink and then of a painfully bright yellow/white? And you just can't sleep, you want to sleep. There's just another hour or two of rest and you sure need it, but no, your body and mind don't seem to get along on the subject ... you ponder for long minutes wheter to give in, get up, make some coffee and start the day. And just when you're about ready to do that, venture out of the cozy warmth of your comforter to face the day, right then you actually fall asleep. The problem is that by then it's often time to get up ... X(
On mornings like these I am always late for work ... ah well ... it's good to be, sometime ... X)
Anyhow....
The AlternativePressExpo this past weekend was a lot of fun, without a doubt the most "artsy" convention on this coast. It was hard to leave the hall without purchasing some really interesting books. Books that resemble artifacts more than comics. I really love that. I didn't take any photos unfortunately, but luckily Jen Wang did, check her fun con report. I also had a chance to hand out many postcards spreading the word for the upcoming may sketchcrawl! If you want to do the same you can find the images I used here. And by the way I added a mailing list option on the main site, please enter your email if you want to receive updates regarding Sketchcrawls!
I have a feeling we're gonna have a big group crawling around SF this next crawl. I have to get shirts done in time ...

And ... if you are in the LA area do not miss the FLIGHT gallery show opening this saturday night, tomorrow, at Nucleus!!! Tons of great artwork, a great space (I have a couple of pieces in the show too) and plenty Flight2 books to purchase and get signed by the artists. I can't make it down there, but let me know how it goes if you do!

cheers

E

:: morning! (old photo)

    

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::04.7.2005 - Busy, busy.

Darn, work is getting busy ... not much time for posting and even less for getting ready for APE (the alternative Press Expo, this weekend in San Francisco). For those of you coming, Ronnie and I will be at table 118. By the way thanks to all of you that visited our artshow at Super7 during this whole month. We got a lot of great feedback and we hope to do more of these "hang your stuff on the wall shindig thingies" ... X). The great news is that this friday the James Jean art show is starting at Super7. The opening should be fun and his new art book looks simply amazing ... more info here.

And you know, I really need a sketchcrawl! My inspiration/productivity levels are so loooow ! Let's do one in early may ! I'll figure out a date asap ...

later!

PS : Almost forgot about Flight Volume 2 ! Superlative quality and hearty quantity meet in this amazing book! Flight 2 is fresh out of the printers and it's gonna debut at the convention. It looks amazing from what I've seen and I am sure it's gonna be the talk of the industry for months to come ! Kudos to the man who put it all together Kazu San and a kick in the shin to me for not finishing my short piece for it (I'll make up with Flight3, I promise)! X)

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