Le Salon de Livre de l'Outaouais: Rendez-vous International de la BD de Gatineau

so i've been invited to (deep breath) Le Salon de Livre de l'Outaouais: Rendez-vous International de la BD de Gatineau, (this thursday to sunday).

as the name might suggest, to those of you who both speak frenchy-talk and managed to get through the title, it's an international festival of comics and bandes desinees. the organizers have other guests coming in from france, belgium, switzerland, and now, with the invitation of yours truly, from across the river... (of course they offered to pay for hotel and airfair, but i told them i'd be satisfied with parking.)

i probably should have mentioned all of this earlier on, but i've been busy, what with work, baby, and incapacitating illness (read: cold).

i've been invited to participate on the strength of my MAD work (although they did mention something called "caper: beware the hand of doom!" in my bio on the site), but really i'm looking forward to a very different "con" experience. i'll be available for autograph sessions all four days as well as a few special events. so if you're one of the three people reading this in the ottawa/gatineau area and you're willing to brave my contagion, swing on by.

oh! and it's free!


yeah, thought that'd getcha. cheap bastards...

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pushing daisies...

so about four weeks before san diego i get a call from my friend michael wright in dc's creative services department. the call was to work on a promo giveaway for bryan fuller's new show, "pushing daisies".

i missed that call. when i called back i found out that zach howard and cameron stewart hadn't.

now, i'm a huge fan of mr. fuller's, so suffice to say i was pissed...

but it was then i discovered that because the deadline was insane (they wanted it done in time for comic-con!), and the entire story took place on a fire escape (thanks bryan...), and zach only had a weekend to complete the pencils, i was back in as the layout artist. to quote zach, under the circumstances he needed someone "to do the math". fire escape not withstanding, it was a fun job. as i said, i'm a huge fan of bryan fuller's, so i'd have jumped at the chance to do anything with him, still would.

after the layouts were done there was another call; again: missed.

at the eleventh hour the clients wanted a bunch of new cover concepts. ultimately one of zach's was picked, but because of the long weekend he couldn't ink it, and because of a number of changes demanded by the client (move "chuck" from upper left circle to main image, replace with blonde girl, etc...) and the fact that it wasn't a long weekend in canada, michael sent it to me to redraw (sorry zach) and ink. unfortunately zach's pencils became layouts and all i could save of his original drawing was the very large dead guy foot.

so here, along with that cover (above), are my layouts for the story. in case anyone's wondering about the numbering, zach did the first couple of pages solo.

the ones without fire escapes...



ps... watch the show.

new brushes...

got some new brushes yesterday from a nice lady in england. they took no time at all to get to me (less than a week! go post office!), so i spent the rest of my time yesterday goofing around with them, trying to shake out the cobwebs.


this was done with a "rosemary and co. kolinsky sable series 33 no. 4".

i'm pretty happy with it. come to think of it, i'm pretty happy lately in general.

weird feeling...