The Road was my first McCarthy book and the only one I’ve read, but I don’t think I’m jumping the gun when I say he’s my favorite living author. I dig the spartan prose and the way he discards all but the most important details letting you fill in the rest. He has a real painterly style of writing. The contrast between most of his prose/style and the way the last couple of paragraphs in the book were written punched me in my stomach. So. Fucking. Good.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of his work.

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I’m going to try a new style of blogging. Rather than a topical post that seems article-like, I’m going to do a daily open thread, updating the post if something good comes along, and talk about what I’m up to, what my friends are up to, and what I saw, read, or consumed that’s worth repeating.

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I got my Rosemary & Co. brushes some time ago. After some break in time, they seem like a great buy. For the money, hard to beat.

Well, I’m a total traditional art convert. I hate being tethered to my computer now; it’s so freeing to once again be able to do my work anywhere it might strike my fancy. My new obsession is buying art supplies. Sweet, sweet art supplies.

I just bought a bunch of Kolinsky Sables from Rosemary & Co. A friend of mine, Kiel West, introduced me to Rosemary’s brushes. She’s a woman in England who hand-makes all her brushes at a fraction of the cost of other manufacturers. Manufacturers who seem to have an inverse quality to price ratio of late – I’m looking at you, Windsor & Newton.

This will be my first order. I can’t recommend them from personal experience yet. She comes so highly recommended, and with prices so affordable, it’s hard not to get excited. Just look at how much brush I got for so little dough:

1 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 1 = $6.41
3 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 2 = $20.91
3 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 3 = $25.28
1 x Series 22. Pure Kolinsky Designer. Size: 4 = $9.80

1 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 1 = $4.58
3 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 2 = $14.14
3 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 3 = $15.87
1 x Series 33. Pure Kolinsky Sable. Size: 4 = $5.82

1 x Bamboo Brush Roll. = $7.36

Sub-Total: $110.17
Shipping to the USA: $8.48
Total: $118.65

$118 for 16 Kolinsky brushes with shipping. Wowee. Unless these are the single most atypically useless Kolinsky Sable brushes ever made, that’s a miniscule amount of money.

What do they have in common? Me! They were a couple of semi-recent commercial gigs. I haven’t been posting / blogging a lot of commercial work. I’m growing a bit disenchanted with it. All I want to do is find the time to work on comics and video games (the latter being where I worked before becoming a freelance illustrator; before that I was a print designer). I think it’s easier to make a living making product based on my original works than through billable hours for clients. Budgets are shrinking ever smaller and there aren’t enough hours in the day.

I’ve convinced myself to start a few comics after I get back from a trip to Prague in the next few weeks and embark on the latter path. We’ll see! But I digress…

For the Paste illo, I managed to feature my friends as ghosts haunting Jim Carroll (Known, musically at least, for “People Who Died.” He’s a great prose writer; author of The Basketball Diaries). Who better to haunt him than the people I interact with on forums? They’re kind of etherial friends. They exist on the tubes and nowhere else from my perspective. That’s sort of eerie.

I got a bunch of them to submit photos of themselves and proceeded to place them into the illustration in a paint by number fashion.

I used the same method to make my BRAINS Threadless tee. That image featured ~40 unique heads and is the current tiled background for my blog. It’s an easy way to make a crapload of people happy, har.

After roughing in the approximate locations of all their faces, I started in on the loose pencils, seen here in green.

Here it is inked and colored:

I’m not too wild about it. It was one of my last fully digital pieces and the sterility of the medium seems more obvious to me now than it did then.

Same goes for this guy, the LA Weekly cover. It was a bit of a rush job, time-wise, as a prior commitment for the cover didn’t work out and I batted clean-up. I’m happy with what I was able to accomplish, but I wish I could’ve done more in hindsight. They liked it a bunch from what I gathered, so I guess I should stop being so critical of myself. No one is a bigger heckler about my work than I am, that’s for sure!

Here’re the pencils for the first version of cover before their input:

And here are the pencils after their input:

The beginning of the inks:

And the final product:

Two things: there is a ton of bleed in that image. Her hands are cropped and there’s a ton taken in from the sides in the final. I wasn’t responsible for -and this isn’t the final- text. They dropped that in for the finished image. A friend in LA was good enough to take a photo of it:

Here’s the problem. Snow Leopard is seeing the Cintiq’s default refresh rate higher than its native 60hz. Using a third party app named SwitchResX, I created a custom 1650×1080@60hz resolution. I rebooted my MacPro, applied the resolution setting in the Display SysPref PrefPane, and, voila, no more problem.

An official fix would be nice, though. Hear me, Apple & Wacom! Old man Frenden shakes his fist at you with scorn and malice!

In case you didn’t catch my twatting on Twitter, the Cintiq 20WSX’s display goes googly-moogly after upgrading to Snow Leopard. It’s not like Wacom had months of anticipatory development time to ensure it’s compatibility or anything!

Apple support forum discussion on the topic.

Me lamenting Wacom’s monopoly of pen-based input devices and their lack of customer support on Twitter.

I sure do love my $2400 brick!