#this ones in my mini sketchbook so its about 4×6 inches

[estrangedandwayward]

This painting of tgc proved fucking impossible to photograph, but I still like it

[mrsbeef]

Heart-shaped herb flower display build

When I’m in an emotional rut, I often find the best way to distract myself is to throw my entire soul into some kind of project, ideally one with a bit of external motivation. And fortunately for me, just such a project suddenly fell into my lap. Some friends of mine were having a party that was part birthday, part LGBT community celebration. It was also Black Panther-themed, and the event name was “Queerkanda”. My task: design and build a punch bowl display based on the glowing purple flower of the Wakandan heart-shaped herb, so that party guests might imbibe and obtain De Strenkt of De Bleck Pentha™. I was only too happy to take up the challenge.

This whole project took 7 days, though only about half this time was spent actually building anything. The rest of the time was spent conceptualising, sketching, finding references, and toting feels.

 Step 1: Site visit

I had a little walk around the area where my installation was going to be placed on the night. The spot was a hedge approximately 2.5 – 3 feet high. The bowl itself was going to be placed in the mouth of a large acrylic cylinder, which would then sit in the middle of the hedge, giving the impression of the flower rising out of the foliage. Sounded simple enough.

Step 2: PINspiration

A bit of research showed that the heart-shaped herb flower from the Black Panther movie is not bowl- or cup-shaped like a lotus or a poppy, but actually more trumpet-shaped, like a datura. In fact to me it looks like nothing so much as ruellia tuberosa, a blue-purple flower that grows wild all over the place here in Trinidad and goes by the amusing local name of ‘monkey gun’.

(JM Garg under Creative Commons licence)

Then I started to have a think about glowing flowers. Immediately I thought of those lamps made of silk (or occasionally wool) with solid black edges that look almost like stained glass once lit up. You know, these things:

So I assembled a Pinterest board with pictures of purple trumpet-shaped flowers like monkey gun and morning glory, and pictures of lamps like these from Etsy. I’d refer to these images for inspiration throughout the project.

Step 3: Preliminary sketching

Having seen the site and the acrylic base I’d be using, and having acquired some reference images, I was now able to start imagining how I might actually build this thing. And what better way to do that than to get a pencil and start drawing stuff?

The basic idea was to make five separate flower segments to then be combined into the full trumpet shape around the cylindrical base. They’d be made of purple fabric with black fabric borders, over a skeleton of large-gauge wire. Each of these wire-and-fabric segments would then be illuminated from the bottom by a carefully-angled blue LED bulb, with another LED to be placed right below the bowl. My initial idea was also to add some different tints and tones to the purple by using bleach solution and blue fabric dye, if I could get my hands on it. This was because

a) using paint would affect how the fabric would look under the LED light, and I didn’t want it becoming opaque; and

b) bleaching and dyeing the fabric would allow me to add colour variation without the risk of colours running.

Now I had a much more concrete idea of how to proceed, which meant it was time to go…

Step 4: SHOPPING!

This was going to be an outdoor installation, and currently in Trinidad it’s the rainy season. And if you don’t know what tropical rain is like… well, it can be pretty merciless. So the key phrase in my design philosophy here was “all seasons”. This is why I elected to make the flower out of fabric instead of paper; I needed something that could stand up to the elements if— heaven forbid— it had to, without falling apart.

Luckily, Trinidad is the land of Carnival, so I was able to get pretty much everything I needed in the same store. However, Trinidad is also the land of public holidays, so I had to wait out the long weekend before I could buy stuff. By the time I got everything it was already Wednesday.

For the base fabric I chose a purple candy floss, which is a translucent material that’s quite shiny on its own. While in the store I used my phone flashlight to test how the candy floss would react to light; I found it had a soft glowing, almost frosted look to it, which I liked.

For the borders I picked out a length of black suedette, which just devours light like nobody’s business, so I figured it would make a very nice contrast with the more luminous candy floss.

Finally, for the wire bones I got a coil of heavy 12-gauge aluminium wire, the kind that’s usually used in the construction of Carnival costumes or large puppets or any other kind of sculptural armature of a certain size. It was a good weight, sturdy, pliable but not excessively pliable. All good qualities, but boy, did this wire cause me some pain. More on that in a moment…

Step 5: Construction begins

Aluminium wire of a certain thickness, when repeatedly bent at the same point, becomes hot to the touch.

Just a cool bit of science I happened to notice.

How did I come to notice this, you ask? Well, you see, as the picture shows, the only wire cutters in my house strong enough to take on the task of cutting through semi-hard 12-gauge aluminium wire were old and rusty and dull and horrible. So I ended up using them as a vice, clamping down one end of the wire while repeatedly bending it back and forth until it just broke. That is how I had to cut every. Length. Of wire.

Raw ends of wire like that are also sharp, and will cut skin when they swing around. I managed to slice open my cuticles twice just trying to get the wire cut. Somehow I was able to keep my eyes intact, though I found myself really missing my safety glasses, which are still in Toronto.

I would shape a single length of wire with the rusty pliers and my hands, leaving the two open ends at the bottom corner. I then bound those ends together with masking tape to give myself a closed fan-like shape. This process I repeated five times. Then I cut the suedette into long strips about an inch wide, and starting at the tape-covered join for a bit of extra stability, I glued the fabric strip in place with a hot glue gun before proceeding to wrap the suedette around the wire, which gave me a heavy black outline.

Finally, I cut the purple candy floss into squares and used hot glue to glue three squares of candy floss to the back of each covered wire outline, before trimming away the excess with scissors. It was an arduous bloody process, and I kept having to take long breaks to be an emotional wreck of a human being, so it did take quite a while.

But one square of fabric would have been way too diaphanous, and in the end it actually turned out to be a pretty good decision to use three sheets, for reasons I will explain later.

Step 6: Lighting tests

LED lights are great because they don’t tend to give off a lot of heat. This is good for my purposes, because any light that gets too hot would melt everything I’d made. That’s why black light bulbs were not an option. Those things get DAMN hot. I know because I burned my fingers on one. Between that, the hot glue gun and the wires, I’m essentially impervious to pain at this point.

Now here’s the fun part.

I could not find blue LED lights no matter where I went. Originally I wanted battery-powered bulbs, but then I relaxed my standards to mains-powered rope lights. Nothing doing. Couldn’t even find them in white.

So I had a poke around at home. I found a large bag full of close to 100 tiny battery-powered LED mini-bulbs in bright white, left over from previous birthday parties here. They weren’t very powerful, but I used them to test out how light would look on the flower segments.

How many bulbs will give enough light? One bulb? Three? ELEVEN?

The number of bulbs needed to satisfactorily light one segment was just prohibitively high (not all the bulbs in the bag worked), so I needed to try something else. I eventually settled on a spool of bright white LED Christmas lights. Using the coil of leftover aluminium wire and two large books, I set up an improvised frame that I could use to arrange the flower segments around the light string.

Hmm, looking pretty damn good if I do say so myself. But there’s something missing.

Step 8: Last-minute detailing

It became apparent to me fairly early on that the candy floss seemed to be completely immune to bleach. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but I decided to jettison that idea. I also couldn’t get my hands on any fabric dye. But I still wanted to add a bit more black fabric to the flower segments, so that the finished flower would more closely resemble the silk lamps that were my original inspiration. So I got out the sketchbook again and drew out a few ideas.

Eventually I settled on the pattern of thin points of graduating lengths in the lower right corner; I cut them out of suedette and arranged them on top of a segment with straight pins. However, there was a problem: the black suedette absorbed way too much light, and pretty seriously affected the way the light hit the candy floss.

Solution: apply the detailing to the *back* of the segment instead, allowing the dark strips to be visible on the other side while still being covered by a layer of light-diffusing candy floss. I applied the strips of suedette very, very gingerly, using only small dots of hot glue. This is where it became apparent that it had been smart to use three layers of candy floss: the glue adhered only to the first layer of candy floss, so I avoided having spots of dried glue showing up on the surface of the flower and getting thrown into horrible relief by the light. Unintentional win! Now time to go to sleep and await--

Step 9: Installation

I arrived at the location with about an hour and a half of sunlight remaining. Borrowing two extra pairs of hands, I bound the five segments tightly together around the cylindrical base using a length of 14-gauge soft wire, which felt like freaking silk in my hands after everything I’d been through. Then I used some good old-fashioned elbow-grease to shape each segment convincingly and help create the trumpet shape I’d been after. Finally I stuffed the remaining purple candy-floss into the cylinder and arranged the lights before sticking a bowl on top.

Then it began to positively piss down rain. Luckily the outlet where the lights were plugged in had been wrapped up with a piece of a black bin bag, and the whole flower being soaked now meant it wouldn’t catch on fire! Can’t burn this one, Killmonger.

The rain turned out to just be a passing rain (though a heavy, almost hurricane-like one), so once the spot of bad weather was over, all we had to do was wait for sundown.

And there it is!

Queerkanda forever <3

[comicsbeat]

Yet more amazing comics debuting at tomorrow’ Comic Arts Brooklyn show!

Roopert August Lipp Revival House 56 pages, 8.5″ X 11″ 2 color offset
$10

The long-awaited debut by comics virtuoso, August Lipp. Perhaps you’ve been fortunate to see glimpses of his work in esteemed anthologies such as Smoke Signals, for example. Now, one can evince the full dexterity of his talent with the exuberant saga, Roopert. Roopert is excited to return to school after a summer of splendid adventures! His best chums will all be there: Clyve the shy badger, Benji the other, slightly shorter bear, Hannah the ballsy fox, Timothy the average frog, Clarissa the dentally-advantaged crocodile and many more. Hey, this school is a real ZOO! What kind of antics will they get up to when the bell rings and Miss Julienne the human’s 6th grade class begins? Irreverence and beastly nature are masked by overzealous displays of etiquette as the child animals struggle for agency in the face of less-than-responsible authority figures. Follow along as this comic meanders through Roopert’s first action-packed day of middle school! Adult supervision recommended. published by Revival House Press!

Hot Dog Beach #4 by Lale Westvind

High octane slapstick adventure starring Mop and Fuzz, two ding dongs trying to make a buck on a strange gig that never ends.

“BIG BONERZ: A Street Dawgz Comic Collection” by Lizz Lunney

This experimental comic tells the story of a group of canines that tackle depression, drug addiction and anger problems whilst roaming the streets and protecting their cardboard box home from outsiders. Lunney explores themes of fame/celebrity, mental health problems, class struggle, addiction and more through a pack of homeless street dogs. Lots of jokes! Lots of bones! Published by Birdcage Bottom Books 5.25″ x 7.5″, 44 pages. $7
Two-color risograph cover with b+w interior

The Loud Atlas

By Peter + Maria Hoey

Our new accordion fold book takes a surreal and funny look at the noisy world imagined by the Italian Futurists. Using the style of Marinetti and the rhyming pattern of Dr. Seuss. 8 panels and 45” inches long. Screen printed in 2 colors and hand bound on black book board in an edition of 50.

  DOMINO BOOKS

At CAB, we are proud to debut our ninth publication, BOOK OF DAZE by E.A. Bethea. Swing by table M3 to check it out—we will also have dozens and dozens of rare zines and art books available, many of them making their debut at the show.

  If you can’t make it to CAB, BOOK OF DAZE is available for pre-order now through our online shop.

  Book of Daze by E.A. Bethea. $6, 40 pages. Color cover, black and white interior, printed on newsprint.

“I first discovered Bethea’s stuff almost twenty years ago, she is one of the people whose work made me finally commit to comics as my medium of choice. With her barbed, nervous line and blunt writing style, she’s like a Duchampian voice calling for comics revolt. Her comics call out to us that no matter how damaged or how much of an outsider someone is, comics is our birthright.” -Josh Bayer, author of Theth

Book of Daze by E.A. Bethea is the kind of book DOMINO exists to publish. I first found Bethea’s work lying around an apartment I was visiting. I picked it up and from that moment on, have never forgotten it. As I began to read her dense pages, I was overwhelmed by the straightforward emotional statements and startlingly precise mind behind the sequences. In one moment, Bethea’s comics would acknowledge pain and disappointment, then turn to explain it away or justify things, only to finally confront the problem from a new angle. On the next page, simple pleasures became the focus, romantic notions embraced. Later on in the book cynical approaches to anything and everything were duly considered. All of this managed to congeal as Bethea kept another strong cloud hanging over it all: a refusal to shy away from an unashamed embrace of the full panorama of life. 

Bethea, a simple interpretation might offer, chronicles the web of living in the world with a heart and a mind sometimes at odds and sometimes simpatico. But Bethea gives us something more complex: at times, the work feels dead-pan as it shifts from exhilaration to resignation without a change in visual presentation, but it’s here where we have a guide to the heart of Bethea’s project. The often uniform nature of the pages and the highly non-uniform nature of what is contained within become a catalog of days or weeks or years. One page offers a subdued period in life, while the next (seemingly) similar page offers a day full of regret. Bethea talks about her work relating to cinema, specifically calling attention to what happens between one of her panels and the next. The shifts in emotion and carefully chosen images alongside highly precise language feel like walking into a film where the entire crew–from director to actor to gaffer—united in one mind to make something highly exquisite.

The Unquotable Trump by R. SIkoryak (Drawn and Quarterly)

R. Sikoryak frames Trump and his declarations as the words and actions of the most notable villains and antagonists in comic book history.

The House of Dickinson by R. Sikoryak (self published)

This mini combines the poetry of Emily Dickinson with the atmosphere of 1950’s horror comics.

Futile Comics #6 Mike Centeno

A 16 page look at a day in the life of a woman who deals with subway abuse, retail hijinx, and gym bros until she reaches the breaking point and has no energy left to keep all the black goop of rage inside of her.

Precious Little Lives By Joe Garber

This new American classic follows the melodramatic tragedies of a Tap n’ Scat Jazzist just trying to make her way in the world with a head full of dreams and a pocket full of toxic-male assholes.

Generous Consolation Conor Stechschulte In consolation for not having the third volume of Generous Bosom ready in time for CAB, this zine offers a preview of selected images from that book. Available on its own or for free with a preorder of GB3.

TRUMPTRUMP Volume 1: nomination to inauguration

by Warren Craghead III

Every day, Warren Craghead draws and shares grotesque portraits of Donald Trump and his minions. TRUMPTRUMP Volume 1 collects the first six months of these daily drawings with context and commentary, from when Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president on July 21, 2016 until his inauguration on January 20, 2017. — Retrofit Comics

Bestiary by Alden Viguilla

A collection of mythical beasts risographed in blue and gold.

  Final form #1 By Craig Bowers

A fantasy about two friends trying to make quick cash so they can go travel the world and two frogs slacking on the job.

The 12 Days of Christmas

Caitlin Keegan

The 12 days of Christmas, illustrated. A holiday zine that you can color (or not.) 

Twin Peaks poster

Caitlin Keegan

12×18″ poster featuring sketchbook drawings of characters from season 3.

 Bronze Enamel Sun Pin

Caitlin Keegan

Bronze + enamel pin with reversible sun face (1.125″)

I’ll also have copies of The Illuminated Tarot, which came out in April.

So What? Press Tales of the Night Watchman LLC

www.sowhatpress.com

  Tales of the Night Watchman is the story of Nora, a blogger stuck working a dead end job in coffee, and her roommate, Charlie, who happens to be possessed (in the nicest way possible) by a spectral detective called The Night Watchman. Baristas by day, heroes by night, Nora and Charlie answer the call to fight the city’s never-ending flux of supernatural activity.

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Issue synopsis:

The Gowanus Golem is back! In this follow up to one of the series’ most popular tales, Brooklyn’s most toxic monster is after a couple thugs who are responsible for the death of a young boy. There’s only one problem: To stop him, The Night Watchman must protect one of the killers. Oh, and did we mention it’s also a Christmas special? Written by Dave Kelly Artwork by Brett Hobson Colors by Clare DeZutti Cover by Tim Hamilton

Over Time, Every Section Was Allowed To Grow Accordingly Aaron Cockle, New York Is For Sale, Table J2

It’s part 1 of a 2-part Franz Kafka fan comic, 32 pages

Annie Mok Loves Videogames by Annie Mok

A collection of comics, essays, and an interview, all about an abiding love and critique of games such as The Legend of Zelda, Shenmue, Sonic, and others. Annie Mok freelances for Rookie Mag, The Comics Journal, The Establishment, and others, and now makes games such as The Haunted Nintendo.

Keep Going Greg Kletsel

32 page Risograph zine inspired by the phrase “keep going”.

  Animation: Dansemorphia (on custom silicone USB’s !) Zine: Frame Drain –

Roya Haroun

blurb- Danse! Morph! Ya!

Parasite Wanderer By Connor McCann

A girl wakes up with a parasite attached to her face and the two embark on a bombastic and poetic 16 page adventure.

People of Oakland Asuka Ohsawa

When I moved from Brooklyn to Oakland in 2014, in an attempt to get to know my new environment, I got into the habit of staring at people who caught my attention, memorizing their facial features, and drawing them at home. The book is a collection of some of those sketches.

Somewhere, Sometime Asuka Ohsawa

After my dad passed away in 2016, I traveled to my childhood home in Japan often and dug through his material possessions. This experience triggered an avalanche of childhood memories that I hadn’t thought of for so many years. I decided to piece together bits and pieces of these memories in this book.

Slasher #5 by Charles Forsman

It’s all been leading to this. The final issue of Charles Forsman’s exploration into violence and sexuality. After the events of issue four, Christine lets herself indulge for the last time. From the creator of the E4/Netflix series The End of the F***ing World.

Live at the Grelman: #4 Amy Magick By Vinnie Neuberg, AT Pratt, and Derek Timm-Brock

Live at the Grelman is a collaborative storytelling stand-up comedy comic strip. All strips are written and drawn in the order that they appear and nothing is preplanned. This issue features guest strips by Drew Miller, Disa Wallander, Lane Graff, Max Huffman, Kelsey Wroten, Haejin Park, Mikey Karpiel, and Michael Furler. 40pp

Touch By Vinnie Neuberg

A new mini-comic about an online date gone awry in a Virtual Reality world. Each comic comes with a foldout poster. 24pp



False Advertising By Dylan Balliett

False Advertising is a collection of recent illustrations, comic strips, and single panel gag comics by Dylan Balliett.

The Fishes’ Ball By Priscilla Boatwright

A locket. A fisherman. A steed. The Fishes’ Ball is a short tale about a man who descends to the bottom of a lake in search of his beloved.

CAB 2017 Debuts Part Two: More exciting comics to fill your brains and shelves Yet more amazing comics debuting at tomorrow' Comic Arts Brooklyn show! Roopert August Lipp Revival House…