The Sum of David

If you sliiide your gaze to the upper right-hand corner of my site, you’ll see a Portfolio link for my illustrations.

Madness!

My 27th birthday came and went last week. To be honest, I sometimes forget exactly how old I am. If asked, I will undoubtedly pause and think about it. And then Josh will correct me when I guess wrong. (In my defense, I’m usually only a year off. They all started to blend together after 23.)

Anyway. I’ve been struggling for a couple months now with my various activities — Design, Illustration, and Writing — and how they affect my life and balance with one another. And there’s a battle going on.

Design will always be Priority #1. It’s not only my bread and butter, but I lurve it. I love creating visual solutions, and drooling over other people’s work. Package design, a good logo, a beautifully integrated illustration or an amazing commercial… it all makes me warm and fuzzy inside. There are so many wonderful ways to conquer the same problem — that is, communicate a message in a unique and memorable way — and I haven’t found them all yet. There’s nothing else I’d rather spend 40 - 60 hours a week doing. Illustration is that back-burner love that has fallen back into my lap, which is lovely. And writing is something I’ve been doing for years, and I’m only recently feeling ready to explore the professional end of it.

This is where my conflict lies. I have three things that I love to do, and so I divide my time amongst those three occupations. I understand the idea of wearing many different hats, and I’ve been juggling all three competently enough. But does splitting my time between those three somehow rob one of them of the potential to be the best it can be?

For example: if I’m never published, will it be because I didn’t give writing the due concentration it needed?

I never want to stop pushing myself, and I love them all. But I have to wonder if I’m sacrificing the quality of one to pursue the others. So what matters most here? Quality? Or quantity? I would usually say quality… but when the quantity is improving the quality of life as a whole… where does that leave things?

This is heavy thought for a beautiful Friday. Let’s have a donut.

I wrapped up the last part of David’s sequel at around 3 am this morning. It’s been a tough few weeks, but I’m feeling good about the finished product. I’m also exhausted, since I’ve been putting in 8 - 10 hours of my day job and then heading straight to the coffee shop to write for another 5 - 6 hours. But I hit the May 1st mark, so yay me. I’m excited, but also POOPED.

At one point I typed “understanded” and was filled with a millisecond of rage when Word’s spellchecker put a little red squiggly line under it. I thought, “What the hell? What’s wrong now? That’s how you spell it!”*

Here’s some yummy facts to chew on while I recover.**

The current manuscript is 150 pages long.

That’s approximately 72,000 words, nearly 40,000 of which were written in the last four weeks. It will undoubtedly expand and contract when I begin editing.

In my brain it is simply “David’s sequel”. In my laptop, it is called “SoD BK2 v01″. I’ll come up with a better title eventually. Hopefully.

It’s my fifth novel and the second of a planned trilogy.

The above illustration is a rendition of me late last night/early this morning. I was feeling loopy and absolutely inundated with LETTERS. So that’s me… feeling loopy… made out of letters. Merry Christmas. Zzzz…

*That is so not how you spell it. Or conjugate it. Or whatever.

**This recovery will absolutely involve alcohol. And probably a nap.

…it’s kind of like that. There’s a lot going on up there.

On a happy and delightfully stress-free note, as of Wednesday night I am the only one with a perfect area in my NCAA Bracket Sportsocracy’s blogger’s league. Josh has been yelling blasphemes since that blog post was made, mostly because he knows my mode of selection. Hint: it involves the alphabet. Xavier for the win!

I do recognize the irony in having a plate piled high with To-Do’s and then spending that precious time drawing an unnecessary illustration for my blog, but it gave me half an hour of peaceful distraction. So there.

I’m not a big Valentine’s Day person. I do like the idea of appreciating your loved one. I understand that sometimes life gets in the way, and taking a day to remind someone how much you care is not only vital, but necessary to maintaining a healthy relationship. I like chocolate. I don’t mind the color pink. It’s all the other stuff that bothers me.

However. Instead of droning on about the nauseous feeling I get every time I walk into a drugstore in the two weeks before this silly, disgustingly consumer-driven holiday, I have a present for all of you:

I’m afraid I can’t offer much explanation. He loves you… and so does his tapeworm. Or his tapeworm loves you and is speaking through his host body. There’s really a number of ways to translate this, and they are all disturbing. Feel free to pass it along to all those people in your life that you care about. Happy Valentine’s Day!

There are a few things that I will go straight up fangirl over. Hellboy is one of them.

Josh spent much of the weekend hibernating against our awesome 20-degree weather, so I popped in the Hellboy movie while he sawed logs on the couch. First off, let me say this: I know it’s not the perfect movie. The graphic version of Seed of Destruction is superior in several ways (the greatest of which is the fact that Sammael doesn’t resurrect fifteen times and we have to watch them battle him over and over. And over.) But it is so much fun. The casting is perfect. No one but Ron Perlman could play Hellboy — playing a giant red demon-man toting a giant stone hand and covered in runic symbols would be impossible for anyone else to pull off. Doug Jones and (the uncredited) David Hyde Pierce are an impeccable Abe Sapian. And even my reading brain didn’t translate Professor Trevor Bruttenholm as well as John Hurt did.

The thing that makes this movie enjoyable for me is the execution of taking the world and story from paper to live action. Hellboy’s creator, Mike Mignola, worked very closely with del Toro to make the creatures and environments rich and believable. I think they do a beautiful job of it — the set of Bruttenholm’s study and the Russian graveyard are especially beautiful in my opinion, and Kroenen and Sapien really are very fantastic. With three discs, the Hellboy special edition is also  one of the most extensive bonus features DVD I’ve ever encountered and offers HOURS of yummy documentation of what went into making the world come alive. (Rivaled in size and detail only by LOTR box sets — 7 discs. Yowza.)

Mignola’s Hellboy is a fascinating character. While I am not usually a huge fan of horror in other fiction, I love it in Mignola’s dark, boxy style and the humor he injects into the stories is a nice balance between the gore. I generally love the ‘refusal of destiny’ arc in stories anyway, and throwing in the impending apocalypse via the hero is right up my alley. Combine it with lots of dark folklore, disturbing occult conspiracies, heaven vs. hell, and the whole what makes a man thing — I am one happy camper.

Visually, Mignola’s art is more than drool-worthy. He has an unmistakable style: heavy shadows that can cover an entire page but still insinuate there is so much going on; angular, sometimes abbreviated shapes that lose nothing from their incomplete execution; character designs that challenge your base knowledge of mythological figures (like the stone, iron-maiden goddess Hecate, anyone?); action and framing that is clear and dramatic. And his paintings make me cry tears of jealous, reverential JOY.

JOY!

“Look, Sammy, I’m not a very good shot… but the Samaritan here uses really big bullets.”

A new WearPittsburgh design was released last week. Behold:

Now, now, it’s not as horribly cruel as you think. “Cat on a stick” is the affectionate term used for a particular outdoor vendor that serves grilled kabobs to late night patrons on the South Side. Don’t believe me? Think I’m a horrible person for even participating in such a barbaric design? The owner of Cambod-Ican refers to his product using the exact same terminology. (link courtesy the fabulous PittGirl over at The Burgh Blog)

No cats were harmed in the creation of this design.

One of my goals this year (did I list it in the last post? I don’t know) is to do more freelance.

Luckily, the universe read my mind and in entered WearPittsburgh. If you haven’t heard of it, Wear Pittsburgh is a clothing company that creates Pittsburgh specific clothing. My personal favorite is Reserved Parking, which is even more beautiful if you are accustomed to the domestic habits of those more tightly packed neighborhoods around the city. I can relate to that pain: nothing pisses you off more than going home and not being able to find a parking space within four blocks of your home. Especially in the winter. In Pittsburgh.

Although I can’t take any credit for bringing that slice of genius into visual interpretation, I’ve done a few other designs. The first was released yesterday and refers to a section of town:

Squirrel Hill. Get it?

I’m a transplant to Pittsburgh. I moved here for college and simply never left. It’s home. I love the idea of embracing all the idiosyncrasies of the region, and Pittsburgh has plenty. Whether it’s putting fries on sandwiches, enjoying our favorite potato-stuffed pasta, or our beloved PennDOT (that’s a joke that practically writes itself, over and over), we’ve got plenty of things to celebrate as ours, and only ours. Keep your eyes on Wear Pittsburgh!

I don’t know where the suggestion came from (I suspect it was hatched by Joe and Jesse) but a few of us met at AIR on Tuesday night for a crash course in screen printing.

Per Joe’s suggestion, Josh and I stopped at Kinko’s to print my design on a transparency (only 81 cents!) and we were off. I also hear that you can print a transparency at AIR, but I since I had zero idea what I was in for, I figured I could at least sort of appear prepared.

The building is huge, and we camped out on the 3rd floor. Joe showed us the ropes, which I will poorly replicate here:

1. Put your transparency on the giant table with bulbs under it. Put magic screen on top of transparency. Cover screen with giant black thing, then top all with weights.
2. Click timer to 4 minutes. The bulbs come on with all the power of the sun, so scram so you don’t go blind.
3. After light clicks off, spray the heck out of the screen. Exposing the magic screen to light hardens where ever your design isn’t, so when you spray the screen your design pops out. Rinse until bubbles are gone, spray with air, then chat while it dries in front of a fan.
4. Lay screen in workspace, tape any holes and possibly the edges.
5. Scoop that delicious ink on to the screen. AIR actually has some you can use, which is nice. I’ve been told it’s mostly gray, which is cool, but I was lucky enough to stumble onto some lime green, yippee.
6. After putting your material under the screen, pull the fancy squeegee toward you and push your ink through your design.
7. Lift screen. Squeal like preteen.

Here’s the original file in Illustrator. I had about a minute to throw this baby together and burn it to CD before I was going to miss my bus. It was just a thought bubble and skull at first, but I had like 15 seconds where I was just fiddling my thumbs — hence the horns and fang- mandible-things.

…and here’s the final art on my hat. I’m not exactly sure what it is that I’m thinking about, but rest assured it is sufficiently eeeevil. I did a shirt, too, which I figure will be appropriate to wear when I have a tummy ache.

The facility, AIR, was really great, too. According their website:

AIR is an artist-run organization that integrates the production of fine art printwork with innovative educational programs that explore the creative process. AIR provides print and imaging services to professional artists and educators. Our goal is to maintain an active and vital imaging laboratory that supports artists and facilitates creative activity.

And, via my personal endorsement: it’s righteous.

The staff was polite and helpful, and the three hours of fun we had only cost $5 since you pay by the screen. It’s open to the public from 7pm to 12am on Tuesdays. Plus, there were past projects hung all over the wall, which was really inspiring. Next week: two colors!