…and now I’ll be out of town for a few days, so there will be a break before any more of these get posted.

In 2010, along with a group of friends, Mike and I made comics for every day in May and called it The Month In Comics. I had a great time doing this.

These days we’re both working full time and it’s not easy, but we’re making a go at it anyway!

In the future I’ll post to this blog instead of just to twitter/Facebook. Here are 2012′s daily comics so far:

Most of the remaining month will be journal comics, but these gags were burning a hole in my pocket

I had a great weekend at Stumptown Comics Fest, though this photo shows I was manic enough to have the Crazy Eyes.

I’ll put up a page about the Soft Scientist later this week, and am also going to do a The Month In Comics project in May during which I’ll be posting lots of quick comic strips.

If you’re here as a result of meeting me at the fest, thanks for visiting my table and my site and I hope you enjoy your comics and/or urban sketcher’s notebooks and/or postcards!

There has been very little sketching to report at this blog lately, but I’m not slacking: I’m busy preparing for Stumptown Comics Fest! My table partner Molly and I will be at B-19, which is just about straight to the back corner of the room directly across from the entrance. This will be my first time tabling there, after two years tabling at the smaller, more casual Portland Zine Symposium. I’ll have a new minicomic, three (three!!) urban sketching collections, postcards, and all the older works (Dangerous Aromas, The Month In Comics, Ancestors of Hair Metal).

It’s great to be finishing up new projects for public consumption, but my nose has been to the grindstone for weeks now. I was very happy to take a break from comics and layout software to spend an afternoon in the sun with the urban sketchers.

We didn’t all arrive at the garden at once, so when we gathered again at the gates it was surprising that we had become a large group! And jovial, as several of us were just back from vacations, or just leaving on vacations, and there were new sketchers, and we were all pleased to see each other and to finally get a break from sketching in the rain. Best way to spend a summer afternoon!

Like many urban sketchers I choose my watercolor palette carefully.  When working quickly and often in sub-par conditions, it’s much better to have a few inspiring colors that mix well than a vast selection of shades that tend towards becoming mud.

These are two of the colors that inspire me most right now.

Cobalt Teal Blue (Pigment PG50)

This blue isn’t an all purpose mixing blue, yet it’s one of the most heavily used in my palette.  Mine is from Daniel Smith.  (Another good option for the same pigment is Winsor & Newton’s Cobalt Turquoise Light.  If you buy from any other manufacturer, make sure the pigment is PG50 or you’re getting something entirely different.)

You might guess that this is color is basically the same as pthalo blue lightened with white, but it isn’t.  It really isn’t.  Cobalt Teal Blue is a high intensity color that is not dulled down; the pigment is just naturally this bright tone.  There’s no chalkiness.  Cobalt Teal Blue is also lightfast, granulating, and holds its intensity well after drying. It adds a bright yet soft touch when used in mixes …

PG50	mixed with…	results in
Cobalt Teal Blue (PG50)	Quinacridone gold (P049)
Cobalt Teal Blue (PG50)	Quinacridone Violet
Cobalt Teal Blue (PG50)	Napthol Red

Quinacridone Gold (Pigment PO49)

This gold lends a gorgeous warmth to everything it touches.  Add it to blue, and it’ll give a lively green that looks like it’s made out of living plant life.  Add it to red with some water and you’ll get a rosy skin tone that cannot be surpassed.  This one is also from Daniel Smith, and that manufacturer claims to be the only provider of single-pigment quin gold (i.e., other manufacturers are trying to mimic quin gold by using multiple other pigments).

Quin gold is warm and transparent.  If you lay it on thick it’s similar in color to raw sienna, but without any muddiness that you would get from that earth pigment. Lay it on thin and it’s like liquid sunlight.

Just a few of the amazing greens you can get with this gold, the first a repeat of above…

	mixed with…	results in
Quin gold	Cobalt Teal Blue (PG50)
Quin gold	Winsor Blue (PB15)
Quin gold	French Ultramarine (PB29)	(same pigments as DS Undersea Green)

For very thorough discussions of these pigments, see the PG50 (Cobalt Teal Blue) and PO49 (Quinacridone Gold) sections at the excellent site Handprint.

There are so many lovely colors out there, but these two give me particular enjoyment.  Highly recommended!

On January 21, we had our first regular sketchcrawl of the year. It was cold and intermittently rainy, so our surprisingly large group sheltered in a cafe at SW 2nd & Taylor, a place I walk past every day on my way to work …

then under the ramparts of the World Trade Center, where my company holds its quarterly meetings…

and in more cafes, this time with a view of Portlandia.

Lately I’ve felt absorbed by work and health improvement projects, so it is a particularly good time to go out with the sketchers, enjoy the good company, and get back to thinking visually!

I spent most of January studying some tech stuff for work, developing comics ideas, and managing a sick cat.  However, some regular sketching did get done as well.

New Year’s Day was very cold but I made sure to do one urban sketch in the Close-In Southeast industrial area.

Bill Sharp invited the Portland urban sketchers to his lovely studio, where we had a great time talking art, snacking, and sketching each other.

Bill took pictures and caught me in a sketch!

I managed to spend some weekend afternoons at cafes and did quick sketches while working on comics projects…

…and also did one quick sketch at the Horse Brass Pub.

Tomorrow I’ll post about the January sketchcrawl a couple of weeks ago.  Gotta get caught up!

Last Sunday, Dr. Sketchy’s monthly figure drawing event at Crush Bar featured Wonder Woman! Which is awesome on its own, but more awesome because it was in support of Women of Wonder Day, a charity auction benefiting domestic violence prevention and recovery programs. I got out my Noodler’s Flex Pen stocked with Noodler’s Black Swan in Australian Roses ink.

The Wonder Woman theme was fun.  The model was a whole lotta curves and struck some great poses.

Crush Bar is a great venue for Dr. Sketchy, though I do wish they’d get better lighting in place.

Some of us Portland Urban Sketchers tagged along with the Portland branch of ASIFA (Association International du Film d’Animation) for a Halloween Drink ‘n Draw at The Peculiarium in Northwest Portland!

The ASIFA folks set up three light tables, and we were all encouraged to take turns making 10 frames of animation, following their simple guidelines.  Alanna, Tad, and I each did one set.  At the end, more experienced animators connected the end of each series with the beginning of the next to make seamless loops, after which we got to watch what we had done on the projection screen!  It was awesome; I look forward to trying this again now that I have a little bit of a feel for how it turns out.

Here are some ASIFA folks at work on their animation frames (surrounded by grotesque masks)…

The Peculiarium is a crazy place – an art gallery of the weird and macabre combined with a candy shop/novelty store/snack bar that will sell you meal worms to sprinkle on your ice cream, which you can eat as you stick your head up through the hole in the alien autopsy table.

Thanks for the fun, ASIFA, and thanks for the weird environs, Peculiarium!