Okay, I am horrible at self-promotion. In all the chaos of preparing for APE 2009 in San Francisco this past weekend, I forgot to post to the notebook that I would attending.
Or that I would be selling prints of some of my illustrations.
Or that I would be doing personalized sketches for anyone who bought a copy of the new Haiku Comics book.
Or that I would be selling coffee mugs of Zombie Baby.
So, if you were in the San Francisco area and would have paid my table a visit if you had only known I was going to be there, my apologies. Mea culpa. Or, as we say in english, “My bad.”
For those of you who did stop by the table, it was a pleasure to meet you. I know there were a few people interested in purchasing prints that were not able to do so at the show – I promise to get a store up as soon as I can. In the mean time, please contact me if you’d like me to keep in touch and I’ll notify you when the store goes online.
I haven’t been posting to this blog much these days. If you’re interested to in seeing what I’ve been drawing lately, you really should keep an eye on Haiku Comics — I post new stuff there three times a week.
So, since I don’t have any drawings to share, I thought I’d put up a little film my wife and I created this past weekend. I think it came out pretty well. Enjoy.
I recently began work on a new project with my brother, Robert Olsen. We’ve developed a web comic called Haiku Comics. Bob writes the poems and I draw and letter the strip. It’s been a lot of fun to work on so far.
Neither of us really knows where this thing is going, so our goal is to publish a new strip every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and just see where it takes us. If you’re interested in watching the strip develop, you might want to bookmark the site or add it to your RSS feed. I’m pretty proud of the strips we’ve put out so far and I only think they are going to get better.
I have printed and assembled the first copy of my new storybook, Will Someone Open This [CENSORED] Jar? The “first printing” is a signed & numbered edition of twenty copies made using archival inks and acid-free paper.
I’ve been meaning to put this up for a couple of weeks now. It was on display last week in the graduate advancement show at California State University, Long Beach.
Well, after working on it for a good week-and-a-half, I think the illustration I’ve been working on is done. A week-and-a-half? I am ridiculously slow.
Well, it’s been a rough month. After getting back from Japan, I was hit with a couple of health issues that completely blew the deadline I’d set for the animated film I’ve been working on. I’m fine now, but I’ve had to push back the completion date for the film until January of 2009. Fingers crossed.
The main reason why I’ve pushed the date so far back is that I’m back in the saddle again, so to speak. I’ve been hard at work at the drawing desk pulling together some new illustrations. I just scanned in some rough pencils tonight. Here’s what I’ll be working on tomorrow:
Yep, more Lovebot! He now has a nemesis, however — the dreaded Lollypop Squid. Oh boy!
So, I happen post on an illustration forum that the super-talented Frank Stockton also happens to post on. A few weeks back, I mentioned to him that it saddened me that the RSS feed on his blog didn’t work – I like seeing his new work and I’m really just too forgetful to visit his site all that often.
Anyway, we got to talking and he basically threw the problem into my lap. I am apparently that guy, you know? The one who knows a lot of things about a lot of things. Anyway, I got to tinkering and I fixed it. Frank now has a working RSS feed for his blog. I can now follow his blog through a feed reader. Everyone wins. Yay!
End of story, right?
Well, then this arrived in the mail:
A beautiful little print of his illustration from the Fantagraphics Book, Beasts: Book Two. Rad! Thanks Frank!
I thought I’d post an update about the film: a crazy, impossible project that I just can’t seem to give up on.
I wrapped up another scene last night which brings me to, oh, say, NOT NEARLY ENOUGH FINISHED SCENES. As I wrote previously, I really didn’t understand what I was getting myself into with this project. But, now that I’ve invested so much time, I am determined to finish the film.
In the past few weeks, I’ve had some pretty big breakthroughs. In order to deal with some rigging issues, I invested more time in just learning Blender 3D and really got a handle on some of the more powerful ways of using the program. And that means I can work faster. And working faster means that I can finish scenes faster. And finishing scenes faster means that this film might just get completed before I die.
Sigh.
I am proud to report that the scenes that I have finished look pretty amazing. I’m really happy with the way the project is coming together. I’m also really happy that the last few scenes have only taken two to three days to complete. Which, of course, is still too slow.
Anyway, here are a couple of backgrounds from the film. I think they give the film a really unusual look and give the piece a lot of character.
Last year, I started work on a little comic book story and, like many things I seem to do, I never finished it. I have six of eight pages inked and some preliminary lettering finished as well. It’s a little sci-fi story about an astronaut that gets separated from his ship and has to figure out how to get back.
I experiment a lot. I’ve never hit upon a working method that I’ve ever totally comfortable with so I’ve continued to try new things rather than sticking with a single style. The experiment with this comic was that I inked it using Adobe Illustrator. I thought that it would allow me to work faster than I was able to all those years ago when I was inking with a brush. I figured that it would also allow me to more easily correct mistakes (by either undoing a brushstroke or tweaking the anchor points on the vector path). I was wrong.
This project became a nightmare. Inking with Illustrator is a painfully slow process for me. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to ink quickly with the program – I just never figured out how. I used a Wacom tablet to create my brushstrokes and, on tight curves, Illustrator had a tendency to create weird, super-fat brush marks that required individual tweaking to fix. This really slowed me down.
I kept thinking that the process would get easier that more I worked with Illustrator but it never did. After six pages, I just couldn’t face inking with the program anymore and gave up. I also knew that finishing the comic any other way at that point wouldn’t work — there’s no way I could mimic that inking style. It’s just too clean. I love the effect, but the process is unbearable.
Now that I have Adobe Illustrator CS3, I’ve been tempted to go back and see if I couldn’t finish this story. Maybe the brush tool has been improved. I’ve very please with the pages I’ve finished so far and I’d really love to see this thing through. Maybe I’ll find some time this summer to work on it. I have no idea what to do with it when it’s done though.
Here’s another set of illustrations from 1999. I came up with a couple of characters that I creatively named “Bear & Pig” and sent them around the world. As I recall, I had more destinations in mind for the duo, but had to move on to other projects.
This first piece was the inspiration for the rest. It was for a self-promotional postcard. The caption was to read: “‘Oh, no!’ Exclaimed Mr. Pig. ‘Without opposable thumbs, how will we ever finish our project?’” That, of course, would be where I came in.
One of my favorite parts of drawing is when you’re able to crack yourself up. I remember giggling to myself quite a bit as I drew those horns onto Mr. Pig.
Vegas! Please ignore the horribly drawn lights in the rafters. There are times when rendering everything with a tiny brush starts to wear you down and, if you’re not careful, it ends up on the page. I should have just taken a break.
Of course, I spend all that money to send the pair to Russia and what does Mr. Bear do? He sleeps through the whole goddamn thing. Sheesh.
I’m going to try to keep these weekly postings up and, while I work on new material, I thought it might be fun to show some of my older work.
When I was an undergrad at CSULB in the 90s, I was a big fan of pen and ink. The work I admired most always emphasized markmaking — whether it was ink or paint, you could see the artist’s process as he worked through an illustration. Although my style is evolving, I still am drawn to this sort of work.
Anyway, for the Advanced Illustration classes I took in 1999, I did a series of brush and ink illustrations about William Faulkner’s 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying. I had read it in one of the many literature classes I had taken, and I had fallen in love with it. In the book, Addie Bundren dies an unhappy woman and, to exact her revenge on her family, requests burial in Jefferson City — a brutally long journey made worse when one has a rotting corpse in one’s wagon. Hilarity ensues.
This first piece above shows poor Addie Bundren in her coffin. She would only fit in upside down because she insisted on being buried in her wedding dress.
In a famously short chapter from the novel (it’s only one sentence long), Vardaman Bundren, Addie’s youngest child, confuses his dead mother for a fish. I wish I could take credit for the coffin-shaped plate, but it was my instructor, Robin Richesson, that came up with the idea while we were discussing my thumbnails for the project.
The Bundren’s journey to Jefferson City. I’ve never been one to shirk away from difficult perspective challenges in an illustration and I was quite proud of the way I handled the horse in this piece. One might argue that the people in this piece look somewhat crude, but that was intentional. Was the effect successful? I’m not sure. I do think that they work okay in the piece, but I can’t say whether it was the best solution.
One of Addie’s older children, Darl, burns down the barn where Addie’s body is being housed for the night in order to stop the family from having to continue on their journey to Jefferson. It almost goes without saying that the farmer who owns the barn is not very happy. Oh, and they managed to save Addie’s corpse from the fire too!
Looking back on these illustrations, I’m still pretty happy with them. They’re a bit rough here and there — I think Addie’s dress was my biggest failing – but they still have a certain charm. I remember that I worked really hard on these pieces — each one probably took about eighty hours to complete. Drawing all those teeny-tiny lines with a #1 round brush adds up. Hardly efficient, but it can’t be said that I didn’t work hard. Three of these pieces were matted and framed as a triptych and displayed in the annual end-of-the-year student show in the CSULB University Art Museum.
![A photo of Nathan Olsen's new book, Will Someone Open This [Censored] Jar?](http://www.nateomedia.com/images/notebook/newbook.jpg)
