something unfolds

What is this? Could it possibly be...a new comic?

Adriana thinks she is special for making one paltry 2-page comic during all of 2011. We'll see if she ever scans it and posts it online so you can actually read it...

Pre-Occupied

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I took a weekend jaunt to NYC to visit Occupy Wall Street. I wanted to pay my respects and see how the birthplace of the movement compared to Occupy Los Angeles. I was hoping I'd meet other teachers in New York and talk with them about what they think can be done to fix the education system.

I reached Zuccotti Park less than 24-hours before the police cleared everyone out. The mood was nothing like the Burning Man-esque hippie gathering depicted by the mass media. It felt solemn, organized. Various groups (Socialists, Anarchists, Libertarians, etc.) had set up information tables distributing literature explaining their viewpoints. The tent city was bustling quietly and protestors engaged in friendly, serious conversation with visitors.

When I arrived, I wasn't sure what to do with myself. It felt weird to take photos like a tourist, and I wasn't planning on pitching a tent and joining the occupiers for the weekend. As I walked around the park with my friends, the answer revealed itself.

insert "the pen is mightier than the sword" reference here

Joshua Boulet is a comics artist from Texas who came to New York to document the occupation with ink and brush. I stopped to admire his work and we talked for a long time. He showed me the beautiful drawings he had been working on for the past few weeks, which were his contribution to the movement. I can't think of a more sincere, relevant way for an artist to participate. Joshua was the only artist I met at Zuccotti Park that day, and it was definitely an auspicious bit of serendipity. He reminded me that I'm on the right track as both artist and educator.

Check out Joshua's versatile work on his website. You can purchase his Occupy prints here. He's also working on a book called Draw Occupy Wall Street that's already over one hundred pages.

I decided to go back to school to become a teacher because I want to be part of the positive change our nation's public education system irrefutably needs. I'm in alignment with the goals, values and ideals of the OWS movement, and support those across the country who have been camping out to help create a unified voice for change. Though most occupiers have been evicted from their protest sites at this point, I'm proud that so many individuals have been invoking their constitutional rights to protest greed and corruption. Those who do it creatively are the most productive, in my opinion.

Tree Huggers Update

My Tree Hugger is a drama queen, of course...

(digital drawing and photos by moi)

She loves to look down from her pedestal...

fraternize with the locals...

...and she's always ready for her close up.

 Au revoir, mes amis!

http://sundial.csun.edu/2011/11/tree-hugger-art-project-draws-attention-to-campus-food-garden/

http://www.csunsustainability.org/

Learning to teach is an Odyssey

I struggle to become a good teacher. The uphill climb feels pretty steep and I realize I need a lot more training before I reach the summit. I may break down into tears from the pressure, but I'll never give up because just when I'm ready to throw in the towel, magic happens.

  

Sometimes you get those perfect days where everything just works. You're reminded that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.

Today was one of those days, and days like today make it all worthwhile.

Comics class at Odyssey Charter School in Altadena 

through Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock.

Photos by the lovely Joanna Waterfal

Oh, Say Can You CAEA?

A couple weeks ago I volunteered at the California Arts Education Association conference in Bakersfield. This is an annual gathering of state art teachers (not to be confused with this gathering) to share "news, community, best practices and advocacy gathered in the arts." 

The lady from Sargent Art was delayed in China (or was it India?) so yours truly was charged to run Sargent's vendor booth all weekend. I didn't mind because I got to play with fun new mediums such as liquid metallics and space-age sculpting goo. Have you guys seen these multicultural crayons? I hear they're all the race rage:

While I was baffled at the demographic (where were all the educators my age? why are there no men or people of color? why are art teachers primarily white women?) I was equally compelled by the incredible warmth and generosity buzzing about the halls. In the true spirit of community and collaboration, I was gifted with enough amazing stuff to pack my car. Art supplies, tee shirts, textbooks, posters, worksheets and lesson plans galore...I left the conference with my arms full—not to mention my heart and my brain.

Special thanks to the nicest person of all time, Mark from Pacon Creative Products. Homeboy hooked me up with a bunch of wonderful and unique crafting supplies, including some nifty discontinued sculpting items that I can't wait to use in my first classroom.

Talk about great customer service....

he even delivered everything to my car for me. What a guy!

Art 485: Studio Problems in Teaching Crafts

Learnin' how to teach is serious business.

Shot on Fernando Maludo's Canon Rebel T1I

with an 18-55mm macro fisheye lens attachment.

not too shabby

My first student teaching assignment:

Intro to Art – 4th & 5th Period – STEM Academy

@ Helen Bernstein High School, Hollywood, CA

Objective: Create an original character using the basic elements 
of art (line, shape, color, texture, value) on the paper toy template provided.

Awesome toy design project c/o readymech.com
Awesome character designs c/o 9th-12th graders of STEM Academy

Happy 10th Anniversary, Gothtober!

Yes, everyone' favorite interactive Halloween web calendar has been bringing you creeps and ghouls the best seasonal clicks for a whole decade now.

This year's theme is "chain restaurants," and the head candy corn Julianna Parr has whipped up enough blue plate specials to choke an army of hungry zombies (it's true, they eat more than brains).

Each day of the month offers a different story, video, animation, recipe, how-to project or artwork, replete with sounds and downloads, hoots and hollers. Most are great for kids of all ages, but some may be truly haunting. Click at your own risk...BWA HA HA HA HA!

Click on Tuesday, October 18th for "Ghettoblaster Disaster," a gore-tastic webcomic created by my good friends Furious Georgette and Bill Wolkoff.  It's a parody of Christine and a bit of a gross-out gore-fest, so hold onto your lunch...

http://www.gothtober.com/

p.s. I love second chances!

Tree Huggers

I just found out that Cal State Northridge has a "green" initiative, the Institute of Sustainability. Since the CSUN Arts Education program is totally awesome, we're participating in a fall event inspired by Polish artists Agnieszka Gradzik & Viktor Szostalo's Tree Hugger Project.

Our assignment: build an all-natural, tree-abiding figure (aka "Tree Hugger") out of found organic materials (twigs, leaves, vines, etc.) bound only with raffia.

Results thus far have been a tad Blair-Witchy, but it's still a ton-o-fun. We're going to hide them around the campus grounds and have a party next month (I think near the Botanical Garden?). More to come as the project progresses.

Alex Garcia's gettin' twiggy with it

"Be the change..."

This famous quote — attributed to Mahatma Gandhi — is the central theme this session for the P4K teen program. With knowledge and inspiration gained from visiting creative professionals, field trips, art and writing activities and weekly blog reflections, our intimate group will decide how THEY can create positive change in their own worlds.

Oh, hai Shay <3

We're just getting started, but the goal is to self-publish a zine of original artwork, photos and text by mid-November and pass it out to members of the community. Check out the teens' blog every week to see where they've been and where they're going:

http://www.p4kteen.blogspot.com/

Peace4Kids Taking Over the Nation

For the past 3 years, the kids over at the Boys and Girls Club of Watts/Willowbrook have been kind enough to let me dork out with them, volunteering and teaching various art workshops. Peace4Kids, the organization I work with, has taught me the meaning of community as family.

It's been a true joy watching the smart 9-year-olds I first had for comics-making class grow into even smarter 12-year-olds, and I look forward to seeing them each Saturday from 9-2. They've become my family and I don't know where I'd be without them.

This year, our sessions have been extended from 6 to 9 weeks, giving us more time to develop longer-term projects and work on ongoing community goals. It's heartening to have a consistent space with such a radsauce group of committed creative people on board.

NHM, I miss you already!

pros and cons

This year at San Diego Comic Con, all I did was sleep in. And eat. And go shopping. There's something to be said for that, but here's hoping for more comix-making in 2012!

I did also run into a few of my more famous and prolific colleagues, Kiyoshi Nakazawa and Bwana Spoons, whose awesome booth was jam-packed full of eyeball-exploding art, comix, toys, zines, shirts and ceramics. They reminded me that I have a lot of work to do if I ever want to be a real cartoonist when I grow up.

diorama drama

being insects: compound eye masks and citra sippers

designing an ecosystem: the classic diorama

my goodness, how time flies!

Has it really been five months since my last blog post? So much has happened since then!

After my first semester at CSUN I began an amazing summer working at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits.

As a new instructor for Adventures in Nature discovery camp, I've been having a blast teaching a different subject theme each week to awesome 3rd & 4th graders. Sessions included Insect Investigators, Pleistocene Naturalists and Dino Descendants (just to name a few), and the campers have been schooling me in a thing or two.

Vertebrate paleontology, ornithology, polychaetes, myriapods, herpetology, the butterfly pavilion, the pregnant plesiosaur in the new Dino Hall...I think I'm geeking out more than the 8 year-olds.


Oh, by the way:

  

tender college lurve

I drew this while riding the bus. Gotta try that more often.

white manxiety

be true to your school

CSUN is radical. No, really...the School of Education is awesomely progressive, calling for a total blow-up of the status quo and a nationwide curriculum upheaval. Um, this school has a Mission Statement, a Vision Statement, a list of Strategic Goals AND a Conceptual Framework which are totally in alignment with my values as a human being. Some snippets:

• "Foster a climate in which the meaning and implications of diversity are continuously defined, examined, and addressed."
• "Solve problems, make decisions, facilitate change, and produce knowledge in new and creative ways."
• "Engage in inquiry about what it means to be an ethical and caring professional."

Unheard of! Love it!

Aaanyways, since I love to make WAY more work for myself than is bodily necessary, I decided to do this mini-comic for one of my little 5-point homework activities. 

The Class: Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 417 – Equity & Diversity in Schools.
The Assignment: Define your cultural self, and don't be PC about it!
Me: Really? Okay, I'll give it a shot...here goes...

Let me know what you think!

linkage

Sometimes it's fun to google yourself and see what shows up. Tonite, I found this article, which links to one of the more favorite comix I made for gURL.com back in the day. It made me nostalgic for a good number of reasons:

http://www.nonfictioncomics.net/2010/09/hey-ladies/

Not too shabby.

While I was there, I found a new site that caught my attention, The Comic Book Project. This looks like a fairly recent educational arts & literacy learning initiative, with kits and materials published by Dark Horse (the biggest "indie" comics publisher) and workshops sponsored by the Center for Educational Pathways. Sounds great to me! I'm all for using comics and manga to help bridge the literacy gap, so I will be keeping a close eye on this program in coming years. The site has lots of good photos and galleries of student work from schools and libraries around the country.

http://www.comicbookproject.org/

o say can you CSUN?

Oh, hai. It's been a while. 

A former student of mine recently reprimanded me for being a neglectful blogger. While I was shocked to learn that anyone was actually following this thing, it was just the kick in the pants I needed.

I missed you, Nerdegade. Did you miss me?

In January, I entered the credential program at California State University, Northridge to become a full-time licensed public school teacher. CSUN has one of the best education programs in the WORLD, and every moment is jam-packed with new challenges. Gosh, it feels great to be using more of my brain. I've never been so inspired, and I've never been so ludicrously busy.

My days are spent in the secondary school classroom (that's grades 6-12), and my evenings til 10 pm are spent in class. My life hasn't been this consumed since I dated that bipolar guy...except this time there's an amazing future to look forward to.

ANYWAY, I'm totally going to post some comics totally soon. In fact, here's a little somethin'-somethin' right now...it's a page from a mini comic I've been working on for my class on Equity and Diversity in Multicultural schools. I promise to post all 16 pages before summer ;)

p.s. I'm still working on that one-point perspective...

our bowel movements, fresh off the press

Robyn Chapman's Make *w00t!* was reviewed by The Comics Journal *thrills!* and my comic got a little mention *gasp!* I guess this is my first review, like, ever. Thanks again, Robyn!

READ IT!

so close, you can almost taste it

just...not quite.

I hate missing deadlines...

sigh...it'll get done eventually

rant...er, i mean paper review

This Webcomic I've been toiling over for the past couple months has been an excellent learning experience. I'm pushing myself farther than usual and I think my rendering has improved since last year...yay! But one glaringly negative part of this process, which is unfortunately one of the most essential elements, has been the paper I'm drawing on: Strathmore 500 Series plate-surface bristol...boo!

For years I made my comics on whatever generic office paper I could scam from freelance jobs (oops, did I just say that?). My experience was mainly in Webcomics and I wasn't thinking about preserving the original art, so my process was heavy on the cut & paste. I would end up doing most of the work "in post," as they say here in Hollywood.

Elements such as body text, lettering, sometimes entire replacement hands and heads and backgrounds, were drawn outside of the panels in the margins or on a different piece of paper altogether, and everything was scanned, assembled, colored and refined in Photoshop. It wasn't until I attended a summer workshop at CCS in Vermont that I was clued in to the value of penciling and inking your comics as tight as possible on a nice piece of bristol and drawn at twice the output size of the final publication. Not only are also they cool to keep around just in case you get famous and they make great teaching peripherals, but making comics this "proper" way SAVES SO MUCH TIME.

Now, about this paper. I was stoked to get a free sample pack of 24 sheets, because this stuff is pricey. However, it's taking me hours longer than usual to clean my pages up in Photoshop, and I blame this paper. The plate surface is just WAY too smooth. I don't normally like any tooth in my paper, but this smoothness is ridiculous.

First of all, blue pencils are useless on this surface. I'm extremely heavy-handed when I draw, but with the blue pencil I could barely see a line on the page. I wore down 6 or 7 of them before I gave up and switched over to graphite...which I never do. Being as heavy-handed as I am, as well as super anal and eraser-happy, my pages tend to be an overworked mess. I'm not saying messy is bad, but the messier the page the more computer clean-up is necessary. When you do too much work in Photoshop, you lose that nice hand-drawn quality to your images. Not so good, in my opinion.

Next, despite Strathmore's claim that the 500 Series bristol is "ideal for pencil, pen and ink," I don't know what kind of ink they were thinking of because the surface is simply dreadful for my inking tool of choice, my beloved Pentel brush pen. The ink practically floats on top of the paper like motor oil on the LA freeway, and we know that's a Very Bad Thing. It wasn't long before my lines actually started to bleed into the paper, which was perplexing because isn't the whole point of the plate surface to have no tooth? Perhaps it's just not very durable.

It is also not conducive to working with assorted materials such as white-out pens and Microns. I tend to switch around from tool to tool and the 500 Series seemed confused by this. That's the only way I can describe it. Different inks and graphite do not integrate well on this paper, if that makes any sense.

To make a long story...uh, long, I do not believe Strathmore when they say that this paper is "recommended by sequential art professionals and award-winning artists." I'd like to have a word with any sequential art professionals who really use this stuff. Anyway, I gotta get back to work!