My cousin-in-law works for Red Cross and got to see President Obama’s speech in person. She’s kind of a fan and, needless to say, was a little star-struck. Audrey and I created this image to tease her.
Oh, and Happy Halloween!
More Apropos of Nothing.
This year’s Alternative Press Expo (APE) was a lot of fun. Audrey and I stayed once again at the Best Western Carriage Inn, where each room is named after a different famous San Franciscan. This time we stayed in the Isadora Duncan room; below is the portrait of her adorning our wall (unfortunately I can’t find the name of the artist who created the portrait):
I shared a table with the amazingly talented, Sacramento-based artists Joel Smith and Jacob Magraw-Mickelson. To my other side were the amazingly talented, Bay Area artist Cody Vrosh and his wife, Sheatiel Sarao. Intimidating! Still, we did all right at the Jesse Baggs table. Thanks to everyone that came by and said hello, bought a comic, t-shirt or drawing.
As always, there was an overwhelming abundance of amazing comics and crafts to choose from. Curse you, opportunity cost! Hopefully I’ll have time in the near future to write a little something about the purchases I liked most, and upload scans of convention sketches other artists created for me. But in the meantime, here are the sketches and drawings I made.
First, general sketchbook portraits created while people watching:
Other people paid me to draw them. Here are three such portraits, accompanied by a photo of the subject for comparison purposes (I hope none of them mind being on the Internet). If you like what you see, send me an email; I’d be happy to draw you, too! You can also check out more portraits in the new Caricatures section of JesseBaggs.com!
One guy asked me to draw him as a “male Sarah Connor”:
A nice young lady asked me to draw her Maine-Coon cat eating an orchid:
Someone else asked me to draw a “cartoony Mona Lisa”:
Other people tried to stump me, asking for things like “a space-walking goblin”:
Or, “Rocket Squid. All I’ll tell you is that he’s part man, part rocket, part squid”:
Toughest of all was the one-word request for a drawing of “nihilism”:
But my favorite drawings were these last three. First, a guy that looked very much like Martin Starr as Roman DeBeers in Party Down, asked me to draw the TARDIS with a hedgehog. When I handed him the drawing, he said, “It’s beautiful.”
Another guy asked me to draw Link fighting Finn from Adventure Time, which was not only a great idea but also a lot of fun to draw. When he saw the final drawing, the guy gave me a high five.
And finally, the funnest drawing of all: someone asked that I draw Abraham Lincoln fighting a praying mantis:
But all that fun wouldn’t have been the funnest without my booth baby, Audrey, who was there to lend moral support, buy food, and keep me from spending too much money.
Looking forward to APE 2013 already, and watch for me at Sac-Con this March!
Made around the same time as my “Gift for Salome” bust, so I figured I’d give it a similar name. Paper Mache, acrylic; 2010.
More Scratch Papers.
As mentioned previously, the newspaper stand I painted for the Sacramento News and Review was on display at the State Fair this year. The Fair is a big event, and when Audrey and I went a few weeks back we were a little afraid we wouldn’t be able to find my box. We ended up finding it without even looking; it was right in front of the wine garden, of course!
Watch this blog for updates as to where the box gets placed permanently.
“Well, it turns out that you are not one thing. Your brain is made up of lots of competing sub-populations. The right way to think about the brain is [that it’s] like a neural parliament with different political parties that are battling it out to steer the ship of state.”
David Eagleman discussing his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report (the quote starts at 4:55). Sounds like someone’s been reading my comics!
Amanuensis –noun. A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.
I am proud to say that Marc Weidenbaum asked me to be the 16th illustrator for his blog Disquiet’s “Sketches of Sound” series, in which he asks cartoonists and illustrators to draw a sound-related object. Previous artists include Brian Biggs, Dylan Horrocks, Megan Kelso, Darko Macan, and Justin Orr, so I’m in good company. Here’s my piece:
I first met Marc in New Orleans as I was traveling cross country in the summer of 2002, where he was kind enough to let some friends and I watch the Lennox Lewis / Mike Tyson fight on Pay-Per-View at his house. Marc lived in Sacramento for a time before that, where he was a writer and editor for Tower Records’s now-defunct Pulse! magazine. One of the features he edited for the magazine was a music-related comics page that started with a series by a young Adrian Tomine, and then another by Justin Green, which was eventually collected in the book Justin Green’s Musical Legends, for which Marc wrote the introduction. The Pulse! comics page eventually featured many more artists, a virtual cartoonists “Who’s Who,” including Peter Kuper, P. Craig Russell, Jason Lutes, Carol Swain, Dan DeCarlo, Keith Knight, John Porcellino, Kaz, Jessica Abel, Matt Madden, Tony Millionaire, and many, many more; the complete list can be seen here.
My dad is a drummer, and played for a garage band called The Unheard as a teenager in the 60s.
When I started creating illustrations for Drum! Magazine in the early aughts, my dad purchased a subscription to the magazine and took up drumming again. My youngest brother, who also played drums in school, purchased a drum set from Aaron Winters (my, this is a name-droppy post!) and now one room of my parents’ house is packed full of drums, where my dad, brother, and even my mom play from time to time. I originally wanted my “Sketches of Sound” piece to be of their equipment, but my initial sketches were too visually cacophonous:
Marc told me he liked my less prevalent “straight” drawings, such as this sketch of my hand:
So, I decided to pick one instrument I could really focus on. My next-door neighbor fixes violins for a living, and has two garages full of instruments he’s working on or has turned into art objects, such as lamps. He lent me a “burner” violin, from which I created this drawing:
I really liked the whole thing, but felt the top handle looked best with its intense focus. Marc agreed, and now the illustration decorates his blog and twitter feed. Hoorah!
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