This is usually a Black Friday offer from me, but the Holiday shopping season was short, and online shopping was even shorter – as a result, I chose to stay out of it.
These are, however, available now and tomorrow.
How does it work? Your purchase is for a pen and ink of any creature you want, done in my style, in archival pigment inks, on acid-free heavyweight fine-art paper. Anything from robots to dragonflies… and yes, I now robots aren’t creatures – so I suppose that entire rule is right out.
I guess I’ll do airships and submarines and other things too – the only thing I won’t do is “characters”… not because I look down on such things: simply because such typically involves too much direction and not enough art.
If there is something you would like a drawing of from me – my prices are *way* reduced because I could really use the money – from $75 a drawing down to $45.
December 27th, this offer disappears. Not just the price, but the offer for my time altogether, as I’ll be very busy doing other work once the new year starts.
The painting was originally to be a part of “Featured Creatures”, a movie monsters art show at the Ice Cream Gallery, but at 24×36 inches, in acrylic, and with little time to work on it – I knew I could not give this piece the love and attention I wanted to, and ended up submitting a smaller and more free-formed painting of Henrietta from “Evil Dead”.
Over the past months, this is mostly what I have been working on when I sit down to paint, and I have very much been looking forward to finally being able to show it…
Over the past months I have been tapping away at keys, collecting scans of artworks old and new and even a lot of forgotten works, in order to make a very intensive book of my works to date.
At first, it was only going to be the Airships and Tentacles series, but I began to use “lost” artworks for section endings, and decided I should include old paintings from before the series, as well as all of those pieces I have worked on during the series as album covers, book covers, commissions, illustrations, or things I did during the series just to clear my head and work on something different. It even includes a few samplings from my-yet-to-be-published literary works, and some pieces I’ve done relating to the works of others (Voltaire, Clive Barker, Dexter Palmer, Bethalynne Bajema, and others), and collections of doodles and sketches to decorate text pages (such as the Table of Contents, Words from the Artist and other sections)
The book has a cover specially designed by Bethalynne Bajema from my existing artwork, and I *love* what she did with it. Click the image or link below to view as a PDF online, or right click (recommended) to download and view in 2-page side by side book format.
I did some live painting down at Ice Cream Gallery, and I did 4 new paintings in 2 days at Cinema Wasteland with a painting in my lap, a pallet balanced on my knee, and paint cup between my feet. Below are 3 of them.
I returned home inspired to reboot my old comic book, since I found that there was a good amount of enthusiasm for it at the horror convention, and because Bethalynne has always been trying to encourage me to get back on it.
I had abandoned the project a long time ago, not because I did not love doing it, but because it seemed the web didn’t like it much. It took no longer caring, for me to go and work on the site, and when I did I found that my “buy now” button had been broken since its very first launch… which makes it very hard to judge the enthusiasm of others on sales.
So, I updated very little… moved some boxes and bubbles around for better flow and easier reading… got rid of all the ads and extra credits inside the covers… prettied up the front cover just a touch, and everything else is pretty much the same. Crazy how ahead of its time it must have been that now it feels almost current.
In the, wow, nearly 20 years of this site, 10 years at this domain, a lot has changed, and will continue to change.
I’ve been in the middle of another major site overhaul for starters, so you might see some things shift here or there even as you browse.
The store will continue to work as usual, and will continue to carry many, many art prints, art originals, and other things – but I am working hard to get the gallery filled with the 100-some images I have available, in order to make it much easier to see what types and sizes of prints are available for each artwork all in one place… because I realize it can be rather overwhelming to sift through 400 items and feel you are miking the best choice.
I’ve removed eyesores like the facebook feed and the twitter feed, because they took up a lot of space – and it was silly to have them, since you are already here, and most posts over there are about things that are available here.
I’ve also removed them because, well, I am going to use them both a lot less often. Twitter really just seems like a lot of people talking into the wind to imaginary friends, Tumblr and Pinterest seem to be the sport of sharing as many images as possible as quickly as possible, Livejournal is filled with Russian spambots where people once were, and Facebook, since they started promoted posts – well, for 800-some people I see a little “10 people saw this post” at the bottom “insights”, and it all seems pretty pointless.
… as does the internet in general, if all it is to be is a billion people slaving away at sharing things quickly, forgetting moments later for the next sharable thing… not visiting sites, or reading articles, just “liking” them and sharing.
… it isn’t exciting anymore; It isn’t even pleasurable or relaxing anymore – just mind-numbing addictive boredom and a day filled with forgettable moments… click – share – click – share – comment – click – share…
Though I spent a lot of time building up readership on facebook – as have many others with their pages: the best solution seems to be if everyone were to go and start that again elsewhere. I’ll only be there, in the sense that my posts from here will feed into my “fan page”… at least until they make that a paid service too.
On the up-side, this has forced me to get back to what I shouldn’t have stopped doing: updating right here – like I did years ago, finding a few things that well-worth blogging about and putting some effort into sharing as articles and reviews worth typing about, rather than all sorts of things “sort-of ” worth sharing at the click of a button.
I don’t have a mailing list in place yet, one of a hundred things on the slate for these next few days… but if you have a decent browser – there is an rss button at the top.
Please check back often; Aside from posting new artworks and books and such things here, and special offers, I plan to return to posting about music, the art of others, event reviews, and whatever else fits well in this space.
If you came here looking for special offers, well, there are many new prints being added in the process of building the gallery, and many products being marked down until the end of December.
If you would like to see those specials, you can now find many of the newest deals through the gallery.
These are just a handful of upcoming and past appearances.
I do have many more appearances in mind this coming year, to be announced – and my mind is so fuzzy on the older ones, so I’ll add them as they come to me.
I’ll also update a lot of this with proper links gradually over the coming weeks.
Bethalynne is still in the hospital – misscarriage/ectopic pregnancy… and we’re hoping she won’t need surgery; Two days of hospital so far, and the drugs don’t yet seem to be doing their trick, but we’re hopeful.
Of course this happened on the day before we were to launch these, so I do not have access to her photographic skills for these boards. Also, we are trying to sell some of these, or some of anything in order to cover prescription and aftercare costs once she is released – as well as to keep me in gas and road food for hospital visits.
Anyway, about the boards:
These boards are designed by Bethalynne Bajema, with woodwork by Myke Amend (me).
The boards measure 15×18?, are made of thick 3/4 inch oak, stained a deep red cherry, and are coated in varnish and then waxed for an easy gliding of the planchette.
Edges are ornately routed for an added decorative touch, and some of these have gold leafed edges as well.
There are only 6 available in each edition – each are sealed to the buyer’s specifications, and can be decorated with added touches. Each are also hand-signed, numbered, and dated on the back by both artists.
Each planchette (optional) is uniquely made by Myke Amend, cut from oak, and stained deep red cherry, accented with hand-shaped brass, and gold leaf – no two planchettes are alike. I am letting the saw guide me for each one, and I also have to pick and shape pieces of brass from my found brass box – so each planchette will be designed to fit the buyer and/or the board (if a board is purchased with the planchettes… planchettes can be bought on their own).
I realize that not everyone has money for boards of these quality on short notice – so of course these are not the only things I am raising funds with. Anything bought from my store will help us out.
Dead Teddy Bear Picnic limited edition Spirit BoardGrandville Spirit BoardTemptation Spirit BoardHand-Made Planchette by Myke Amend
These are drawings I did on the back of the post cards I made available for a brief time a few weeks ago. Since I am filling another coloring book and using these characters elsewhere, I figured this was a good way to make original art available cheapish while somewhat covering my hours of work.
Now I am adding these drawings to the grab bags (Available Here) for Halloween, which will ship October 22nd, and will only be available until October 10th. They are a great way to get an assortment of prints along with these pigment ink drawings, for really cheap considering all that comes in them.
I did this as a drawing a while back for my free coloring pages I offered here, which is a coloring page not in my for-sale coloring book, and decided that I really wanted to do a color version myself… even though its fitting well into the series would even further-delay the release of my Airships and Tentacles art book, still in the works until the last two commissions are done.
The image is one of a little girl drawing out her surroundings with a magickal piece of chalk… floating fish, airships, men riding sharks, and geometric stars like snowflakes are some of the major scene elements, but like always: there are lots of things hidden within ice formations and other elements.
Though it is incredibly cartoony (from a cartoony sketch that is no surprise), and way more colorful than I tend to do things, I rather like it… enough so that I wish I could better communicate the look online, but you know how web graphics go: never nearly as much can be seen or felt as looking at the original painting, or at least the prints which look dead-on the original painting thanks to giclee printing technology.
And, because of the vivid coloring in this one, and because of my love for metallic prints, especially where blues and reds are concerned, I decided that I wanted to offer something more than just giclees and the original painting on my site. In addition, I am offering 25 metallic full-size (18″ x 12″) printings of this, hand signed and dated.
So, we’re back from the Steampunk Symposium, cooling our jets for a few weeks (read: working frantically on other things and preparation for coming conventions).
We had a great time; Aloyisius and his team put on one extraordinary event, and did one seriously good job of keeping everything organized and running splendidly. We would *certainly* love to come back next year to see the next and bigger version of this convention. Many triumphs to expand upon, and, as far as I can see… no mistakes to learn from and that is an incredible feat for a first convention.
I had several panels there, and I hope that people enjoyed them as much as I did… even the second one wherein “hungry” influenced my conversation and concentration a bit more than I would have liked it to have. I’ll learn from this and avoid early morning panels in the future if I can at all… but I did somehow manage to fill a whole hour, and keep people there and asking questions.
I had a tall stage, a big screen, and a digital projector… which I of course did not use. I suppose I like things to feel smaller and more intimate- and have always felt a bit out of place on a stage doing anything other than karaoke-ing 80s and 90’s post-punk tunes.
Outside of the panels, we spent most of the days at our tables, selling art prints and speaking with people – and I experimented by bring many large giclee prints on heavyweight fine art rag paper. I came up with this idea so I could add an alternative above our less-expensive and convention-priced prints, and below that of the giclees on canvas and original paintings/engravings.
In that, I learned pretty much what we had established before: To stick to the $5 through $30 range items. I did however establish that it is not the thought of carrying around some huge-sized canvas print that hinders sales there – but that price, is purely the reason.
People at sci-fi/fantasy/subcultural conventions, myself included, are primarily looking for clothing, accessories, gizmos, trinkets and such… and when it comes to art, they are looking for something more in the souvenir range… perhaps as a keepsake reminder of the convention, to have something that is signed, or simply to show some support for the artists they like.
I’d have to say my first thought whenever I arrive at any convention, is that if I make X amount of dollars, I am going to buy myself a cool vest, a nice pair of boots, a well-made pair of gloves, a new shirt, etc… why should other attendees feel any differently?
It is because of this that I had a thought: Next convention, I will focus more on the smaller prints, and otherwise I will bring the originals for the devoted buyers, and I will be bringing some new things as well… hand-crafted works in wood and brass, mechanical or just practical/handy/decorative… and I’ve got a lot of things in mind, all of which I am excited about having the opportunity to show and offer. I’ll have more on that when I have made them… for right now, it is a bit of a secret.
So, I return home with a great amount of fond memories of the convention, and souvenirs in the form of prints – special made for this convention. Each are rather large, printed on 390 GSM (super heavyweight) rag paper in fine pigment inks. Each are signed, and dated “Steampunk Symposium 2012”. These are *all* rather rare, one of a kind for their size… They are 13 inches by up to 24 inches. Most average about 13×20 inches, and are all beautiful and sturdy reproductions on my work.
Our table at Steampunk Symposium 2012
I *thought* about offering them all as a set… and if you make an offer before any of them sell, I would be more than happy to offer them that way), otherwise: I’ll be putting them up for sale over the next few hours. There are some available now, and by morning I’ll have them all up and available, in their own category here:
There is only one of each, so if you see one you like, this is a good time, the only time to grab it.
So, what is coming up? Well, Jfax in June (Grand Rapids), In October we’ll be at Kokomo-Kon in Kokomo Indiana, and are hoping to be a part of Utopiacon in Cincinnati the week after. We’ll be trying to fill in many more spots as we can, hopefully some more guest spots and panels, but we’ll be looking at conventions to just vend at as well… maybe a few to simply enjoy attending. Please watch this space, and I’ll try to be much better about announcing our future appearances in the future.
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