Last week was spring break week for my school, so I headed back to Minnesota to visit some friends and family. I hardly did any drawing or other work, but I had a good time snapping a few photos of some of my favorite folks and places around Minneapolis, including Grain Belt Premium, as seen above. Click on the picture above to check out my small but growing Flickr page, including a series of shots from a coffee cupping at my friend’s coffee roastery.

Now that I’ve got a new camera, I’m going to attempt to start upping my Flickr use, so check back.

I did find the time to do a little bit of business while back in Minneapolis though. For those of you in the area, I dropped off a few copies of Baby Otto: Volume 1 and Business Casual at Big Brain Comics, if you find yourself needing a copy.

Left side drawn from a photo at www.shorpy.com, one of my favorite sites out there.

I’ve been carrying around a small Moleskine sketchbook for about a month now. It’s so much more accessible than whipping out my big sketchbook (which of course I still keep but use only for notes and sketches for assignments or freelance work). When I pull out the small book, I have no worries whatsoever about making anything look polished, it’s just more about the feel of putting something down on paper. I think it’s not only upped my speed but also my confidence in pure mark-making, as everything you see here went straight to ink, no pencils. Here are a few of my favorite pages from the last month.

This post is also a good window into the three materials I almost never leave the house without lately, my Pentel Pocket Brush, a water brush filled with a light ink wash instead of just water, and usually about four colors of Sharpie paint markers.

Ghost bomb ended up becoming an etching, which I’ll post when I get a final edition scanned. The top right drawing garnered a friendly, but mis-guided “Oh, I like that!” from a waitress in the restaurant I was sitting, after which I almost instantaneously snapped the book shut, slightly embarrassed. Also, some fan art for my buddy, Brybox.

Self-explanatory.

Like ghost bomb before it, the left side here also got turned into an etching entitled “My Other Automobile is an Ornithopter.” Right side is Phil Bunyan, were he a small deer. (And yes, the page was very smudgy, although it doesn’t show in the scan)

Mummy drawn during class and a guy I drew from memory after glancing up and seeing him on CNN yesterday.

My most recent assignment for Intermediate Illustration was to create a series of one to three cover designs or pinups of a comic book character of my creation. I decided to create a sequential front and back cover design for Phil Bunyan. My plan right now is to do one or two more short Phil Bunyan stories and then ask other artists if they’d care to submit their own Phil comic; eventually to be printed by me in some sort of Phil Bunyan anthology. Let me know if you might be interested.

The Robopocalypse Comics Collective and I will be having an art show at the ever-friendly handmade boutique/comic publisher/music label, Tender Loving Empire, in April. As part of the show, we will be releasing a series of small, “robopocalypse” or robot-themed screenprints. Each print will be 6 inches square and will feature art from most of the RCC’s members. This is the image for mine, entitled “The Boneyard.” I went with the darker side of the robopocalypse to go along with my comic in our upcoming themed anthology, “Beware the Robopocalypse,” which will debut at Stumptown Comics Fest at the end of April.