Aberrant Press

Previously : I spent the week being rather productive, actually. Got much writing done and a ton of page layouts for the guy drawing my former mini-series, now graphic novel, Super. The really cool thing I did this week was that I got to use my gigantor-bad-ass printer to make a number of back-lit posters for Burning Man. The job was kicked my way by my Epson guy, and that’s where all the really cool parts came in. First, the artist who needed the prints was doing symmetrical fractal images, which are beautiful if you know what you’re doing (and he does). Then it turns out that the guy’s name is Mike Crowley, he used to write for Marvel UK and he knows Alan Moore! And yes, he is loosely related to Aleister Crowley, a fact he was unaware of until Robert Anton Wilson told him that the more famous Crowley only pronounced his name the English way as a matter of affectation. Neat stuff, that! Anyway, I wasn’t going to show these off, because I hadn’t asked his permission, but they should already be on display at the festival, so here are the pieces.

These first three were printed at four feet by four feet each on clear film. The colors are so wonderfully vibrant when lit in front of an opaque piece of plastic.

And this piece is just brilliant. I wish you could see it at the full size I printed it. Finished, it came out at three feet by twenty feet and was done on an opaque material, so that you need only to add the back-light for effect. I believe they are using this piece as a bar top.

So yeah, a number of dudes up there on peyote, or shrooms or whatever owe me for their totally wicked trip.

Also, on Thursday, I held my weekly Drink and Draw meeting. This week we had Mark Millar and Tony Harris stop by since they were in town promoting their new book, War Heroes. They were great fun to hang with, very laid back and talkative. Was a real nice turnout and we had ribs for dinner. Here’s some photos…

The crowd.

And here’s Tony playing pool while Mark goes against type and drinks a Guinness.

Currently : I’m currently playing some online poker while drawing a bunch of necrophiliacs… No, really… Plus, dishes and trash tonight…

Approaching : Will be done working on this television show in another two weeks… Gonna have to find something else to do with my weekends… My plan is to try and work really hard on getting more business involving my printer and finish banging out some art projects… Maybe build some custom lightboxes and do a gallery installation at the next art festival… We’ll see…

I also have a sin to confess. At the Drink and Draw, my boy Gilbert, who happens to be drawing the book mentioned at the top of this post (and taking forever on it, as is the way), was having a piece of artwork he did (some militray-themed zombies with the words “Iraq Year 100” drawn on the bottom) fawned over by just about everyone, especially Millar and Harris. Now, Gilbert is very talented, easily the one of my group with the best chance at landing mainstream penciling work someday, but he’s never been very supportive of the Drink and Draw, treating it like it’s a waste of my time and money. So it makes me jealous that everyone was paying so much attention to his work while I was too busy running the event to pick up a pencil. And that is my sin… Being jealous of my best friend when I should be happy that he’s getting all this attention… I am ashamed and I should be.

Yeah, I know, I’m slipping on here. Nothing has been changed to make the site more “aberrant” and places like my Myspace are getting all the blog posts.

But there is good news: I’ve been knocking out work stuff left and right and will get back on this horse a.s.a.p.

As for the work I’ve been getting done, I’m working on the liner note artwork for a local band called Necrophiliac’s Hearse. Give them a listen. It’s fun and campy and about having sex with the dead! Also, I’m (as I’m writing this) printing out a number of large-format prints for an artist who is using them in an installation at the Burning Man Festival. They’re these amazing symmetrical fractal images. Five bucks says that some dude is gonna trip balls in front of these things and it’s gonna blow his mind, man. I’d show you all now, but I don’t have any sort of clearance to do so… Maybe after the event is through, if he’s okay with it. Three of the pieces are four feet by four feet and were printed on clear film. The fourth is an astounding three feet by twenty four feet being printed on opaque back-lit media.

I’ve never printed on either material before, but have been wanting to for some time. Mostly because I plan to make some custom pieces and hold a gallery show during one of the First Friday events out here. The clear film has a number of challenges attached to it, so the whole process has been rather time-consuming. First off, the paper sensor on my printer is calibrated in such a way that it basically sees right through the film and thus doesn’t recognize it. So for the darned thing to even accept the media, I first have to turn off the lights in the room, which apparently is the only way the sensor has any shot of “seeing” it. Then at the end of printing any piece, I have to turn out the lights again, so that the printer will “see” the film and cut it! If that doesn’t happen, then I end up in a whole heap of trouble, trying to roll the piece back up, get the printer to accept the media again, feed it back through and get it to cut properly. Considering how nice the pieces have been coming out though, I’d say it’s worth the time put in. Plus, the guy I’m doing this for is super cool as it turns out and happened to be a writer for Marvel UK back in the day, so we managed to get really nice discourse going…

There is one other project, a reality television show about a daytime club at the Hard Rock pool. It’s probably the closest to actual reality I’ve ever seen with a “reality” show. None of the “cast” are actors by trade but the actual people who work at the club and the producers don’t really create situations so much as they earn the trust of the people they follow and then let the drama reveal itself. Not sure if the show will be any good, but I’d definitely work on it again next summer should it come around.

Of course, now with all this stuff wrapping up, I may have to get another “straight” job… Ugh…

I think I’m slowly getting the hang of this…

I managed to get a “nude” template (it strips the site of all aesthetics, leaving only the text… Basically a blank) uploaded on here and finally pulled my head far enough out of my ass to learn how to use a FTP client…

I’ll wait until you stop clapping to continue…

So yeah, now with that out of the way, I have an easy place to build up from without having to worry about old code getting in my way. In the meantime though, I’m going to leave up the theme that it’s on now, unless I get froggy and decide to use this other one I downloaded recently.

Okay, I was gonna go watch a tutorial, but I got caught up in filling out some basic info…. the thing is that now that it’s saved, it doesn’t reflect on my website. This post will go up immediately, but the name change in the banner or the added link won’t show… Hmm… What to do, what to do…

EDIT: Okay, I guess administration stuff just takes a little time to upload… Now it’s all good…

The latest version of WordPress my host will set me up with is 2.3, but 2.6 is available and I tried uploading it… My host will let you upload files, but only one at a time… So I spent a couple hours posting up all the new files only to find that I screwed up somewhere (likely in the configuration of login information) so I had to reload version 2.3…

Sigh…

Oh well. I’m off to watch a tutorial on how to edit all this stuff so that I can make this page look cool… Hopefully…