I am not dead yet!

Oh em god, you guys, I am so sorry about the long delay in updates! I didn’t mean to ignore the blog for so long, but this is what the last month has felt like for me:

I’ve been having a good time, but with HeroesCon, moving drama, Drawn Out Storytelling prep and performances, computer failure, preparing for my camps next month, and trying to print a bunch of books and stickers, my mind has been in, like, eleven different places at once! I think that I should be back on track with a decent updating schedule now, though. I’m in NYC for the next week doing shows for Drawn Out Storytelling, which you guys should totally come see if you’re in the area! We’ve got three shows coming up:

The Adventure to Misadventure – Friday, June 24 at 8:45 pm

Featuring stories by Jeff Simmermon (illustrated by Paul Swartz), Adam Wade (illustrated by Bailey Sharp and myself), and Kevin Allison and Adam Newman (illustrated by Bailey Sharp and Pat Barrett).

Rubber and Glue: Stories to and from Geeks, Dweebs, and Losers – Sunday, June 26 at 8:00 pm

Featuring stories by Ben Lillie (illustrated by Paul Swartz), Seth Lind (illustrated by Ben Horak), Leslie Goshko (illustrated by Pat Barrett and myself), and Erin Barker (illustrated by Ray B.).

Identities: The Secret Fantasy of Our Reality – Wednesday, June 29 at 8:45 pm

Featuring stories by Cyndi Freeman (illustrated by myself), Steve Zimmer (illustrated by Pat Barrett), Ophira Eisenberg (illustrated by Paul Swartz and myself), and Jefferson (illustrated by Pat Barrett and Ray B.).

All of these shows will feature musical accompaniment by Mike O’Malley, Ray Gehring, Steve Lipshutz, and Carson Moody, and they’re all part of the Comic Book Theater Festival at the Brick Theater. Tickets are $15, and you can get them online here or at the door. We’ve been working super hard on this show, and we’d love it if you could stop by!

Speaking of which, it’s about time for us to head over to Williamsburg and do some prep work before tonight’s show. If you have a chance, please come say hi! You’ll be treated to a delightful combination of live storytelling, music, and illustrations such as these:

This is an image I did as practice for Joanna Bradley’s story last week. I’ll be working in a different style tonight, as the story I’m illustrating is slightly less classical and Sapphic, but I promise it’ll be fun. Hope to see you there!

Scratch that–who’s got two thumbs and her master’s degree?

Spoiler alert: it’s THIS GUY again! :D

Sorry for the extreme delay in updates, you guys! I was completely wrapped up in my nervousness about meeting with the thesis committee, and after that I was busy celebrating the fact that I TOTALLY PASSED! In fact, every single member of the class of 2011 passed, making this a first in CCS history! I’m pretty proud of us.

We had a fantastic commencement ceremony featuring speeches by Lawrence Lee Derks III (whose blog is brand-spanking-new) and Francoise Mouly of RAW, Little Lit, and The New Yorker fame! You can watch a video of the ceremony, including a somewhat-impromptu dance number, here (courtesy of Bailey‘s dad). While you’re at it, you can also check out our amazing diploma drawn by–who else?–my fantastic advisor, Aaron Renier! I’m gonna do a post gushing about everything next week (and reflecting on my time at CCS), but for now you’ll have to make do with this picture from the graduation reception:

That’s me with my mom, dad, and grandma. My grandpa is, as always, the one behind the camera. I’m wearing the smile of someone whose life suddenly includes sleep, showers, and chocolate-covered pretzels! (My grandparents brought me boxes of Sarris chocolate-covered pretzels all the way from Pittsburgh…and if you’re from the ‘burgh, you know how great those are!) I had a fun time showing them all around WRJ and introducing them to all my friends.

Now that they’ve gone home, I get to kick back, relax, and–oh yeah–get started on work for Drawn Out Storytelling! Pat, Bailey, Paul, and I all headed to NYC earlier this week to meet with some of the storytellers and plan out our illustrations. We’ve got a fantastic lineup for these shows! Kevin Allison (of The State and Risk!) Jeff Simmermon (of The Moth and And I Am Not Lying), Peter Aguero (of The Moth and The BTK Band), and Ophira Eisenberg (also of The Moth and As Is) will all be there on varying nights, plus a bunch of other incredibly talented storytellers, artists, and musicians! Check out the full lineup on our Kickstarter here.

And, speaking of our Kickstarter, guess what? We are 93% funded! :D Thank you guys so, so much for your support–it means everything to us! We’re just $125 away from our goal, and we’re incredibly excited. If you have a spare dollar or two, please think about sending it our way so that we can make this show the best it can be!

I’m about to wrap it up for tonight, so here’s a little drawing I did during one of our many summer thunderstorms this week:

As someone who’s lived in California for the last eight years, summer rain is a new and wonderful phenomenon to me. I love it! I assume that someday the idea of it being 80 degrees and pouring rain will become normal to me again, but right now I’m content to spend a lot of time staring out the window, fanning myself and marveling.

Little doodles and big news!

Hi, guys! Thanks for all your feedback in regards to my crests. I’m still making my final decisions, so I’ll leave the polls open for a few more days in case you’re still interested in voting. I’m planning to screenprint them sometime in the next two days, so I’ll let you know what the results are then!

As you can probably tell, things are getting to be super hectic here. I haven’t had a chance to do much non-thesis work, but I do have a little doodle for you today:

I’m not just busy with thesis stuff, though! I’ve also been working with Nisse Greenberg and Paul Swartz to organize a pretty awesome show called Drawn Out Storytelling. Check it out:

Drawn Out Storytelling is our entry in the Brick Theater‘s Comic Book Theater Festival. It’s a show that combines live, note-free storytelling–the kind you might hear on Risk! or The Moth podcasts–with comic art! Performers like Nisse (and several others that I can’t reveal just yet) will tell their stories on stage, accompanied by either live drawing or a prepared slideshow of illustrations by artists like Pat Barrett, Ben Horak, Bailey Sharp, Paul Swartz, and myself. We’ll also have live musical accompaniment by Mike O’Malley, Jonathan Anderson, and possibly more. We’ve got four shows scheduled:

Saturday, June 18th at 5:30pm

Friday, June 24th at 8:45pm

Sunday, June 26th at 8:00pm

Wednesday, June 29th at 8:00pm

Interested in coming to the show? You can buy tickets here. Want to help us make the show happen? Check out our Kickstarter! You can donate as little as $1, and we’re offering some great prizes in return for donations. (Can you say, ‘custom original art’? AWW YEAH.) Even if you can’t attend or donate, we’d love it if you’d help spread the word. I’m really excited to be a part of this show, and I hope it’ll be a big success!

This is your brain. This is your brain on no sleep.

Ugh…I need to stop pulling all-nighters on blog update nights, you guys. I forgot to update because I spent all of Monday and Tuesday feeling like this:

CCS Industry Day is tomorrow, and I was determined to go all-out. I spent most of Monday making Leftovers Are Good Luck, a collection of my short comics that’ll be replacing Eat Up, Cat in my MoCCA debut lineup, and most of Tuesday fighting to stay awake and failing.

But hey, speaking of MoCCA, we finally received our table number! Bailey Sharp, Ben Juers, Max Mose, Paul Swartz, and I will be at table M10. We’ll have Em Sauter, Ryland Ianelli, and Jesse Mead on one side, and Beth Hetland, Ben Horak, Pat Barrett, and Josh Kramer on the other. (What an awesome sandwich!) We’ll also be in the same row as many other lovely CCSers, such as CJ Joughin, Canto, Billage, Andy Warner, Melanie Gillman, Nate Wooters, Dakota McFadzean, Holly Foltz, Denis St. John, Nomi Kane, and many more! If you’re going to be there, please come say hello!

I also mentioned in my previous entry that I’ll be teaching two comics workshops in Springfield, VT this summer. Some of the details have changed since the last time I mentioned it, so here are the final details:

Making Comics with Lena!

Come learn all the basics of making comics! We’ll pencil, ink, and letter our own comics starring our very own characters, and at the end of the week we’ll put it all together into a finished book. No experience necessary– if you like to draw, we’d love to have you!

The first session is for students 10-12 years old and will take place July 11-15 from 9:00-11:30 am. I’m going to be covering the basic terms, materials, and methods of making your own comics, including character design, backgrounds, and lettering. Plus, we’ll doing some really fun drawing activities, and at the end of the camp I’ll put the students’ work together into anthologies for everyone to take home. I’m so excited about teaching this!

The second session is for teens and older students and will take place July 25-29 from 9:00-11:30 am. I’ll cover the same basics as in the first session, since they can be beneficial for students of all ages, but I’ll be going into more detail and doing some extra activities. I’ll also put the students’ work from this camp into its own anthology for students to take home.

If you or someone you know is interested in either camp, you can find out more on the Vault Gallery’s website or at the gallery itself at 68 Main St., Springfield, VT. :)

All right, I figure I’ve talked your ears off enough for now. I’m off to Dr. Sketchy’s to draw some clowns in corsets! It’s gonna be tons of fun, so if you’re in the WRJ area, you should definitely stop by! :)

Who doesn’t love a good hula-hooping?

I do, that’s for sure. I remember fondly the last time I took my hula hoop out of the garage and gave it a spin…

…okay, no, I don’t. But I do remember the last time I drew a hula hoop! Check it out:

This is a preliminary sketch for Vintage Sleaze, a nifty blog that specializes in 1950s “forgotten, anonymous, or neglected sexy artists” of comics, pin-ups, books, and other souvenirs designed to titillate. The blog’s co-author, Jim Linderman,  found Paul’s site a week or so ago and asked him if he’d like to contribute an illustration inspired by a vintage sleaze gag. Upon finding out that Paul attends a school full of artists, he opened up submissions to the rest of us CCSers. You guys know how much I love pin-up girls and 1950s ephemera, so it’s probably no surprise that I jumped at the chance. I kicked around a lot of ideas, including one involving an Indian woman in a sheer sari that I might revisit later, but ultimately I feel like this sketch came out the best. I ended up doing a full-color watercolor of it for the final version.

Want to see how my finished illustration turned out? Check it out here on the Vintage Sleaze site! Additional entries in the series will be posted once a week and will include work by Gary Panter, Vanessa Davis, fellow CCS students Paul Swartz, Bailey Sharp, Max Mose, and Denis St. John, and hopefully many more!

And then I slept for 17 hours.

Ohhh man. Sorry about the late update, you guys! Yesterday was a pretty big deadline for our Thesis Seminar class, and I was up for 24 hours straight preparing for it. After that, well…see the title of this post.

It’s been a pretty eventful few days, though! After the dust settled yesterday afternoon, I realized that two things had happened while I wasn’t looking. I turned 23 on Sunday (hurray!), and–oh yeah–some of my work was reviewed on the Comics Journal! Rob Clough wrote a really nice piece on two of the minicomics I gave him at MoCCA as well as two minis by the most excellent Holly Foltz. (Holly’s a recent CCS alum who draws hilarious comics, contributed to the pin-up calendar, and is an all around cool person.) You can read the article here.

Speaking of the calendar, I’ve got a preview for you guys. Here’s the image I drew for the month of January:

That’s the lovely Colleen Frakes in a homage to Art Frahm, master of the celery/pink granny panties combo. Not to shamelessly repeat myself, but I’ll be selling the calendar this image appears in person at PIX and online after that. They’re full-color, $7, and feature a lot of fun pin-up drawings of CCS girls by CCS girls.  Contributing artists include Amelia Onorato, Bailey Sharp, Beth Hetland, Betsey Swardlick, CJ Joughin, Colleen Frakes, the aforementioned Holly Foltz, Jen Vaughn, Laura Terry, Melanie Gillman, and of course Nomi Kane and myself. As I mentioned before, I drew Colleen and was drawn by the very talented Laura. Please email me if you’d like to reserve a copy! :D

Okay, that’s it for me for today. Check back tomorrow for a 100% real, live, on-time update!