100 Watercolors #36 - Precious Treasure

For this week's theme, I decided to rework an image that I used a while back on a promotional postcard.  I decided to make the dragon a bit smaller so that I could place more emphasis on the pile of books, which in this case are the "precious treasure."

I feel like something clicked with my process on this painting.  I feel like I have a better grasp on how to attack different sized areas and I'm getting better at mixing colors.  I don't have everything figured out, but I definitely feel like I am improving.  Luckily, I still have another 64 of these to go, so hopefully by the end of the project I'll really know what I'm doing!

Ramen Music #5 Cover

Oh man, I'm so glad that I didn't just post all of the covers I did for Ramen Music last year when I drew them.  Instead, I get to re-plug this awesome project every time they use one of my covers!  This month being just such an occasion.  For the cover of Issue #5, I had my Nogard the Dragon character (from my upcoming webcomic Isle of Elsi which should start in 2012?) blowing some hot jazz through a trumpet.  I love dragons, and I played trumpet for about 15 years, so this image was a lot of fun to draw.

If you haven't checked out Ramen Music yet, you really should!  By following this link, you can listen to the entire 5th issue FOR FREE.  And you can share that link with as many people as you like!  The idea behind Ramen Music is that they charge a subscription (right now it's $29 for six issues a year) and then they accept submissions from independent musicians and curate an awesome music "magazine" every other month.  It's a great mix of a website, a music player, a zine that has interviews with all the bands, and the whole thing is beautifully designed.  

Then, unlike MOST music business stuff these days (record labels, iTunes, etc.) they split up the lion's share of the incoming money and give it back directly to the artists.  Right now they are paying $150.00 per track to artists, with very fair terms.  

This whole project is the mastermind of my buddy Sudara, who I went to Oberlin with a long time ago, and who is ALSO the mastermind behind alonetone.com, which thousands of people use to post their music and share it with people.  It's a real honor to be involved with such a cool project, and Ramen Music still has a few more of my covers banked, so I'll post the next one when it goes online!

DRAGONS! Covers

Each year for the last three years, my buddy Greg over at Tugboat Press has ganged together with a few other Portland-based publishers to make an anthology for Free Comic Book Day.  This year, he asked me to help him put together a free comics and activity book for kids, called DRAGONS!

The first person I told Greg we had to get for the book, was one of my favorite illustrators working these days, Dan Moynihan.  He came up with this brilliant dragon image for the back cover:

I love the playfulness and spontaneity of Dan's drawing style.  I could stare at his illustrations all day long, and they inspire me to keep trying to loosen up my drawings.  Before you read another word of this post, I insist you go take a look at his wonderful work.

Well, after Dan turned in that image, the pressure was on!  I had to come up with something fun, that could hold its own, on the other side of such a great back cover.  Lately, I have been completely obsessed with Carl Barks (or really, for my whole life) and so his cover designs were at the forefront of my thoughts while I started sketching out ideas.  I liked how many of his covers had a simple gag on a uniformly colored background.  That was the kind of comics cover that I grew up looking at.

With that style in mind, I sketched up some ideas and sent them along to Greg.  

Greg thought these were okay, but none of them were getting across the whole idea of the book, which was that it was jam-packed with puzzles and mazes and gag cartoons and comics and all kinds of other fun stuff.  He said he wanted something a bit more like my Microcosm Publishing catalog cover with lots of different characters doing all kinds of things.  Once he gave me that feedback, the finished cover idea just jumped out of my pencil.  It incorporates a lot of characters from my upcoming (in 2012!) webcomic Isle of Elsi.  We both immediately liked this version a lot better.  Here's the final!

DRAGONS! features a 15-page comics story by yours truly, plus gag cartoons, mazes, connect-the-dots, puzzles, craft activities, poems, dragon-libs and all kinds of other fun stuff.  You can get a full run-down of all the contributors on my other blog.  DRAGONS! will be available in select comic book stores on Free Comic Book Day, which is May 7th this year, and I will be sending copies out to all the Phase 7 subscribers this summer.

Baby Nogard for Sam

At the end of last school year, the CCS operations manager, Valerie Fleisher, gave birth to her first child, Sam.  Here's Sam with his Mom a few months later, at the 2010 CCS graduation party.

Because CCS is a school full of cartoonists, our boss James asked us all to make some drawings for Sam, which he collected in a book and gave to Val after Sam was born.  I decided to make a drawing of my Nogard the Dragon character as a baby, sort of like the Muppet Babies or Tiny Toons or something.  I tried my best to make it as cute as possible!

Microcosm Catalogs are in Print!

Yesterday I got a whole box full of the new 2010 Microcosm Publishing Catalogs. They look great! I'm really happy with how they turned out. The 2-color printing looks pretty rad on the newsprint. They ended up using the Wolf spot illustration, but not the dragon one, oh well!



Claire sent me this photo, showing a copy she found in her local coffee shop in Oakland, CA. And Nate said he saw some a few weeks ago at the Chicago Zine Fest, so these things are OUT there! You can get one for 1 cent over at Microcosm Publishing or I'm sure they'll throw one in ANY order you place for the rest of this year. I'll also have copies to give away at a bunch of comics shows this year, so check it out!

Microcosm Publishing 2010 Catalog - Spot Illustrations

As promised, here are the spot illustrations that I did for the upcoming 2010 Microcosm Publishing Catalog. Again, these feature characters from the Isle of Elsi book I'm working on. If you're curious, you can check out their first story over at Dark Horse Presents. The first spot shows Draziw the Wizard making some zines with his wand. If only it was that easy!

Next we have Nogard the Dragon and R.J. Jr. delivering some zines!

And lastly, for good measure, some of the 'ites (as I call them - actually Stalagmites and Stalactites) mailing off a letter. It looks like some zinesters had their way with that mail box!

This one isn't actually going to make it into the catalog, but I thought I'd post it just the same. It depicts one of the wolves giving a ROCK show for all the 'ites. ;)

I'm almost done wrapping up a big illustration project, which I will post on here as soon as it's done. There's more on the way!

Microcosm Publishing 2010 Catalog - Cover!

I recently finished up some illustrations for the 2010 Microcosm Publishing Catalog. I thought I'd share the cover image this week and some spot illustrations next week!
For those of you that don't know, Microcosm Publishing is a super awesome zine distributor and publisher. They've been carrying my Phase 7 Comics for years and they have published books by some of my best comics friends. When they asked me if I wanted to draw the cover, they said that I could draw pretty much whatever I wanted, and that it was going to be printed with two colors (score!) I decided to use some of my Isle of Elsi characters from my Dark Horse Presents story that was released back in May.
There have been some great Microcosm Catalog covers in the past, so the first thing I did was look at those to see how some of the other illustrators handled the two color look. I especially liked the ones by my friends Liz Baillie and Sarah Oleksyk but instead of dropping the second color into a black line drawing, I wanted to try and utilize the second color throughout the illustration, so that I could get a variety of lighting and texture effects. Here's what I came up with! (click for a larger view)

Now all I have to do is wait for a printed copy, to see how it all turned out. I'll let you all know once it's out there so you can order your copy (I think they are usually like a penny if you place an order with Microcosm) and like I said, I'll post some spot illustrations from the inside of the catalog next week!

Dark Horse Presents

Above is the first panel of a new, full color, 8-page comic that I did for Dark Horse Presents. It just went up today, so please check it out! This story features my dragon character, which I have used in a number of self-promotional illustrations over the years. So you can finally see him in action!
I'm working on a lot of little illustration projects right now, so hopefully I will have some stuff to post on this blog during the summer. I'm also slowly but surely working on a redesign of my illustration portfolio site. So there is more on the way!

100 Watercolors #9: Drive

Oof, last week's watercolor ended up being kind of depressing, so I was determined to have a little bit more fun this week. Mission accomplished! I'm working on a children's book featuring this here dragon, so I might use him as a reoccurring character in these watercolors, as a chance to draw him more.

I'm still learning a lot each time I do one of these paintings. I can't imagine how much knowledge I will have gained after the next 91 of them!

New portfolio update!

This week I am taking a break from the Harry Potter Drawing Challenge to announce the quarterly update of my illustration portfolio site: aleclongstreth.com! There is a lot of new work up including the following new pieces:

This is a dragon character I hope to do a lot with in the future (so he's © 2008 Alec Longstreth! Okay?) I drew this as a new promotional postcard which I just sent out to a lot of art directors and illustration contacts. There's also this one:

This is an engagement announcement I did for some friends. Each letter form has a small illustration featuring some aspect from Isla Mujeres. It's based off the design of some really old tourist postcards from places like Coney Island and San Francisco. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun!

Well, I'm already working on the next batch of Harry Potter characters and then it will be on to a new drawing challenge... Thanks for checking in!