David Chelsea's Blog, page 13

PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION Arrives!

I have mentioned my upcoming book PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION from time to time, but the day of publication has at last arrived (Coincidentally, it is my wife Eves’ birthday. Happy birthday, Eve!) I of course cannot be objective, but I think the book is beautiful– kudos to my editor at Watson-Guptill, Patrick Barb, designers Emily Blevins and Mari Gill, and the entire production team.

David Chelsea is still reading:In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown

by Amy Gary

Less a book on basic principles than a hands-on guide to creating fun projects which put perspective knowledge to use, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION includes sections on creating illusions like the deceptively constructed Ames Room:

The book is in comics form like my two previous instructional books PERSPECTIVE! and EXTREME PERSPECTIVE!, but without Mugg (who has been busy appearing in ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?). Another difference: this one’s in color!:

Page from PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION

It’s not QUITE true that Mugg doesn’t appear in the book- here he is with girl of his dreams Mandy in a 3-D demonstration panel taken from ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

Also in the book: detailed instructions on how to paint a bowling ball in spherical perspective, like this M.C.Escher adaptation:

The book includes an explication of the tilted mirror method of copying a picture, which was used in the hit documentary Tim’s Vermeer:

The book features a little excursion into the fourth dimension as well, laying out the principles of motion perspective, a cornerstone of animation:

I am proudest of the explanation for my own discovery, The Unified Field, a method for combining any angle of one-, two-, and three-point perspective in a single picture:

In addition to appearing in the better bookshops, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION is available for order on Amazon right now! Use the link below, and I get a tiny Amazon Associates kickback (which I get even if you DON’T order the book, and order something like an inner tube or a set of chopsticks instead- just as long as you don’t leave the Amazon site!).

24 Hour Comic Promotion This Saturday At Tonalli’s!

Tonalli’s Donuts & Cream is hosting a rally this Saturday to support the documentary film “24 Hour Comic”. Swing by, meet the artist, filmmakers, get autographs, and get free stuff for pre-ordering the film! Including FREE DONUTS & COFFEE, plus enter to win your very own PDX CARPET, used from the premier! You won’t want to miss the comic art battle between me and PIZZA GUN’s Jacob Mercy!

David Chelsea is reading: nEuROTIC

by John Cuneo

If you’ve been following this blog, you must already know about 24 Hour Comic, the documentary. However, if you don’t, this interview with director Milan Erceg should fill you in.

24 Hour Comic Rally

Tonalli’s Donuts & Cream,

2805 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR 97211

Saturday June 24th 6-9pm

DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE: THE WEEKLY STRIPS on Patreon

I’m beginning a new archive comics series today on Patreon, a collection of the prototype strips for my graphic novel DAVID CHELSEA IN LOVE. These were drawn over a period from about 1987 to 1989, and distributed in the form of photocopies which I gave away at performances of the Weird Al-like stand up act which I had been doing for several years in and around the East Village. The idea was that audiences would come back to follow the story (of course, it would have made even more sense for me to come up with new material to perform, but I was a slow writer). When I finished the series, I tried to market it to alternative weekly and comics publishers, but could find no takers. Gary Groth at Fantagraphics suggested that I expand it into a full-length graphic novel, and it was that version which Eclipse Comics eventually published in four issues in 1991-92, and as a collection in 1993. This early version did eventually make it into print when Eclipse made it part of their weekly ad in the industry publication THE COMICS BUYERS GUIDE, which actually reached far more readers than the comic itself.

David Chelsea is watching: Blade Runner

starring Harrison Ford

This comic tells the story of my failed romance in the early 1980s with an actress I call “Minnie Maurier”:

These strips were drawn in a horizontal format which is not particularly phone-friendly, so I have reformatted the panels vertically to read better on modern screens. The original strips appear at the top of each installment:

This week I posted an introductory cover for the series, and the first six vertically reformatted episodes. There are 37 episodes in this series, and I’ll be posting six or so a week over the next six weeks.

Meanwhile, I also posted the two latest pages of my new webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? this week. To decide who stays and who goes on the 24 Hour Comic reality show, the judges must perform a mind meld:

Kudos to ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? colorist Jacob Mercy, who really went psychedelic on this panel!

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

24 Hour Comic: The Events

It’s going to be a full summer of activity for me, trying to build the 24 Hour Comic documentary into a hit. Here are some of the events I’m going to to be involved with:

– Tonalli’s Doughnuts in Portland on Saturday June 24th 6-9pm

– Premiere at Laurelhurst Theater in Portland Q&A Thursday July 6th at 7pm

– Matinee at Laurelhurst Theater in Portland Q&A Friday July 7th at 4pm

– Release day screening with Q&A at the Kiggins Theater in Vancouver, WA

Tuesday July 11th 7:30pm

– Wild Things Games in Salem, multiple events

Saturday July 15th (approx 10:30am-8:30pm)

– Film screening at San Diego Comic-Con (July 20th-23rd)

Details are somewhat sketchy as of now; I will add more as they come in.

David Chelsea is reading: Not Waving But Drawing

by John Cuneo

Meanwhile, another two-page installment of ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? went up this week. The suspense mounts as we tick down to the final whistle- whose 24 Hour Comic will reign supreme? And who’s going home?:

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

24 Hour Comic Documentary On iTunes!

Milan Erceg’s terrific documentary about a topic close to my heart, 24 Hour Comic, is releasing July 11 on iTunes. The film follows 8 artists as they try to create 24 pages in 24 hours. It features me quite prominently, as well as my fellow cartoonists Paul Guinan, Rachel Nabors, Sera Stanton aka Opal Pence, Jacob Mercy, Pete Soloway, and Tom Lechner, and also has some delightful footage of my daughter Rebecca at 13, making her first attempt at a 24. Special guest appearance by comics guru Scott McCloud! This is the debut film from a very gifted filmmaker who happens to be a dear friend.

David Chelsea is reading:The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time

by Ariana Huffington

Paul Guinan

Here is how you can help 24 Hour Comic become a success. For indie films with no marketing budget there is basically one hope for success, and that is to make the iTunes’ sales charts, as this can lead to placement on the highly visible “new and noteworthy” section of the iTunes’ store.

Rachel Nabors

The crazy thing is, this is not an impossible task, in fact it is very very doable! It only takes 100 or so pre-sales to launch on the charts. We already have a bunch of events and stunts lined up over the next couple of weeks at local coffee shops and comic book stores that we think will be very effective at pushing pre sales, but we really need your help…

Opal Pence

We need you to preorder a copy today!!

Jacob Mercy and Pete Soloway

It’s only $10 bucks for SD and every order is so very important to making that list. I would personally be so amazingly grateful if you were able to either pre-order the movie here or share this post, or even better, BOTH!!

Rebecca Celsi

Over the next month I look forward to sharing with you all our successes as we work at climbing those charts.

Scott McCloud

Thank you in advance for all your love and support with this project, it means the world to me!!

Watch the trailer for 24 Hour Comic on Youtube!

Milan Erceg

ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?: Up The Yin-Yang!

Last Friday, I put up another two page installment of my continuing webcomic about Reality TV, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? on Patreon. This week we meet our three celebrity judges who will decide who is this week’s winner, and who will be eliminated on the 24 Hour Comic Reality TV show hosted by Eisner-award nominated graphic novelist and perspective expert David Chelsea:

David Chelsea is reading:The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time

by Ariana Huffington

Devoted David Chelsea fans will recognize The Virgin Valkyrie from her appearance in my 24 Hour Comic THE GIRL WITH THE KEYHOLE EYES, which was later turned into a full-color story for Dark Horse Presents. Extra-devoted fans will recognize Piggola, a character I first drew as a pre-teen, who had a short run in the 1970s with his own strip in The Portland Scribe:

Piggola

I also posted a Piggola comic from a 1970s sketchbook on my Patreon page two years ago:

Blog post about Piggola from 2015

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

More inside baseball: alert readers will recognize that Piggola is wearing a T-shirt from the Metropolitan Learning Center, where I went to school from fifth to 12th grade (appropriately so, as my friends Will Spray, Tim Hill and I drew the first Piggola comics in the basement art room there). The school insignia has been the Yin-Yang since it opened in 1968, and just lately that venerable symbol has become embroiled in controversy. An “Equity Team” of students find its use to be an instance of “cultural appropriation” because this is a symbol belonging to the Taoist religion- though Portland has no Taoist temples, and no actual Taoist has stepped forward to protest personally. The whole thing is a bit of a Portlandia sketch, on a level with the Portland taco cart that recently had to close because of threats from PC protesters who objected to two white women cooking a recipe they had stolen from indigenous Mexicans. Still, as an alumnus, I am inclined to defer to people presently involved in the school, and truth to tell I was never a big fan- MLC’s use of the symbol always reeked to me of 60s dilettantism, and with the changes in cultural etiquette it seems even more dated and embarrassing, like a once-cool but now politically incorrect tattoo adorning an old hippie’s bicep. I say let the present generation pick its own symbol.

Here is some old school MLC nostalgia- a flyer I drew for a party celebrating the school’s 20th anniversary in 1989, which some unimaginative person recycled for the 35th anniversary 15 years later. This kind of rankled me, because I had designed the two figures on the flyer to be wearing 1968 and 1989 fashions respectively, and this made no sense at all in 2004. My thought at the time: doesn’t MLC have any younger poster artists?:

A word of explanation on the dates that don’t line up– blame the unfathomable academic custom of straddling two calendar years in every school year. I had originally written in 1969 as the starting date, because that was when the first senior class graduated, and the event was to be held 20 years later in 1989. However, whoever was in charge of the event insisted that the school had actually begun the previous fall in 1968, and therefore that date should appear on the flyer. I trust that this was not a math teacher. Naturally, the error persisted when the flyer was recycled 15 years later, because tradition.

There will be a meeting tonight, Monday, June 5, at the Metropolitan Learning Center to determine the fate of the Yin-Yang symbol. I can’t attend, but I expect that I will hear all about it on Facebook.

American Bystander #4!

This past weekend, I got my copies of the latest issue of American Bystander in the mail. This issue of the recently launched humor magazine has contributions from comics gods Rick Geary, M. K. Brown, Frank Springer, Mimi Pond, Peter Kuper, Howard Cruse, and Shannon Wheeler, illustrations by Ron Barrett, Drew Friedman, and Roz Chast, gag cartoons by S. Gross, George Booth, and the late Jack Ziegler, an interview with Realist magazine founder Jack Krassner, and a beautiful wraparound cover depicting Trump and his court by Steve Brodner. I cannot recommend it highly enough, and that is not just because I happen to have work in it, an illustration for a humor piece by Steve Young about an Uber-like ambulance service.

David Chelsea is reading: Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca

by John McWhorter

Here is a work in progress series about my contribution, from my first batch of thumbnails to the final published piece:

Roughs for American Bystander illustration
Rough for American Bystander illustration
Refined sketch for illustration
Pencil drawing on coquille board
Watercolor painting
Final art

The American Bystander is a print-only publication supported by reader contributions, and is available by subscription, by mail, through Amazon.com, and possibly by personal drone. Check out the American Bystander website to learn more, and possibly pledge for the next crowdsourced issue!

This Week On ARE YOU BEING WATCHED? Work In Progress, And Mandy Rocks A Corset!

In this week’s installment of my continuing web comic on Patreon, ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, Mugg is deep in the lucid dream he is having while napping at his drawing board during a 24 hour comics session. Mugg has discovered that he can control the events of his dream, so naturally he uses his powers to put the girl of his dreams Mandy into a very fetching corset:

David Chelsea is reading:Rose City Vice: Portland in the 70’s: Dirty Cops and Dirty Robbers

by Phil Stanford

Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!

Also this week on my Patreon page, I have pulled back the curtain a little bit on my working method, and posted a Secret Stash of work-in-progress on ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?. This includes some tightly packed figure studies of the various characters who appear in recent pages, some of the backgrounds I digitally paste those figures on to, renderings of CG heads I use as reference to keep the character’s features consistent, and a full sequence of the stages of one individual panel:

Membership has its privileges; all Secret Stash material is viewable by Patreon sponsors at the $4.99 level and above.

Modern Love Podcast: Minnie Driver Reads ‘Our Story Ended With a Slow Fade to Black’

Another of my New York Times illustrations has been resurrected for the Modern Love Podcast. On this week’s podcast, the actress Minnie Driver reads “Our Story Ended With a Slow Fade to Black,” an essay about seeking normalcy after a terminal cancer diagnosis.

David Chelsea is reading: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

Minnie Driver

The author, Patty Dann, is a writer and teacher in New York and Baltimore. She expands on the loss of her first husband in “The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss.” She is on Twitter.

Ms. Driver currently stars in the ABC series “Speechless.” She is best known for her performance in “Good Will Hunting.”

Coming In June: Perspective In Action!

Just a reminder to all you loyal readers that my latest instructional book from Watson-Guptill, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, is being published this coming June 20th (coincidentally, my wife Eve’s birthday).

David Chelsea is reading: Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story

by Peter Bagge

Less a book on basic principles than a hands-on guide to creating fun projects which put perspective knowledge to use, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION includes sections on creating illusions like the deceptively constructed Ames Room:

The book is in comics form like my two previous instructional books PERSPECTIVE! and EXTREME PERSPECTIVE!, but without Mugg (who has been busy appearing in ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?). Another difference: this one’s in color!:

Page from PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION

It’s not QUITE true that Mugg doesn’t appear in the book- here he is with girl of his dreams Mandy in a 3-D demonstration panel taken from ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?

Also in the book: detailed instructions on how to paint a bowling ball in spherical perspective, like this M.C.Escher adaptation:

The book includes an explication of the tilted mirror method of copying a picture, which was used in the hit documentary Tim’s Vermeer:

The book features a little excursion into the fourth dimension as well, laying out the principles of motion perspective, a cornerstone of animation:

I am proudest of the explanation for my own discovery, The Unified Field, a method for combining any angle of one-, two-, and three-point perspective in a single picture:

Although the book is formally being published in June, it is available for preorder on Amazon right now! Use the link below, and I get a tiny Amazon Associates kickback (which I get even if you DON’T order the book, and order something like an inner tube or a set of chopsticks instead- just as long as you don’t leave the Amazon site!).