Theo Ellsworth's Blog, page 83

sneak peek at my upcoming show at Giant Robot

 Portrait of Special Agent Rogbert.
 Natural House Formation
 Ghost Seer
 Turtle Base
 Personal Treasure Spirit
Leaf Dog Rider

back in stock!

I've got some final copies of Sleeper Car up for sale in my Etsy Shop. It's been sold out for awhile now, but Secret Acres was able to send me copies from a hidden stash of them that they recently unpacked.

The Sudden Amplification of Certain Senses

I have a solo show at the Giant Robot Gallery in Los Angeles opening on July 28th! More about this soon!

Singing Ghost

Some people I know

These are a few little panels from The Understanding Monster Book One. It looks like it's finally off to the printers now! If all goes well, it will be out in time to be released at the Small Press Expo (SPX) in late September!

On the wall

my piece from the Game over show at Giant Robot is up for sale now. It was good to see that they hung my little piece directly under a dinosaur and a tiger. It's definitely worth checking out the whole show. There's some great work by some excellent artists.

Game Over show at Giant Robot

 I did a small woodcut character for the Video Game themed art show that's opening in a couple of days at Giant Robot. Obtaining extra lives by ramming floating crystals with your head is an important concept to me, so it felt good to create a visual rendering.

Nether-Moon Dub EP-from Space Cadets

I got this in the mail from England a little while ago. It's a lot of fun getting to design all these covers and then have the actual physical objects show up at my door. The music is great too.Perfect sounds to have in the room while drawing. The next ones are going to be in full color.

The Understanding Monster Book One

 As of last night, I'm completely done with all of the art for book one! Pictured above is the first page of Book Two, which I kept propped up on my drawing table, standing guard as I worked to complete the first one. The title page and the entire contents of Book One is stacked below. I ended up overnighting all the originals to Secret Acres, which was pretty scary after all that work, but they reached New York safely and now I feel much more confident that it will look nice in print. It's all fully hand colored and the originals are much larger than I've ever worked. Drawing larger than I'm comfortable with really helped me explode my sense of what the comics page can be.
This book launches my attempt at creating a long form comics narrative, but right now I'm just focusing on the first four books. For awhile I was working on them all at once until I finally figured out how it could be divided up just right. It was pretty chaotic for awhile, so it feels extra satisfying to finally have something readable. More soon!

More inspiration

These are a few more images from the inspirational slide show that plays when my laptop goes into screensaver mode. A huge majority of the images are ancient, tribal, and ceremonial, though there's also plenty of work from cartoonists I love, as well as photographs of outer space and caves. These images, to me, are so full of a mystery, intensity, and vitality that's missing from most modern art I see. Looking at these pictures makes me excited and inspired on so many levels. Embodying creatures from the subconscious and organizing thoughts into word-symbols and story-drawings is what I want my daily work to be. Art connects the imagination to reality through the intensive act of doing. I wish I could know exactly how these artists thought and felt about the world as they created these works.