bazaar bizarre boston!

what i've been up to lately. i am involved in organizing as well as selling stuff this year, so i have been super-busy! here's the flyer i made for the event.

halloween, corporate style

i'm on the social committee at the publishing company where i work, and every year our work throws a pretty excellent halloween party for employees and their kids. this year i was in charge of flyers and invitations, so one afternoon i sat down with a sharpie and sketched out these monster co-workers:





then i scanned them into the computer and colored them in photoshop. i decided to keep the flyers simple, because of the simple drawing style. (you're not seeing the entire flyer because most of the rest of it is boring details including my work's name, my work's address, and really i need to stop getting so much fan mail there. i'm sure you understand.)





i am secretly hoping that someone will pull me aside and very seriously ask me if i used them for inspiration for any of my characters. "am i the werewolf on three?!" 'fraid so.

something spooky is brewing

More long-distance murals for Eastern Perk (701 Main Street in Willimantic, CT). I'm not sure if they've had a chance to hang them yet, but I do know Karen likes it when I write about things.



Fun fact: Did you know that when I was in 3rd grade, I won a Halloween drawing contest and had my portrait of Dracula printed in the Willimantic Chronicle? That likeness was much scarier than this one, but that's ok; we don't want to scare the customers away. If my mom still has a copy of my 3rd grade Dracula, I'll try to scan it in and post it here.

I briefly considered giving this Dracula a red mug with red steam, but that's just gross. Too much True Blood lately, folks.



Who are these mysterious Perk patrons? Beats me, I just draw 'em.



I have known there to be several haunted places in the Willimantic area, and just want to say, in case any ghosts are reading this over anyone's shoulder, Hello, welcome, thanks for mostly not scaring the bejeezus out of me, and I know this isn't what you look like, it's just a Halloween thing.

more movies i've watched

i still don't know what to say about "the dark knight" except i really enjoyed it, but am still not ready to see it again. it was intense.




sorry seth rogen and james franco: i'm sure you're fun to draw, but MIA's song "paper planes" has been stuck in my head since i saw the first preview for your movie. also, i just about cried when you guys were in the woods: so brilliantly ridiculous.

p.s. fun fact: i would never wear a ski mask because i find them TOTALLY SCARY. file along with fright masks and clowns under the category "disguises that mostly freak me out." see also: most wigs.

barack steady

let me break it down for you, friends: sometimes i need to get a little political.

sometimes a public figure is too entirely perfect a candidate for a marissa-made portrait. sometimes it takes me months and months to be able to get the drawing-in-my-head to commit itself to paper. this one has been bouncing around in my brain for a few months. today i give you barack steady, a 1.25" button (pin, badge, what have you) in celebration of the man himself. not only did i design the button, but i assembled them on megan & sarah's button machine, fueled by chicken pot pie and HOPE. i am rather thrilled with how they came out.

this is a limited edition of 96 buttons (with a possible second edition to come, should there be a need), and one of them can be yours! i'm asking for a $1 donation per button, and all donations will go to obama/biden '08.

if you're someone i see in person, you can just hand me a dollar and i'll hand you a button.


if you're a faraway friend, ordering info is thus: buttons are $1 each with an additional $1 shipping. the $1 shipping covers the cost of postage/envelope and will cover up to 10 buttons. so if you order 3 buttons, you send me $3 for the buttons + $1 postage = $4. cool? payments can be sent to me via paypal to thimblewinder@gmail.com. if you don't have paypal, kindly email me at that same email address and we'll figure something out.


edited to add: hello readers from http://blacksnob.blogspot.com! i have currently sold out of the first batch of these buttons (as of 10/5), but will have more available in about a week.

buttons back in stock as of 10/11. get 'em while they're still here!

summer & andy are getting hitched!

this is a project i've been working on for a few months, and it's finally finished! my friends summer and andy are getting married this autumn, and requested wedding save-the-date cards and invites in comic strip form. you know how much i love drawing my friends in cartoon form, so of course i said yes.

first up was the save-the-date, which they wanted to have printed up as a postcard. they came up with the copy and the general concept of featuring their vintage airstream trailer (hitched, get it?), and supplied copious reference photos. i did a lot of drawing, and was really happy to hear that the only edit they wanted me to make to my initial sketch was to make andy's beard more robust!



then it was on to the invitation, a much more involved creation. we went back and forth on format, size, and pretty much everything else for a few months. unfortunately, if you're going to draw a comic that you want to print at 100%, you have to know things like trim size and know that they're not going to change. once that detail was ironed out, they supplied the copy and the art direction for the various frames, as well as many, many reference photos. the first two frames they had very specific requests as to the identical shoes they were wearing when they first met (old school vans) and the jazz club where they eventually fell in L-U-V (jazzy, crowded). the direction for the last panel was, "... and then i want it to end in a WEDDING EXPLOSION. you know what i mean."



i've heard that their 3-year-old nephew was the first to realize that summer and andy's dogs had made it to the wedding illustration. but of course!

i think it turned out pretty well! summer had it printed offset on french paper muscletone (very hefty) in a chocolate-brown ink. there's copy on the back, too, which was set in estilo script, a font i got from veer that captured the fancy-but-fun aesthetic of the wedding.

a couple of days before printing, we realized that there was a need for an rsvp postcard, too. i decided to keep it simple, and snagged the gorilla drummer from the invitation to make a cameo here:



this was a great project, made especially enjoyable by working with friends who were totally into having fantastic invites. i most appreciated when, after showing them my second sketch of the invite, i said "it's going to be much more detailed than this when i ink it, TRUST ME." and they did.

congrats-in-advance, friends! i am very much looking forward to attending your wedding explosion.

caricatures from the castle

I've been so busy with projects lately! One of them is still top-secret (ah, the nature of other people's wedding invites), but this is one I can show you. I think I mentioned that I'm one of the organizers of the Bazaar Bizarre Boston this year. One of my duties so far has been drawing stuff to promote the event (which is on December 7th from 12-7, so you'd better be there!), and this is a sample of such. These are the little icons we use to personalize our posts on the Bazaar Bizarre blog. The crowns are important, since the fair will be at The Castle at Park Plaza this year. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say it will be royally entertaining.