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.

paintings

for some reason i never got into painting. something about the lack of control of the brushes, the lack of lines outlining everything, the idea of being patient and letting it dry... never really appealed. also, i felt like i had no good ideas of what to paint once the paints were out there in front of me.

but then i ended up planning/curating an art show at my work (so i needed to bring in something i made), and my friend millie said something really funny that i knew i had to draw, and the planets aligned and i made this:



it's dinner with el chupacabra, of course. it came out exactly as silly as i hoped it would. the color is a little bit off on-screen, but you get the idea. funny stuff.

and then, because i can't just make ONE of anything, i made this:



shoe shopping with bigfoot

i'm not sure how much i'll be able to paint (takes time and ideas!) or how much i'll paint vs. draw in the future, but i had so much fun making these and feel like there may be at least a few more paintings in me.

summertime movies 2008

this summer i've been watching a lot of movies. sure, ticket prices are higher than ever, but i can think of no better way to spend a sweltering summer day away from my apartment. this is the first installment of illustrated impressions of the films i've been watching. and on to the summer blockbusters!



stepbrothers, starring will ferrell and john c. reilly. sophomoric gross-out humor? CHECK!!! i liked this movie because it was completely ridiculous. watch out for the sleepwalking scenes, some of my favorites.




mama mia, starring amanda seyfried, meryl streep, and about twenty other famous people. i don't like musicals, but i do like ABBA and several of the actors/actresses in this movie, so it was enjoyable. it was appropriately silly and fun, and the only thing that would have made it better was if it were a singalong (attention theatres: do it!!!).




the x-files: i want to believe, starring david duchovny, gillian anderson, and isn't that really enough? i had suspicions that this movie would be terrible, honestly. i was a huge x-files fan when it was on the air, and felt that i couldn't go without seeing this movie... happily, although it featured zero aliens and nearly as many weird monsters, it was decent and i mostly enjoyed it. "mostly" because it really didn't capture what was so wonderful about the series, which was the overwhelming feeling of possibility. this movie was very grounded and realistic, considering that this is the series that once had a storyline about people being possessed by an extraterrestrial being that leeched into their eyes in the form of a swirly black oily substance. some wacky stuff, but nothing like that.

graphic design nerdery

this post isn't something i drew, and it's not even related to comics at all. it is, however, a hilarious-to-me scene from the movie "american psycho."

i went to see this movie when it came out, but the hilarity of this discussion was (mostly) lost on me until i started working in graphic design. i saw part of this movie the other day (due to the new batman movie, it seems like there are tons of christian bale movies on lately... no objections here!) and realized just how great this scene is:

bazaar bizarre promotion

i'm helping out with some duties for the bazaar bizarre boston this year... my first project was designing these fans to promote the event to vendors and customers at the art beat festival last month in somerville, ma. this has been a fun project so far, and there is lots more to come!