Finally recovering from promotional travel. A token of carrying home on one’s back is this handmade Chunky Rice plush from Raquel & Ferran in Barcelona. Thanks, you two! And to Jordi & the other dedicated Spanish fans that made it out. Accompanying Chunky is a classic casualty of travel – the drowned sketchbook – reminding me of the age-old lesson to sketch in archival ink. Appropriately, most of the drawings are of airplane interiors that literally bled together after so many flights.

Along the way, I meet so many amazing people – too many to acknowledge in this small space – but foremost you readers! Seen here is my Spanish/Catalan editor Laureano & a new fave cartoonist David Rubin. Also, the charming Elvis Mitchell – an incredible interviewer that sets one at ease & draws out an honest conversation.

Some of you may recognize Laureano from my 2004 travelogue CARNET DE VOYAGE. Below, the view a block and a half from Laureano’s apartment. On the right is a snippet from my 2004 sketchbooks that never made it into print. But it’s another good reminder…

Cleaning out the drawing studio in preparation for book tour, I excavated copies of thank you cards drawn for four cartoonists who endorsed
the first edition of GOOD-BYE, CHUNKY RICE way back in 1999. Can you identify those authors and/or scenes mashed up from their own work?

While you’re all being patient for the HABIBI release, here’s some progress updates on slightly smaller projects.
The trifold poster is being colored by the Eisner award-winning Dave Stewart! He’s also coloring the Kazim collaboration for CBLDF.
(For TRICKSTER at ComicCon, we’re planning a B&W screenprint version.) And the BOLSTER mural is not yet finished, but getting close.
Here’s the scaffolding chaos from a couple of weeks ago…

Also, we had a first contest of sorts on the facebook page. Of course, it’s impossible to choose from so many moving stories from you readers.
Thanks for being in touch. More soon!

Happy summer, Blog-friends! My publisher has set up a Facebook page for me. I’m not directly posting there, but I can check in daily on your
generous comments. They’ll be up-to-the-moment news and a few contests and giveaways. Perhaps I’ll dabble in personal posts, but I don’t
want to neglect the DOOTDOOTGARDEN blog any more than I already do. The garden needs weeding, watering, and few more flowers planted.

At the drawing table, I’m juggling a handful of projects. Including:
a.) A collaboration with poet Kazim Ali for the CBLDF‘s Liberty Annual.
b.) Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” in comics form for the upcoming NURSERY RHYME COMICS from First Second Books (October 2011).
c.) And a tri-fold poster for San Diego Comic Con. (Chunky, Blankets, and Habibi merge)

Thanks to all of you for your patience. The HABIBI tour will be here sooner than later.
And an update for fans in the Philippines: It looks like I’ll make it to Manilla early next year. See you all soon!

Thank you, readers, for sticking with my bimonthly updates. Today’s theme is sloppy collage!

Sorting through my flat files for contributions to the upcoming NeoIntegrity Show at MoCCA – NYC,
I excavated these random CHUNKY RICE related scraps.
1) The “clunk” spliced off the last page of original art, slathered with “brush test” doodles.
2) The French translation key from the first ever appearance of CHUNKY.
3) Crumpled vellum-overlay pencils for the 3rd through 5th editions’ cover art.
4) The super-limited edition CHUNKY RICE necklace made by my friends at Studio Acorn. (Less than a dozen in circulation)

a new piece of Chunky Rice art — a birthday card for my mom, actually — continuing with the Hawaiian theme.

Work on HABIBI is progressing, but recent pages feel like spoilers, so it seemed like a nice time to reflect on my first book
~ GOOD-BYE, CHUNKY RICE. Below is a page I drew a decade ago — on December 9th, 1998 to be exact.

(The page preceding it was drawn November 20th, but I liked this one more. To account for the three weeks between pages,
I’d been working on graphic design work for Top Shelf, a collaborative pitch with Phil Amara, gag cartoons and a monthly comic strip
proposal for NICKELODEON magazine.) Anyways, here’s the ballpoint pen thumbnails for pages 104 and 86.

And here’s a photo of me taken approximately the same time — my first trip to the Oregon coast. Look, I was just a boy (23 years old)!
with a bad haircut! Sandwiched between covers of the first printing and current printing of CHUNKY – now available from Pantheon Books.

As a meager gift to you readers, here’s a few goodies scavenged from the piles of scrap paper that litter the studio. Thank you, endlessly,
for being there — for reading the books and your encouraging comments!

1) mindless doodles, circa 1999. One day, the “flaming meanies” will be resurrected.

2) The scribbly rough of page 56 in Chunky Rice

3) The penciled version of page 442 of Blankets ~ July 1st, 2002

4) The photo that became the cover of Carnet de Voyage. 2ème arrondissement, rue des Moulins, Marseilles –
I claim that I didn’t use any photographs on those travels — but Top Shelf needed me to provide a
promotional cover for the book before it ever existed. So before I left for the trip, I used this photo
from January 2001 to capture a trip yet to happen in March 2004.

Peace on earth!

It seems my first book GOOD-BYE, CHUNKY RICE has been underrepresented on the blog, yet this summer happens
to be the ten year anniversary of my move to Portland and beginning that book; so here’s a few snippets of the process.
For the first half year, I was miserable in Portland: stocking shelves in the hardware department at Fred Meyer,
cohabiting with drum-circle hippies, assaulted at a bus stop by six drunken rednecks, suffering from stolen checkbooks
bounced across the nation, and worst of all, missing my friends back in Milwaukee, WI. So I used it all as fuel.

Below are thumbnail roughs of pages 73 and 89. Ballpoint pen, baby. Below that are a couple of finished pages that never made it to the final book.

A sad detail is that I never saw the Oregon coast until the book was completed, nearly two years after moving here, for lack of time and funds.
Now I go almost weekly. Better yet, I was so hard up for money at the time, that when I received my printer’s comps of the third printing of CHUNKY, I took the whole box of them to Powell’s Books to sell. I specified that they were fresh from the printer and that I was the author, so the Powell’s buyer asked that I sign each copy and then bought them from me for three bucks a pop. That $150 saved me from a month of starvation.

In response to one of the most frequently asked of questions, here’s my list of “art tools”. My apologies to those
bored with shop-talk… I pencil with any ol’ HB pencil — these “Berol Turquoise” will do. Erasing courtesy of
“Staedtler Mars Plastic”. The text lettering in the balloons is casually dashed off with a .05 or .08 MICRON felt-tip.
For inking, I dunk a watercolor brush in a well of India ink – the old fashioned way. SPEEDBALL “Super Black” makes
me happy with its soulful darkness. CHUNKY RICE and BLANKETS were inked up with these cheap Winsor Newton
Cotman III number twos — a synthetic/sable blend. With my new book, Farel Dalrymple turned me on to this
upgrade brush — the Raphael series 8404 size number four. It’s quadruple the price, but it’s debatable if my line
has improved at all. While on the go, the Pentel “pocket-brush” is certainly handy. Another frequently asked question;
“How do you get that dry-brush effect?” Answer: Vellum finish bristol paper. Its toothiness combined with an abused brush
caked up with gunky ink.

The dimensions of my pages has fluctuated plenty. The live art area of CHUNKY RICE is 10.5″x14″ reduced for print a whoppin’ 48%. That’s admittedly too much shrinkage. While all the details are sharpened in the reduction, some of the integrity of the original is lost. The Pantheon edition of the book is smaller than the Top Shelf one, but the details are sharper, because I finally scanned the pages at 1200dpi from the original art. The older edition was simply 600dpi scans from Kinko’s photocopies! BLANKETS is drawn far smaller and reduced less — 7″x11.25″ / 70%. HABIBI is in-between; 8.75″x12.5% reduced 63%. (Sorry, this isn’t metric!)

One last goody. On this page of BLANKETS, you can see a paste-up correction. Just a slice
of typing paper glued atop the bristol.