Woodcuts

Some woodcut jpgs which I collected this morning (for you).  A set of images with two similar images of a very unscary-looking demon sitting  on men.  This set includes the often-blogged about "mowing-devil" and although I am not really interested in crop circles I am very interested in woodcut from the 1600's that shows an explanation for them from a time when people believed in demons but had not the notion of life on other planets.  Also in this set is an image of Moses as he was often rendered with horns (image 5).  And a knight under water.

Leviathan Intermediate State

Screen grab of a leviathan image I am working on for a series of brackish water related screen prints. Not sure is the green is what I want or if the gray is too dark or too light.

Working on Leviathan

I am currently working on a series of four 9" x 24" drawings to make into 2-color screen prints. All the drawings deal with water and are somehow dark or foreboding yet beautiful at the same time. While working on the second one - a kind of cuttle-fish headed Leviathan - I took a lot of photos so I could show how I work and how cruddy my paper and pens are. I will post the scan when I get it all finished and will post the others drawings - one based on the Cthulhu, one based on bog bodies and one that is just an island in water at night that kind of makes me never want to go swimming again even though it will make a very pretty print - once I have them finished and scanned. I expect the series to be printed and available in early spring.

New Website Is Up

I have rebuilt my website. With better navigation, a better shopping cart, new artwork and the re-addition of the comics gallery, this website, in my mind, is much better and more enjoyable to look through. If you like what you see, let me know or better yet let your friends know.
http://www.cvicworks.com/

Mountain Light Deck State 1

Center part of the skate deck tryptych from the sketches I uploaded yesterday.

Skate Deck Sketchery

Starting to work on some skate deck designs.

New Pages

Submitting these new pages to a semi-annual book I am sometimes a part of called Bailliwik.

A Couple Things

A tattoo design (first state) that I am working on for someone very very close to me.


A bunch of brightly colored weirdos. May be evil.

Preliminary working of a new page

May end up being colored. Not too keen on the top font. Click to enlarge and read.

NEW YESTERDAY

This will probably become part of a set of random whiteline screenprintst that I anticipate releasing this year. Contents and title to be determined.

PRELIM NOW AVAILABLE at COAST CITY COMICS

If your are from the Portland, ME area and have not yet secured a copy of my recently published book, Prelim, it can now be purchased at Coast City Comics on upper Congress Street in Portland. Go there and say hi and spend a few.
If you are from far, far away, Prelim may be purchased here through my webstore.
Prelim is 96 pages of gorgeous black & white comics, drawings and sketches and is well worth the price of $9.95.

NEW TODAY

A new black & white drawing (Bow Savage):

And a new sketch testing an old color scheme:

NEMATODA COLORED

Five minute colorized version of image I posted this morning.

NEMATODA

I have been working mostly on comic pages for the Book of Ung, but took some time out yesterday for this dark beauty.

PRACTICE COMIC PAGE

I did this freestyle comic page last night to warm up before starting a new chapter in what I am currently referring to as "The Book of Ung." This was basically me just trying to free-up how I was making comics to make it more fun (& visceral), quicker and something that could be completed in a timeframe when the inspiration is still there. I think I am getting close to this goal and will post some work from the new book soon. I have a lot of started chapters and a lot of un-lettered pages so it will have to wait a bit.

C'EST BON Vol. 9 Out Now

Allan Haverholm, over at C'est Bon Kultur, was kind enough to reprint a chapter from my book in the larger format, slick anthology publication, C'est Bon Vol. 9. This is a really top-notch perfect bound large format book that comes out of Sweden, where they know about comics. You can get a preview and also purchase the book over here. Other artists in the book include Michel Ducourneau (SE), Mike Diana (US), Eliza Frye (US), Allan Haverholm (DK), Ed Homer (US), Jacob Rask (DK) and Hanna Pettersson (SE). Below is one of the pages of mine that appear in this new book. Go check it out.

ISO-URKER FEMALES (& MORE)

Vengeful Iso-Urker Females.
Every Urker has their own job to do against humanity.

NEW DRAWINGS

I spent almost all of 2009 sketching. This year I am going to work in a more finalized fashion and get some stuff done that can be made into prints or put into a book. Here is a start from yesterday.

NEW B&W SKETCHES

It's been a while since I've drawn anything worth posting, and it's also been a while since I've posted. Life got ahead of me recently and my fantasies of controlling time have shown themselves to be empty.
These drawings are done by doing a line drawing on paper, then flipping the paper over and filling in the negative areas by hand. I could certainly do this with photoshop, but it does not make finished piece and lacks the hand-drawn feeling I strive for. The second one is NFSW, but if you are looking at my blog at work, your boss needs to give you more to do.


Images copyright 2009 Chad Vercus

Gerd Arntz

While image searching for George Grosz drawings the other day I stumbled across this master of dynamic black & white illustraion of whom I had never heard. Much like the way that almost every computer in every home or office has the font Gill Sans pre-loaded but no-one knows who Eric Gill is, Arntz also left his mark in iconic history by creating a style of drawing the human form that is so bleak and masterful it is used to tell each gender which room they need to go in to squat. You can see in some of these earlier images how he was attempting to refine his style to a point of purity & perfection where the blacks & white are always in perfect ratio and the forms, although being quite human are neither comical or expessive. They are so start in their design it is as if he was more interested in the designs and forms than the often political points he was making in his work. I think Arntz reached a perfection that some of us (myself included) strive fro every time we sit down. not to draw from the right side of the brain but to draw from the left. To make an iconic system in which anything can be rendered and look stylistically the same. I will certianly be ripping of his style for a couple weeks and then add Elvis Studio elements and then get frustrated and go back to drawing art deco plants. Well done, Gerd. You can tell me which door to walk through to piss any day.

Tadanori Yokoo

I promised myself that I would never put youtube videos on my weblog, but then I came across his a couple weeks ago and knew that I could either write his name on a post-it note and lose it on my desk for years, or I could just embed this fantastic animation short from 1965 inot my weblog and know right where to find it any time I wanted.

Three New Paintings

Recently, I was aksed by a local organization to do 3 new pieces for their charity show they do every year where about 100 local artists provide pieces that they frame in 10 x 10 black frames and display in a giant room for one night. All the charitable folks from around the town show up and buy the pieces off the wall and everybody wins. Last year I even made money from it, which was beyond me because I thought I was doing the work for charity. These are what I came up with. The scans are not that great becasue I use 70% gray on black and the scanenr has a really hard time picking up what I am putting down. The paintings do not mean much or say much, but they are pretty and most anyone can appreciate them.

Empirical01

I am now accepting submissions for EMPRICIAL01 - an anthology of comics & art to be produced in the fall of 2009. If you are interested in submitting work to this anthology, please email me for submission guidelines.
Submission deadline is: 07/01/2009
chadverrill@maine.rr.com