Model: Carrie Colin

To use a tired baseball metaphor, this piece feels like a single to first rather than a home run. I find myself thinking more and more about where things are going in my art. Maybe like Autumn, I'm in a change of seasons.

Back in 2008, I was disappointed that I only had 9 pieces for that year. So I decided to start getting up early and try do create 24 new pieces for 2009. (I'm up to 22 right now.) But now I'm not sure that quantity is translation into quality? Maybe I'm jumping into stuff without thinking them through better.

I'm great for grabbing an image I've shot and just running with it. Now I believe I have reached the limit that style of working can take me. That I need to learn to dig deeper and produce work of greater resonance. Also to expand the range of subject matter I cover. Not all figurative work has to be erotic or female. Working in a niché is comfortable but also stifling. I need to grow.

Model: Jessie Marie

Sometime our best efforts don't seem good enough. At one point, it felt like all I was doing with this picture is banging my head against it. (At which someone asked '"which head"?) I felt like either my artistic talent or my sex drive was failing. I couldn't get it to feel right. Nothing was working out like I wanted. Finally I just gave up on what I originally had planned and started playing around with it.

I started experimenting with color overlays. Using them like photo filters. Sepia worked the best. It also muted a lot of the colors that was going out of control on me and gave the image an old photograph feel to it. I like the idea of making it like an old glamour shot from the fifties. Not totally monochromatic but with a little bit of color peeking here and there.

It's not my best piece but I feel happy enough with it to put it down. I would have felt bad if I had too put it on hold until I could figure how to pull it in the direction I had originally wanted it to go. Sometime you just have to move on to the next girl.

Once again I have submitted a design for the Threadless T-shirt Contest. Since one of the comments on my last designs was "...give us something we can't get in a comic shop or at Walmart", I went for something "Fetish Flavored". I don't know it may still be a bit too much for this crowd. But wish me luck.

A Love Not Safe

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Models: Rebecca Palensky & Patrick Smith

Okay, sometimes I like to be more silly than sexy. After doing my friend's romance book cover (The Eye Of The Beholder) I wanted to play with the concept some more. This is from a photo shoot I did with models Rebecca and Patrick last month.

It also helps to have some PG rated stuff in your portfolio, rather than just R. As much as I like to draw bare breasted women, there is a limit to where I can show them off without getting into trouble. In sites that I can post them on, I usually have to put them behind a 'cut' or a screen. I notice that the R stuff get a lot less comments than the PG stuff because of that. Some images I can't share on places like Facebook at all. So for practical purposes, it is good to have some work safe images among the naked ladies.

Also, even though Rebecca had agreed to do part of the shoot nude, it didn't feel like it was going that way and so we didn't. So the two themes I shot her in were ones where she was fully dressed. Nudes have been around since the days of cave painting. Even with an attractive model, I tend to hold off shooting nudes unless I have a good idea for the shot.

I went out to the Folsom Street Fair. Ironically it was the first time I've been there. It was very hot and crowded. The Kinky community of San Francisco was out in force. Though I was ready for the nudity and the floggings and the ton of Gay Porn around, I was not ready for the smell! All the hot sweaty naked people on one street in the hot sun. It had that locker room smell after awhile. Luckly that didn't affect the pictures I got.

( Pictures of KInk People on Parade right here. )

Well I have started laying the ground work for a new marketing plan. I went out to Borders yesterday and went through their magazine rack making a list of magazines and art directors that look like would be a good fit. I plan on going to the library today and do the same thing and when my new copy of the artist market arrives from Amazon. My goal is to come up with a list of about 100 names and then market to them (or as one art director put it "get in their faces") once a month for a year. After that year, review the list and do it again.

Money is tight. My car is breaking down. My computer is old and I have a mortgage to worry about every month. Ugh! If I had a wife and kids I'd be totally screwed. But I think I can handle a mailing of 100 names a month. I have also made arrangements to sell my cards at a new coffee/sex shop in the city.

I'm finding the hardest part really is keeping my head on straight. Part of me just wants to bury myself in making new work. Another part just wants to say screw it, and do whatever comes my way that brings in cash. Neither is a good way to go in the long run. My art is the only thing I have that I can really build equity with. I have to treat it like the serious business it is or I really will die poor. Sometime I go to bed with that running around in my head.

I tried a lot of new things this last photo shoot. For starters, this was my first couple as models. I have done plenty of two model shoots but usually they are people who have just met moments before we started shooting. Rebecca and Patrick have been a couple for awhile. So it was interesting to and capture that. The other new thing was this was the first time I shot my models strictly outdoors. Up until now I have been shooting my models in the studio. For this shoot though, most of the shots were taken in my Father's backyard.



Sleeping beauty
Model: Rebecca & Patrick
Make-Up: Danelle Payne
I started this shoot first in a graveyard down the street from my house. It actually didn't work out as well as I had hoped. I did get some good shots from the benches that were around the area. This shoot was of Rebecca laying back in Patrick's lap.

( More Pictures behind the cut )

Model: Melisande

Another black and white picture of Melisande. I like the old comic book feel to it. Back when color in comics was fearfully limited and simple; the inker would have to carry the burden in getting the image to pop from the page. Todays comics now feature computer color and glossier paper stocks. They are more beautifully rendered but seem to have lost some of that old POW and BAM feel.

( Topless Western Outlaw here. )

I was able to spend a nice day yesterday at the Northern California Renn Fair. It was Pirate day and I was there with my friend Jeff and his two co-workers Emily and Ed. It was not very historically accurate. ( Scotts, Spanards and Englishmen walking around together, come on!) Still it was fun if you can over look the moddle age guys trying to look like Johnny Depp.

( Pirates and other Riff Raff here. )

Illustrations of my friend Camille who is a professional Marilyn Monroe impersonator.



Marilyn in Heaven

I decided to work on a single theme this coming year;'Sexy Monsters'. The plan is to have enough pieces done to do another show. 'Spider-Woman' is the first piece on this idea that I finally completed. It's not exactly work safe. So check it out behind the cut line.

( Topless Girl with Spiders right here )

Yes I'm currently whoring myself out to try and make some money from my art. If get this design gets enough votes printed on Threadless then they'll print it. If the design is printed I'll get will get paid $2,500 in cash and prizes. You can help with my attempt at artistic prostitution by spreading the word (or at least voting for me)! Thanks a bunch.

Big Guns

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Model: Roxxie
Yes, it's another pirate picture. I know I have done at least two other pirate shots but this is my first with Roxxie. The reference was from a shoot we did in January. I originally wanted to just do this in black and white with no gradients or shading. (I was trying for a sharp Frank Miller's Sin City type of look.) At one point though, I realized it wasn't working out. The amount of detail on the pirate costume made it too busy. So I compromised and added gray shading instead of just straight black and white to various elements. That help to visually tone down the image.

This isn't a masterpiece but it is a strong illustration. I can see it being used as a good spot illustration somewhere. I have been toying with the idea of offering a collection of these as stock art. As someone that once did graphic design and layout for a magazine, I understand the how useful good filler could be.

I finally hung my work for my show at the Citadel in San Francisco. It will be running there from today until sometime in October. I was of course really nervous about how it would look. Especially since it will be up all through Leather week next month.

I'd like to thank all my friends who put up with me being a whinny little girl during this whole process.

I got an email from a web-master who who runs a comics site who's..."speciality (pls. check our site) is bondage and woman humiliation". While I can do bondage, female humiliation is a line I can't cross. It just totally goes against my grain. I hate to turn down paying work but there is something to be said about holding to your vision. Nakedcomix is about sexy fun. To me though there is nothing fun about woman humiliation.

This might seem a bit hypocritical on my part. I had done a female serial killer set and female zombies too. I have also shots where the woman has been on bottom. Career wise I could be cutting my own throat. But I think that having quality work that speaks of something different is a better marketing position than following an established trend. But 'Female Sex Slaves of the Yakuza' and the like isn't the type of book I want to be involve in. That whole part of the fetish scene I'm happy to leave to someone else.

Yes I do have some moral standards. They may not be much, but they are definitely there.

Ugh, I hang my first show in two days and I'm already starting to panic. I don't know if I have enough work to fill the space! The Citadel isn't a traditional gallery but a "play space" for fetish people. To it is hard to judge the wall space. I have 6 framed pieces and 6 banner pieces ready to go. But after seeing the space again yesterday I fear it won't be enough to look like a full show.

Lucky I guess that the reception for the show isn't for another two weeks. That way I can hand what I got. Check out what space is left and then prepare more pieces to fill them. Really not what I want to do but hey.

I think I'll be freaking out on a regular basis this week.

A the start of this year I promised myself to complete at least two new pieces a month. So far I've done that but it doesn't mean that they are all of the same quality. For some reason, this one just hasn't been able to work for me. I worked on it for almost three weeks but it doesn't seem to click. At this point I think I have done all that I can with it and just have to move on.

I think where I went wrong is working too close with the source photo. There are flaws I see in the original photo that just got magnified when I turned them into a drawing. Also, I worked on the two model as one figure instead of two. This made it harder to separate them in term of tone and light for the final piece. Then there was the fact that I really didn't know to render the silly string.

I think I learned a lot on what I need to improve upon with this piece. In that case, it has been very successful. Not very work has to be a masterpiece. Some can very well just be learning experiences.

( Jimbo's learning experience behind the cut. )

Model: Christina

I was working on this piece for awhile when I had to take a break from it and devote my attention to the book cover job. That turned out to be a good thing, since it allowed me to tackle all that background detail fresh. Most of my backgrounds tend to be a lot simpler than this one. The idea being, you really don't want to distract too much from the figure in a Pin-Up. Here though I may have spent more time creating it than the main figure. But since it plays such an important part of the overall effect of the piece, I really didn't mind. For the background, I looked for elements from the original film.

When I first saw this picture of Christine, I knew I wanted to do a Frankenstein piece from it. When we shot, it was only her second or third photo shoot as a model and I had Maggie (the other model) put a leather collar on Christine. Her expression at that moment was priceless. Despite my limits as a photographer, I love what I get from shooting my own models. That expression and pose wasn't something I could have pulled from my own brain. In the end that was what drove the whole inspiration for this whole piece.

In The Eye Of Beholder book cover

Models: Cherry Katonic & Jeff Cathcart
The cover art for my friend Sharon's first novel to be published in England.

I met experienced fetish model Maggie Mayhem at a fetish flea market held at the Citadel a couple of months ago. A month or so later, she agreed to shoot with me when a model I scheduled dropped out. The reason I didn't ask Maggie to do this shoot in the first place was because I was looking for someone 'boyish' looking at the time. But like the Rolling Stones said, sometimes you can't get what you want but you get what you need. The whole idea was fun kink. We wrapped Maggie (and my other model Christina) in shiny ribbons. I wanted to do a bondage shoot but with a fun festive feel to it.

( Warning: Festive Bound Boodies beyond this point! )