Cropped Will Cardini artwork

January 16th, 2018

Watercolor Commission of Diana

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 7:10 am

Near the end of last year, I painted a watercolor commission of the character Diana in Tales from the Hyperverse. I did two versions and let the commissioner choose.

Here’s a detail of the first version, with additional lines in India ink:

Here’s the second version, without any India ink:

If you’d like to commission a drawing or painting from me, send me an email at william cardini at this website.

January 24th, 2017

Watercolor Paintings for the 2016 Kansas City Flatfile Show

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 8:56 am

Here are scans of four of the five small paintings that I did for the 2016 Kansas City Flatfile show at the H&R Block Artspace:


“Waterfall Crystal 1,” watercolor and india ink, 6×8 inches, May 2016.


“Monster Crystal 1,” watercolor, 6 x 8 inches, May 2016.


“Monster Crystal 2,” watercolor, 7 x 11 inches, May 2016.


“Alien River Shaman 1,” watercolor, 8.5 x 11.5 inches, May 2016. A riff on a scene from Skew.

It was my first art show in KC! I’m thankful that Glade and I were invited. I had a fifth watercolor that was too big for my scanner and the photos didn’t turn out. Maybe I’ll try to document it again later.

I haven’t done much painting with watercolors. I like how you can mix the colors on the paper by doing wet-on-wet or layering washes. It feels more spontaneous than having to mix all my colors beforehand like I do with my gouache and acrylic paintings.

December 13th, 2016

Hyper-Grid Mount Miizzz

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 9:14 am

Sup y’all, I’m just melting into a hyper-grid mountain over here.

Hyper-Grid Mountain Miizzzard by William Cardini

In other news, the Vortex eBook is now available on itch.io!

April 22nd, 2016

Bow Before the Tree-Beetle-God

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 10:12 am

tree-beetle-god

Happy Earth Day!

August 4th, 2015

New Photo of an Old Painting: “Petrified Forest Spirits Dancing Beneath the Crescent Nightmare World”

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 10:52 am

Last week I shipped off the penultimate reward for the Sparkplug Books Kickstarter that funded Vortex. It was an acrylic painting and I still have one more to do. Glade and I took a photo of the painting before I shipped it (I’ll post a good one once the painting has safely arrived), and because I had the setup, we also took a photo of a 2012 painting that I’d never properly shot before. Here it is:

Petrified Forest Spirits Dancing Beneath the Crescent Nightmare World
“Petrified Forest Spirits Dancing Beneath the Crescent Nightmare World” (30 x 48″, acrylic, December 2012). Photo by Glade Hensel.

I originally made this for the “Surreal Landscapes” show at Gallery Black Lagoon back in Austin, curated by Cari Palazzolo.

July 10th, 2015

Blank Hill Zine

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 10:04 am

I did a drawing for Blank Hill Zine, a book inspired by King of the Hill. The editors, my buddy Jason Poland and Blake Jones, provided a template of Hank’s face that we could fill in.


Drawing this made me feel a little less homesick.

Blank Hill Zine is still available for sale. It’s the spiritual successor to SHAQZINE, edited by Jason Poland and Keith Mclean, which I also contributed to.

SHAQZINE is sadly sold out.

March 17th, 2015

Silver Surfer 2099

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 9:04 am

I moved recently so I went through my six longbox comics collection and culled the fluff. It was a lengthy process that involved a lot of re-reading old comics that I’ve been lugging around for years and never removing from their plastic bags. I tried to only keep the comics that I’ll want to re-read again in five or ten years.

This process led me to re-read all of the 2099 comics that I have. One that’s really stuck out is 2099 Unlimited, which had some cool little shorts in it that are pretty far from a typical 90’s Marvel book. It’s got me thinking about what I’d do in the 2099 ‘verse, and the obvious answer is SILVER SURFER 2099:

Silver Surfer 2099
Collage background is “The star cluster NGC 3572 and its dramatic surroundings” by ESO/G. Beccari. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

ORIGIN: The Silver Surfer was infected by a rogue Celestial AI techno-virus in 2077. Norin Radd’s mind has become a war zone. The mutant Celestial mind tries to compel the Surfer to destroy unfit alien societies through hallucinations – sometimes the Surfer sees through these illusions and sometimes he doesn’t. Paranoid, the Surfer begs Galactus for healing, but all Galactus can do is wall off the Surfer’s consciousness from the exterior universe, sending Norin Radd and the Celestial AI on a vision quest through layers of subconsciousness, trying to destroy each other.

September 17th, 2014

The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard Part 3: Hyperbox

Filed under: Artwork,Print Comics — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 10:31 am

Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.

The look of the Miizzzard and my drawing style changed in 2007. I switched from a bamboo brush and India ink to Faber Castelli marker and brush pens. I also used the computer to color a lot more. Here are two full-color Miizzzard drawings from the fall of 2007:

The Miizzzard Returns
I think I wrote “The Miizzzard Returns” because I had recently moved back to Austin, but it could also be because I hadn’t drawn the Miizzz in a while.

The Miizzzard Rides the Lizzard
The Miizzzard is riding the Lizzard. Sometimes the Lizzard has a crystal head. And the Miizzz is smoking because I used to smoke a pack a day?! So glad I quit in March 2009.

In December 2007 I started my third mini-comic series, Hyperbox (the first two were Omni, with Lanneau White, and Trash). Hyperbox features my semi-autobiographical character Mark. In Hyperbox #1, Mark gets teleported to the Hyperverse and meets the Miizzzard. Here’s that issue minus the postlude that leads into the second issue:

Hyperbox 1 Cover

Hyperbox Page 1

Hyperbox Page 2

Hyperbox Page 3

Hyperbox Page 4

Hyperbox Page 5

Hyperbox Page 6

Hyperbox Page 7

Hyperbox Page 8

Hyperbox Page 9

Hyperbox Page 10

Hyperbox Page 11

Hyperbox Page 12

Hyperbox Page 13

Hyperbox Page 14

Hyperbox Page 15

Hyperbox Page 16

Hyperbox Page 17

The frog character was originally from the comics I did for the University of Texas student newspaper, The Daily Texan. My series was called Fists: Free for All. Most of those strips are incomprehensible. Subsequent issues of Hyperbox bring in the Lizzard, the Wojrollox, and the Space Yetis. I had a plan for the fourth and final issue but I never drew it. It would’ve brought the Miizzzard back into the story. Maybe one day…

September 16th, 2014

The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard Part 2: First Comic Appearance

Filed under: Artwork,Print Comics — Tags: — William Cardini @ 10:25 am

Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.

When Lanneau White and I performed in January of 2007 and I debuted my Miizzzard persona, we gave out a mini comic called Omni. It contains what may be the first comic appearance of the Miizzzard. In this story, the Miizzz is born when Tarpman drowns Mark P. Hensel in a tarp (all drawn in india ink with a brush):


Omni Page 10.


Omni Page 11.


Omni Page 12.


Omni Page 13.


Omni Page 14.


Omni Page 15.

In that drawing of the Miizzzard on the last page, I’m just drawing myself in costume. Here’s a closeup of the Miizzzard mask I wove from a February 2007 video still:

Next post: Hyperbox #1!

September 11th, 2014

The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard Part 1: Origins

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: — William Cardini @ 10:39 am

Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.

I’ve been portraying the Miizzzard in various forms and media since at least January 2007. The oldest Miizzzard documentation that I can find now is these photos from a performance art piece that Lanneau White and I did that month. Here we are assembling a hyper gate:


The Miizzzard is on the left in the brown corduroy jacket and red, Karl Sapien (Lanneau’s persona) is on the right with the green skeleton mask.

The Miizzzard began as my performance art persona. I took a lot of performance art classes in college, mainly under Mike Smith, and then after school I continued to do performance and video art for a few years. Here’s one of the only videos I did then that I’m still into, with a text intro from July 2007:

The moon was low and large and distant in the sky. The inter-dimensional machineries churned to keep the Trans-Dimensional Hypercastle in place, and the haze produced fuzzed the moon, as if she were the ghostly final slice of a peach. The crystalline lattice of fluorescent blue light tubes slowly unfolded under the heavy-lidded lunar gaze. It seemed to be grasping at the whole of night.

The Miizzzard walked up to it and began to play his Hyper-Crystal Mind-Organ…

I had a brief infatuation with weaving in late 2006 and early 2007, when I made the Miizzzard’s mask and other fabric scraps:

The name of the Miizzzard comes from Roy Wood’s Wizzard’s Brew album:

My first blog post in May 2007 was about the origins of the Miizzz:

The Miizzzard no longer exists. He died circa 400,000 B.C.E. while trying to discover the transformative secrets of the Space Yetis.

William Cardini space yeti drawing

His ghost haunts the digital realm and possesses various weavings and synthetic fabrics in the material world in an attempt to recreate Scriabin’s ‘Mysterium,’ a Gesamtkunstwerk that destroys this earth to give birth to another.

He is a figment, a warm bowl of minty fig meat topped with a spoonful of cold jellied plum.

I have also heard that, although he has lived out only twenty-three years, the path that he traces thru spacetime is discontinuous: he shook to Marie Curie’s radioactive boogaloo, procured pamphlets from Le Sony’r Ra in Chicago, was a starving outcast with Grettir Armundarson on Drang Isle and pissed blue thanks to Yves Klein. His last known location was drunk out of his mind at the Deep Eddy Cabaret, singing karaoke alongside the shade of Rrose Selavy.

All we can know for sure is that he’s a weird guy.

More hiizzztory next week!