Cropped Will Cardini artwork

August 30th, 2011

Flower Hypercastle by Glade Hensel and Ads in Secret Prison #5

Filed under: Inspiration,Print Comics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 8:33 pm

Hey y’all, sorry I made a mistake with my blogging and released an incomplete post early on Monday instead of today. Here’s the post that I intended to publish this morning:

Here’s a print that Glade made for our show at Austin Books (Speaking of our show, if any of y’all want to see our prints at Austin Books and haven’t yet, this week is your last chance! Tomorrow is the last day.):

Flower Hypercastle by Glade Hensel

This print is called “Flower Hypercastle.” It’s a digital print of a gouache painting. This past Saturday Glade and I just hung out at home, painted, and watched Mad Men. I spend so much time working on comics on the computer that I forget how relaxing and visceral painting can be. I’m going to try to make painting more a part of my regular art routine.

Something I’m excited about but haven’t mentioned on here yet is that I’m the co-featured artist for Secret Prison #5. It’s especially exciting because I love the work of the featured artist, Tom Scioli. Gødland is one of my favorite comics. I’m bringing it up now because it’s debuting at SPX in a week and a half and they’re looking for people to buy ad space before this Sunday, Sept 3rd. Here’s an information sheet (with a small preview of Scioli’s dope cover):

Secret Prison Ad Sheet

If any of y’all want me to draw your ad for you just drop me a line at mark p hensel /at/ g mail /dot/ com.

August 23rd, 2011

Welcome to the Hypercastle by Glade Hensel

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , , , , , — William Cardini @ 7:09 am

Here’s a print that Glade made for our show at Austin Books:

Welcome to the Hypercastle by Glade Hensel

This print is called “Welcome to the Hypercastle.” It’s a digital print of a gouache painting. I love Glade’s text treatment. You can see a similar design that she did for a Happy Birthday card here.

November 13th, 2009

East Austin Studio Tour

Filed under: Events,Press,Print Comics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 7:06 am

Glade and I are participating in the East Austin Studio Tour this year as Boongoo Studio. We’re number 125 on the map, come check out our spaces!

Here are some shots of my studio:

As you can see in the upper left, I’ve got plenty of Gold County Paper Mill books left over from STAPLE! 2008, including Jak Cardini Achieves the Narratological Singularity, a book of J.C.‘s poems, and Impossible Objects, a collaborative book between me and Jak.

Here’s a detail shot. I’ve also got some color drawz, raw comix pages, and black and white india ink drawz.

Here’s my drawing space and something that I was working on.

Our good friend Alison Kuo came and did an installation in our living room! We’re also going to be featuring the artwork of Beverly Anderson and Aaron Flynn.

November 6th, 2009

Monster Show 4

Filed under: Artwork — Tags: , , , — William Cardini @ 10:14 am

Domy Books has posted pics from the Monster Show 4 in Austin and Houston on their flickr, go check it out, there’s a ton of great art.

Here’s my contribution to the Austin show:

October 30th, 2009

Monster Show 4 Opens Halloween at Domy Books in Austin and Houston

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 10:23 am

Hey y’all, Monster Show 4 opens this Saturday (Halloween!) from 7-9pm at Domy’s Houston and Austin locations, come check it out! There’ll be many, many fabulous and terrifying monster drawz by tons of talented creators, including the lovely Glade Whitworth.

Here’s the flyer, image drawn by Travis Millard:

Here you can get an all-in-one shot of my monster draws in process and a fraction of my new studio set up:

I’ve had this drawing table since the mid-90s, so please forgive the stickers. If you come to our house (Boongoo Studio) during this year’s East Austin Studio Tour, you’ll be able to see my whole setup!

September 10th, 2009

No More Worlds Opens this Saturday

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 7:04 am

The show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery in Chicago opens this Saturday, the 12th. Here’s the promotion image again, Alex McLeod’s Jolly Ranch:

If you’re going to be in Chicago this weekend, go check the opening out, from what I’ve seen the other artists are amazing.

I’ve been working furiously on my drawings for this show the last three weeks, and I finally finished them on Monday, a little too late to enjoy the pool on Labor Day, unfortunately, but early enough that I was able to photograph them and package them to be sent by Express Mail to Chicago on Tuesday.

Here’s one detail shot from each of the six drawings:

I think that adding the india ink really changed these from what they were when they were just gouache drawings. I didn’t have as much time to work on these drawings as I would’ve liked, but I’ve been working close to deadlines my whole life, so I’m used to it. I think that, like most procrastinators, I really need to feel the pressure to actually finish something. Otherwise I just dabble and consider all of the possibilities before making a move. With the time constraints that I was working under, I just chose gouache and used it, even though I had limited experience with it before. If there had been more time, I would’ve spent more time playing with different options and practicing techniques. Now, however, I feel really comfortable with gouache and I’m going to start producing more pieces like this. And one thing that I’m going to put together is the comic tools DIY stay-wet palette, check it out. It sounds pretty awesome. I wish that I had remembered that blog post earlier. Having to carefully note my color combinations and then try to replicate them every nite was frustrating. Even with the DIY stay-wet palette, however, I don’t think I’ll be doing narrative drawings any time soon. I didn’t like having to keep the color palette consistent between each piece, I would’ve much rather been able to experiment.

September 3rd, 2009

MELT for No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery

Filed under: Events — Tags: , , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 6:42 am

I’ve been working on my gouache drawings for the show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery almost every day of the last two weeks. I’ve finished the gouache parts of five of the six drawings (I still have to ink them), but I’ve been having some trouble getting the final page sketched out, so I’m taking a couple days off to doodle out a solution. Sketching out the first page took me several days too.

Once the six drawings are done, they’ll show a simple narrative of a structure melting into a huge lake of some sort of colorful, liquid plastic substance. Here’s part of my (uninked) drawing of the structure:

Here you can see part of the building as it melts:

It’s important, for me to achieve my desired effect, for the structure to go through one or two phase changes as it melts. What I mean by phase change is, as the buildings begin to melt, I draw the same structure, with the same color pattern, it’s just squashed and drawn with increasingly wavy lines. But, at some point, the melting takes on a different color pattern and I don’t redraw the same structure, but modified; instead, I draw a new structure. That’s a phase change. Here’s an example of that happening:

In this image, you can see the unmelted structure in the lower left and the lower right. In the middle and in the upper right, you can see that same structure, with the same color pattern, but drawn with extremely wavy lines. This is the beginning of the melt. But then, along the top and especially in the upper left quadrant of the drawing, you can see the phase change, where the structure has been replaced by the repeating, drippy polygon patten. For the final drawing, I’m trying to come up with a second phase change, which is why it is giving me trouble. I’ll post some pieces of the final drawings once I’ve got them documented.

August 26th, 2009

Gouache Experiments for No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery

Filed under: Admin,Events — Tags: , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 8:22 am

I took most of the content from my old blogs and imported them to this site last nite, so please, feel free to browse the archives and experience some nostalgia. I’ve been blogging sporadically since May 2007 and started to blog at least twice a week since December 2008. I’ll be going through those old posts over the next several weeks and updating their formatting and the size and source of the images.

Last nite I also went to my Okaymountain studio to work on my drawings for the upcoming show No More Worlds at Concertina Gallery in Chicago, which is curated by Corinna Kirsch and Katherine Pill. I’m doing medium-sized (18″x24″) drawings that I’m coloring with gouache. I tried out a bunch of different materials because it’s been a while since I’ve colored something off of the computer. Here’s one of my gouache experiments:

In the end, I decided to do flat color with gouache and then add outlines and details with india ink. I’m going to do six drawings like that for the show which will replicate one of my MELT pages from TRANZ.

Here’s the promotional image for the show, Jolly Ranch by Alex McLeod:

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Following an investigative curatorial model, Concertina Gallery’s first exhibition inquires into the simple yet seldom insignificant gesture: the greeting. Although an invitation can take shape in a myriad of forms, the works in No More Worlds invite viewers to enter – through tactile engagement or with the aid of imagination – captivating yet unsettling environments. Featuring artists who use a variety of mediums, No More Worlds showcases works that deftly combine the fantastical and mysterious with elements of the everyday, reminding us that even our wildest ideas of new worlds are anchored in and mediated by our own experiences of reality. Reveling in the unknown surprises of the grotesque or the extraordinary sensuous qualities of the idyll, the impossible tableaux constructed by these artists hover between real and imagined worlds. These liminal environments give way to partially obscured narratives, both enchanting and monstrous.

I’m excited to be in this show alongside amazing artists and I wish I could be there for the opening. If any of y’all are gonna be in Chicago September 12th, be sure to check it out!