April 2nd, April 16th, and April 23rd I will once again put on my homemade monster masks and play guitar for life-drawing students at MassArt! Set lists will include lots of Man...Or Astroman?, classic surf, Misfits and Ramones, Sleep, classic Black Sabbath, Metallica, Slayer, some Iron Maiden, and more.

And the 2 last dates are geared towards potential incoming freshman who'll be revisiting the school then to decide if MassArt's the right fit for them. If the Frankenstein monster playing "Motorbreath" doesn't convince high school seniors that MassArt is a fun place, I don't think anything will. I love that my masking wire and tape monster heads will kind of be like MassArt recruiters.

(And like the recent Feast of Flesh poster, I doodled this self-portrait using my Wacom tablet in Photoshop instead of doing a traditional drawing. For me, this is very weird.)

Here's me outside my office at Massart after one of the last drawing sessions:

Photo by Linda Bourke, my former teacher and now my cool boss.

Just finished this new poster. And for the first time, the zombie head is 100% digital (Wacom tablet, brush tool, and paintbucket in Photoshop) rather than an acrylic painting dropped into the now-standard Feast of Flesh poster template. This show is going to be great.

I went to my hometown recently for my mom's and sister's birthdays, and found these Uniball pen drawings from middle school under my old bed.

"War is Hell"(1985)

Holy Moly! A heavy-metal-hair skeleton machine-gunner. Wow. This is from 6th grade in a Catholic school, when I started getting seriously into Iron Maiden, Ozzy, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax. This sucker's LAMINATED, even.
Detail:


This one's short and sweet.
"BURN"(1986):


The inside cover of my 1987 school notebook contained this gem:


The lightning BEHIND the moon is especially awesome. Look at all those bloody skeletons! Somehow, this made me remember Sister Barbara's music class, where we'd have to sing "Were You There When They Nailed Him to the Tree?" and other fun Catholic hits, alongside "The Rose" and "I'm On Top of the World". Once she let us bring in cassette tapes to play for the class, and I made everyone listen to Metallica's "Battery". Amazingly, she listened to the whole song instead of shutting it off once the accoustic guitar intro turned into the fast main riff. Her only comment was "It has a fast beat."

Cover for an 8th grade book report in 1987(I got an A+++, seriously!):


And finally, this insane 1987 heavy metal skeleton warlord guy on 12" x 18" sketch paper. I laughed my head off seeing this again 21 years later (crap, I'm old), but I was totally sincere when I drew this:


Black flag with Grim Reaper cut-out:


more details:

My friends J. Cannibal and Mary Widow of Black Cat Burlesque are getting married this October and had me design their "Save the Date" postcards. The original is Micron pen on 9" x 12" 2-ply Bristol, with some muted Photoshop colors dropped in. This is the kind of thing I'd like to see way more often when cloud-watching.
Detail: