It started at 5:45 pm…Members of the San Francisco Cell are, right now, working to complete a 24 Hour Comic Book challenge. That is 24 pages in 24 hours.
The group started in a private residence but moved to Muddy Waters in the Castro district. There the artist plugged away at their stories, stopping only to drink coffee and pastries.
At 11pm they kicked the group out and then ……..
Stay tuned to find out more from the folks drawing right now, poster here on the blog.
I just received a reminder email about the International Sketch Crawl which will be on Saturday July 1, 2006. What is a Sketch Crawl you may ask? This is from founder Enrico Casarosa, a talented artist who lives and works in the San Francisco bay area:
The basic idea: to record nonstop everything I could around me with my pencil and watercolors. A drawn journal filled with details ranging from the all the coffee I drank to the different buses I took. After a whole day of drawing and walking around the city the name seemed quite fitting: “SketchCrawl†– a drawing marathon. ….
I soon figured out it was much more interesting to do the marathon with a group of artists instead of all by myself! And so SketchCrawl turned communal. After a whole day of drawing it proved to be amazingly interesting and inspiring to share and compare other people’s drawings and thoughts. Different takes on our surroundings, different details, different sensibilities.
The next step was making the SketchCrawl a World Wide event: having people from different corners of the world join in a day of sketching and journaling and then, thanks to the Internet, having everyone share the results on an online forum.
So why not set up a day of sketching in your home town. The whole event seems very fun and cool. make sure you check out the samples from previous crawls, here is a link to the results of the first time.
AND for those of us who need a kick in the ass to get drawings, here is a perfect excuses to do so, and a great way to see someplace from a different way.
First of all let me introduce myself, my name is Brian Kolm and I am part of the San Francisco cell.
On Tuesday, May 30, 2006 was the first field trip for the SF Cell, beyond our regular jam sessions at Café International. Our quest…to buy awesome art supplies in San Francisco’s Japantown.
The three of us who attended first met at the plaza between the two halves of Japantown Center, at 6pm. The plaza is quiet and pleasant, with a fountain and tall tower, as well as interesting areas to sit and sketch.
The Japantown Center is a great place to explore, since there is so much cartoon/art everywhere you turn. There’s the usual cutesy characters like Hello Kitty and action stars like Neruto, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Dragon Ball Z, but also places selling handmade paintings and craft pieces. But we had a goal, to visit the Kinokuniya Stationery & Gift.
Kinokuniya Stationery & Gift is a great store if you like unique art materials, particularly their large selection of brush pens. They have everything from fancy re-fillable brushes to the kind that you can throw away after you’re done. They even had some amazing brush pens filled with brightly colored ink (see image below). The secret is to go to the front counter and ask to try their samples. Then you can see what works best for you.
Kinokuniya Stationery & Gift is also great if you like cute little novelty erasers, interesting containers, origami paper, stickers, and beautiful greeting cards. I particularly liked some of the collectible statues from Studio Ghibli films like Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service.
After we had made our buys, we headed over to the Kinokuniya Bookstore. The place is huge and has pretty much any kind of book or magazine from Japan that you could want. Doc Popular, one of the SF Cell’s founders, lead us to their selection of Deleter comic book supplies.
The Deleter brand of comic book paper is quite good with the smaller sized sheets (with non-repo blue rules) running 40 sheets for $4.60. The aspect is for what they call a Dojinshi/B5 size books, so it’s more square then American size aspect ratio. The paper seems to be a good choice for someone who wants to have the pre-ruled sheets, but does not want to spend a lot of money. It would also be great for kids in cartooning classes. The store also sells the popular markers and pens from Copic.
By this time we were all getting hungry, so we headed to Mifune, a restaurant serving big bowls of noodles or rice topped with tasty treats. The price is reasonable and the environment is cozy. We sat and ate our food and drew a bit with our new pens and paper. What a great way to end our field trip….drawing.
All in all this outing was a lot of fun and our little group agreed that we wanted to plan more events like this. So for those in the San Francisco Bay Area or those visiting, check out the message board or right here at the ol’ blog to see what exciting things are going on.
NOTE: I want to invite my cohorts to comment below on what they bought on this Field Trip and their feelings about them.
Conspirator Mari Naomi will have an open studio Sunday June 11th. Mari will be celebrating the release of her newest comic book, Estrus #4 and will be saying goodbye to her old studio.
Wednesday night there will be a Comic Book Art show at Queens Nails Annex in San Francisco’s Mission District. The event will feature some local Cartoonist Conspirators and out of towners (like Jeffrey Brown). It’s one night only and proceeds from the event go towards will go to benefit 826 Valencia’s cartooning workshops and other comics-related programming for Bay Area youth. After party at 12 Galaxies w/ Hey Willpower.
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Wed 05/17/06 (6:00 PM – 10:00 PM)
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Saturday is my favorite holiday of the year. Go to your local comic shop on Saturday and get some free comic books, just for being you…
Today if you’re in the Twin Cities you won’t want to miss MicroCon, the second largest comics convention in the area (the first biggest being FallCon, which is put on by the same folks in the Fall).
Hosted by the Midwest (formerly Minnesota) Comic Book Association, the Twin Cities conventions are no ordinary comic conventions… for one thing they offer free table space to any cartoonist who requests one. This is a rare and generous thing for a convention to offer, indeed.
As a result, you have a huge number and variety of cartoonists doing all sorts of comics… much like the Conspiracy, participating cartoonists include everything from seasoned professionals to rank amateurs… drawing every sort of comic you can imagine… manga, superheroes, funny animals, smut, and even stuff that doesn’t neatly fall into a genre.
Beyond that, the conventions always have a good vibe (cartoonists not having to hustle to make enough bread to cover a table space definitely are a part of that, along with the free food for creators, and the general friendly respect given to all creators by the members of the MNCBA). Really, it’s gotta be one of the best conventions in the country to be a creator at.
Now it’s time for winding down, and reading as many mini comics as possible before Thursday’s meeting.
Jam War was a blast… much blood and ink was spilled, but many gorgeous pages crawled from the wreckage at the end of it. I wish I could post some, but can’t until after judging is completed.
We want to print a book of all the Minneapolis Jam War losers as a mini-comic, so email me if you want to participate in this mini. My team almost certainly will be included… we had a blast losing, though.
Thanks! to Danno for organizing!
Thanks! to Shad for handling everything computery!
Thanks! to Drivas for funding and involuntarily lending us all his lovely visage!
Thanks! to BTA for the paper!
Thanks! to Jeff Rathermel and Book Arts for giving us such a great space to work in!
Thanks! to Wet Paint for providing supplies and letting us stock up at a discount!
Thanks! to Reiner and Grumpy’s for the drinks and discounts!
Thanks! to Nat Gertler for conceiving and organizing the national event!
The Lutefisk Sushi show and box got a great review from Peter Scholtes this week on page 39 of the current issue of the City Pages (dated March 29th). Unfortunately, it hasn’t made it online at this point, so you’ll probably have to seek out a print copy yourself to read it.