Tonight’s Illustrator how-to: drawing symmetrically. Draw a big rectangle, centered where you want the center of rotation to be. Far bigger than you anticipate ever drawing in. Like ‘3x as wide as the entire canvas’ big. Give it no stroke and no fill; it’ll become invisible when it’s not selected. Layers panel: click on the […]

I felt weird drawing my animal-person self for my birthday and not drawing my ex-with-benefits for his birthday, which is two days before mine. He came over yesterday, and we went out to dinner at Liam’s, partially on my mom - she’d sent me some money and said “go have a nice dinner with Nick”. After […]

It occurs to me that not a single person who has worked on popularizing Austin Osman Spare’s methods of “sigil magic” has been, like, actually an artist. So everyone draws these little things that chase the aesthetics of Goetic demon seals. Occasionally people will look at a Vodun veve for inspiration. But whatever they do, […]

At the beginning of the month, this popped into my head. I did a quick doodle and posted it, asking if I should finish it; the responses were unanimously “yes”. Illustrator, 4.5h, about one of which was making those buttons by tracing sigils from Denning & Phillips’ Planetary Magick, which I’ve been working with lately. […]

The first piece from Operation Take Post-Its Off My Monitor Bezel. I was asked to design a few members of an imaginary warez group. The strange shadows of Lord NULL and Ossifrage are, of course, their CYBERSPACE AVATARS. Vexations does not have one; her online manifestation is eerie drones and sourceless whispers.

I just got a note from the Adobe beta program about a new build of Illustrator 24.x, so I guess maybe it’s finally time to move from 22.x (CC2018) to 23.x (CC2019). Herein are my notes about the new features.  

  I went to the Hey We Fucking Value Funding Science march the other weekend. This is one of the slogans/chants going around it.   And here’s a PDF if you wanna print it.

Woo. I finally got around to hacking up some keyboard shortcuts to change stroke weights in Illustrator. It is a horrible mess involving having Quicksilver trigger an Applescript when I hit command-option-control-[/] but it works - I mash the modifiers and hit [, and the size of my stroke decreases by 25%; modifier-mash plus ] […]

So Rainfurrest has this sketchbook they want the GOHs to draw things in. I found about this on like the last day of the 2014 con; it ended up sitting in my bag for a half a year before I took it out and started doing a piece I intended to do in marker. But […]

Earlier this year, A.C. Sobrero asked me to do a cover for the third book in their series, “The Luminous Fleet”. We ended up tossing a lot of email back and forth discussing the themes of the story, what kind of book covers we liked, and playing with ideas. Ultimately I wound up illustrating a scene […]