Overflow XXV: Catalog

     Here's the official catalog (Lulu direct link here) for the upcoming anniversary exhibition (opening this 1st Friday: August 2nd @ the Fairbanks Community Museum).



The color cover features a reboot of the "Stiff Hairy Pelts" logo that was originally done for the "Decade of Doodles" show. The back cover also sports a panel in full-color, "True Love," which is admittedly the single best example of using color in any one of my cartoons ever. All the other twenty-four panels are in black & white along with everything else inside the book, which is eighty-four pages total. This also include another fifty or so additional cartoons larded into miscellaneous articles that have appeared in print (reviews, interviews etc.) over the years so there's a fairly good sampling culled from across the archives.
     The whole process of selecting and editing the material took some time, including long revisions (dial-up at the ol' cabin meant an hour-long uploads of the 120mb files) and tweaking the images. In particular was the real pain in the ass of dealing with old-school halftones (Zip-A-Tone/LetraTone) and experimenting with Gaussian Blur filters to combat the bad moire patterns that would crop up. Good riddance!
     But that particular phase of my work is fortunately only represented with just a few initial, token panels, then it shifts into the second major (or at least discernible) stylistic shift when I waded into digital waters with a computer. That translated into the easily identifiable hallmark of vectored lines when I used Adobe Streamline and Freehand. The third and final phase would be straight Photoshop, with an equal, hand-in-glove emphasis on creating an original work with pen & ink and utilizing washes (here's a good example between those latter two ways of creating a panel).
     Another thing that became - painfully so at times - apparent was how truly bad my handwriting was: clearer focus on lettering has eventually resulted in a much better, more legible captions and dialogue balloons.
     At least in retrospect my subtle, nuanced sense of humor hasn't matured a dam bit: extreme cold, mosquitoes, beavers, bears and outhouse gags (ie: poop jokes) etc. just never grow old. Just me.