I wanted to have some cards to sell this Friday for artwalk, so I designed a set of Dino-Valentines. I designed them with the more socially challenged in mind? Like, when you want to get someone a valentine, but you don’t want it to seem like you have romantic intentions, but maybe you do in fact have romantic intentions. Designs that you can laugh off, or say, “Ha, ha, but no, really, I like you.” Or maybe I overthink things? Anyway, for the socially challenged, there is the “Deinonychus tearing apart a decorative heart” above, and “T-rex totally creeping on that couple” below.

And for those more secure in their valentine giving, we have the more sickly cute “pterodactyl with a heart shaped balloon” and “Oh hey, those dinosaur necks make a heart shape, how cute.” Anyway, happy Valentine’s Day.

Here’s a little online preview of the pieces for my show tonight!

Exploring the Deeps

Queen of the Last Dodos

Werewolf Dysmorphic Disorder

Scary Monster

Crushed by the World Toad

The Children of Wolves

Wartlaw, the Shark Wizard

Journey to the Sleeping Mountains

Fox Night

Oh man! My show opens in 2 weeks. I’ve been a busy bee/beaver/bear? prepping artwork. I’m getting to the matting and framing stage, which is never my favorite. I’m also trying to get some Christmas gift type things ready to sell at artwalk that night. Ack!

I’ll put up a preview of all the pieces the day or so before. Either on here or tumblr. Or both. For now, this is my show flyer, featuring the piece “Journey to the Sleeping Mountains.”

The show is titled “Stories about Things.” It features all sorts of illustrations that maybe should have a story behind them, but that’s not how I roll. So you can make up whatever story you want.

So, today was weird and I managed to miss when my shirt design went up on Stupidhurts.us. I’m just now getting to posting it in all my half-assed social media outlets. Also, I dunked my finger in a frying pan of hot oil.

So go check out stupidhurts.us. Buy a shirt, be it mine or someone else’s. They print in the USA with water-based inks and donate a portion of sales to microcredit loans. They’re nice folks.

“Space Pug” is a commission piece I did for a friend. It was supposed to be a simple free doodle, but I put it off for so long, I decided to make it a finished piece. The original request was: “a pug wearing a 1950s-era space hero suit (w/ helmet) shooting a back-mounted ray gun at a vicious t-rex. ”

And here’s a progress shot. Frisket is kind of a pain to apply, so I experimented by frisket-ing around the edges, and sticking bits of a poly bag (in this case, a shirt.woot bag) to the frisket. It worked out pretty darn well, though I’d avoid the portion with the paper address label in the future. Paint puddled up on it and made me pretty nervous.

“Catbeard” is one of the newest pieces I did for artwalk at Canvas Gallery. He seemed to receive a pretty positive reception. However, lots of people interpreted it as “man with cats in his beard who also happens to be wearing a wizard hat” as opposed to “awesome powerful wizard who happens to have cats in his beard.”

Anyway, I’m usually pretty bad about taking progress shots of my stuff, though they’re the kind of thing I enjoy looking at. So this time around I managed to snap a few pics in between. Here is the mighty Catbeard, from pencil drawing to final piece. Also including a blurry picture from artwalk.

Catbeard prints are available here. (Catbeard original is also still available. Email me @ katphilbinart@gmail.com)

Thumbs up!

As I am so terrible at getting posts written, and it’s been a good two months since these pictures were taken, I’ve decided I just need to throw these up. So here is one batch of my pictures from Japan, presented with minimal commentary. I’ve picked through the standard tourist fare that Nick urged me to take and chosen some of the more (hopefully) interesting ones.

These only span the first couple of days in Kyoto. And since I don’t like mixing long and tall images, this is the horizontal layout group.

View from our first hotel.

I always look forward to the Liquor Mountain.

A Fine Selection of Bears

Scary ghost riders.

Not even the biggest parfait on the menu.

While difficult to see, this is, in fact, a man holding a cat on a platter. As far I could tell, the man appeared to be a butler or assistant of some sort. He was waiting outside a cafe while the kitty’s owner was getting her caffeine fix.  This was in Gion, the “geisha” district, and definitely the first time I’ve seen something like this. Japan is full of surprises.