Dino Riders!? SDS!?

How could I forget Dino Riders? These were some of my most fondly remembered toys, and I am certain that my parents had to endure endless negotiations about how my siblings and I could obtain more of them. Here's the highest fidelity image I could find online: maybe someone else thinks this is as awesome as I do. There were cartoons, which I don't remember at all, but there are a couple comics up at this site, under toys>comic inserts. plus there are desktop backgrounds like the one below. This is probably the coolest ever.
Megacat



also I found an old image I made well over a year ago and then never used. It is a line drawing for an idea I thought would work well for SDS recruitment. It is finals week, I should not be posting.

second attempt.

tilt/shift.

there is an interesting photography process i came across called "tilt shifting." the idea is that you can keep one area in focus while blurring the rest of the image to give the illusion that the entire scene appears to be a miniature. there are some great examples online. here is my first attempt. does it look like a miniature city?

visuals.

i like the red horizontal boxes and the vertical blue boxes.

Squarepusher - Planet Gear from Warp Records on Vimeo.

purrformance art.

thursday night check it out.

i <3 house music.

this is crookers. they are a dj/production crew from italy.

its monday.

so i have had two songs stuck in my head this monday morning: love lockdown by kanye west and tribulations by lcd soundsystem. my early morning printmaking class usually entails drawing for the first half of class and then scanning/photoshop/illustrator in the comp lab for the second half...

is this even real.

on the topic of dinosaurs. this is all i have to share.

estemmenosuchus.

RUMBLEPACK IS BACK ON THE ATTACK!

from months of slumber and deep hibernation rumblepack has returned to staticalaska. I have awoken. i happy to post art and such along with megacat and moink. i will also say that this morning sir megacat bet me $500 that I wouldn't post anything up here today. considering that i have in fact made a post today i have been searching for something that costs exactly $500. i have found the perfect thing - 19 VHS tapes of "Lets Learn to Dance" with Kathy Blake. 

so not only is Megacat out $500, he's also gonna have to deal with the overwhelming jealously that will inevitably fall upon him when he sees me stepping some perfect Argentine tango. 

anyway.

dinosaurs and graffiti maggots

Sorry that this blog has been neglected for such a long time: college seems to have been taking a toll on my outside-of-college life. I have been managing to get through this semester and at this point, my graduation is inevitable, so I can relax a bit and post a bit again. Eric and I are both posting today, which carries with it an agreement that we will post a link to some info about our favorite dinosaurs. This is ridiculously childish, but I'm cool with that. I think I am pretty committed to parasaurolophus, with the whole group of armored dinosaurs coming in second. Parasaurolophus had a showy crest that also worked as a horn for making sound with.
Now that that is established, I can post the image. I drw a page of maggots a couple weeks ago, and over the last few days I have played around with photoshopping them onto the side of a building. Here's the result.

and a detail part:

I didn't really know we were rocking a purple background here at StaticAlaska lately, but I think I'm alright with it.
Eric and I both played in two shows yesterday--first with Flock and then with $2000 Puma. They went alright. There was a lot of feedback to deal with in the first one, and my keyboard wasn't working for the second one. So really, not that awesome, but getting back into the swing of performances is fun. Flock aims to have an album done for the new year, so don't hold your breath, but that is coming up. I think we're playing Harv's CD release show at Eclipse records in St Paul on January 2nd, and then releasing our own shortly after that. I'll try and keep you updated through this blog.
Megacat

Electoralism 2008

[cross-posted from moink.net]

There is little purpose in writing extensively about how the United Stations electoral system, while providing the illusion of popular influence, is little more than a tool to manufacture an air of legitimacy where none exists. It is used to continue our domination, and that of the other oppressed classes. Instead I'll just point to Ray Cunningham's very brief If voting changed anything... it would be illegal.

No matter which candidate is elected, we are in for more of the same. More capitalism. More oppression. More war. More police. More violence. The presidential and vice-presidential candidates are not necessarily inherently bad people, but they do believe in capitalism, and electing the ones from either party will result in just about the same outcome. It is time to stop imagining that our votes make a difference, and begin organizing for real democracy.





Hint: for the most wheat-pasting fun (best quality), print on 11 by 17 inch paper with a printer that supports margins of no more than 0.3 inches... 0.18 is preferred; this may mean turning on "Edge-to-Edge Printing" for HP printers, or something else for printers made by others

To Pick Up a Thing

Here's a guy picking up a thing.
I'm really into the pen work on this--I might watercolor it instead of this digital action, but here's its current state. I often lose interest in things over time, so it's kind of a now or never type of thing. I hope life's treating everyone well lately. Fall break is a battle with myself over what to put my time into--I'm rolling to the library right after this, but we'll see how well I apply myself there.

Ride til You Die: the Last Chapter (maybe)

hey team,
Sorry that it has been a while, but school has been running my life a bit, as I guess is to be expected. I made another 'ride til you die' thing, probably the last one, but I kind of went off of Andrew's remix and incorporated some environmentalism into the concept. I have been thesis-writing a lot lately, so I'm getting my learn on a lot, and have spent more time in the library this semester than ever before. Now I am going to make some music and go to a party to see some friends play in a band.
Ethanol is a dumb idea. My economist friend is writing his thesis on it, and how stupid and inefficient it is. Oh well. Here's the new image.
Megacat

An Adorned Shell is a Symptom of Bourgeois Turtle Decadence that Must be Struggled Against

[cross-posted from moink.net]

Megacat was recently approached by Kusikia to create a poster to advertise the release concert for their new album, "TURTLE WARS". Megacat got on that, and produced awesome turtles of doom. The project was then referred (sub-contracted?) to me, and I produced the text and layout, vectorized the graphics, did the colors, etc.

I have to admit that working with color is absolutely terrifying. I've only touched color in an art medium (other than as a single tone on white or black) once before, and it was a disaster. It still does not seem "just right" to me, and that's mostly because of the colors. If I was limited to black, white, and even two tones, it would be easier to comprehend. The high-contrast and simplicity of monotone work makes it extremely high-impact without the need to struggle with a color palette.

All this to say: color freaks me out, black and white are hella awesome. Hope you like the poster.

Also! Come to the show! Starting at Shakabra's (6th Ave & Oakes, in Tacoma) at 7:30pm, starring Teeath, Palo Verde, The Nextdoor Neighbors and, of course, Kusikia! Free! All ages! !!! !!!!!!!!! !

!



!!!!

The City, A Pile of Rubble

[cross-posted from moink.net]

During my brief time in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was slightly overwhelmed by the city I could once call my home. It isn’t quite that I haven’t been there in a long time. I do know how to move around the town… even got the bus system down. Sometime still felt foreign. It was the people. I returned home to find so few people that I still knew and still cared about. It was tragic, and isolating.

The only exception was when I shared a wireless access point with a new neighbor and we had a long, impromptu chat. “Annie”, sorry I didn’t call you back. I fled California for Tacoma, WA. Anyway, I did a linocut in response to what I was feeling about my life, and the city in general. I don’t have the energy to explain further, today.

Fatalistic Plant Types

I messed around with these for a while and I am thinking maybe I should have watercolored them. I guess I have grown attached to the infinite malleability of digital things. I can try things, making aesthetic decisions all I want, and not feel like I lose anything from it. Of course there are the countless hours that I've spent digitally manipulating things that could have been spent doing maybe more legitimate artistic endeavors, but what's done is done.
Most of these plants came from a sort of feeling like maybe I have been committing myself to pursuing all the wrong goals, like maybe I am a tomato plant aspiring to be an onion. Talking about myself as a plant is not meant literally, it is this college thing called metaphor. Really wild stuff. Sorry, I forget that keyboards can't express subtlety like sarcastic overtones can. But anyway, that is where "give up," and "I will never be an onion," and "no you aint awesome" came from. I think these type of shapes might make for good woodcuts later. The last one on the bottom is an attempt to counteract all the negativity in the others. Looking at them, I am actually pretty furious about how the colors turned out. It will be all gorgeous and saturated, and then saving it in a profile that is fit for the web mutes everything, so now the purple looks all whack and pastel, but it's not my fault completely, I swear.

Keep living,
megacat

Faster Pussycat! Pedal! Pedal!

I loved Megacat's letters, so I got to work applying them in a context that made them make more sense to me. "Ride" is obviously referring to a bicycle, right? Or since I love my motorcycle, it must have been meant for motorcyclists. Or is Tupac just a serious roller coaster 'ridah', in addition to being a self-admitted rapist? In the end I decided it would make the most sense to use a bicycle, plus bicycles have the least to do with Tupac. And because bicycles are awesome.

The idea of being "hardcore" about some activity or another—so serious that you would die doing it—is hilarious to me. It implies the sort of extreme attitude that tends to produce outrageous absolutist statements. If we take a different approach to interpretation, however, and rather than "I will ride my bicycle and I will stop for nothing until I expire, panting down the road", we assume the meaning is "I will always be a bicyclist because it is wonderful. When I die, I hope that I will be able to look back at a life filled with bicycling", everything sounds much more rational. The people who, in my mind, most closely embody the (latter) implied relationship with their bicycle, however, are those in the radical community, anarchists and radical leftists in general love their bikes. They see it as a symbol of independence from consumerist commodities like gasoline, as well as a symbol of self-reliance. After all, in the absence of an engine, it is the rider that provides the locomotion.

Incidentally, I couldn't get this movie title out of my head today. It looks totally bizarre. And sorry if this post seemed mildly schizophrenic.

Ride til you Die

This one might require some explanation. "Riding" is a pretty general verb, one that has a history in hip-hop music, going back in my memory to Tupac, with the track "Ambitionz az a Ridah." If he didn't start it, he popularized it.
Anyway, in Tacoma, in the UPS crowd I hang out with, I really got into the self-coined saying "no sleep til you die, work til you die" a couple semesters ago when SDS had seemingly endless projects constantly happening. It has a flow to it that really can't be communicated through this medium, so I understand if you don't get it. Regardless of why I thought that statement was good, "ride til you die" has better phonetics and can kind of apply to everything.
Obviously the top one is my favorite. I was doing some hand-lettering for this stuff, but it didn't quite work out as planned, and the font looks okay. As usual, they could use some more work, but getting them to this point has been pretty fun, and I just have more ideas than perfectionism.
Okay. Here are two goals.
1) start updating stuff that is almost entirely pen & ink based, plus maybe colors done digitally.
2) figure out how to give you my music in blog form. (This one is probably very feasible, but I'm working on feeling more comfortable with letting anyone hear it; that's probably what the blog would be best for).
The thesis and my other classes will be very demanding this semester, so I'm not making any promises, but I'll do my best.
megacat

Monocles & Moustaches

Hey everybody,
I am working on this illustration in pen turned into digital for coloring style, and it is very comics-looking. I could be perfectionistic, but that seems to be incompatible with fun, so I am opting for fun and flaws. Here is a big dude in a suit. Sorry to not be blogging so much, things are accelerating to get up to speed for school, and that I think means there won't be a whole lot of blog going down for a while. Thanks for reading!
Keep living.


love, megacat.

One of those reasons I can't sleep at night

I have made a poster this week, found below. It is a day late, but it was pretty involved, so be chill. Last week was as involved as this week, but in the end, the comic strip I had done posted looking like trash, so I took it down. Ultimate frustration, but I think this week's looks pretty good. I wanted to try one with black instead of all the jarring blue linework , but attempting this crashed illustrator twice and I took the computer's word that that it would look bad. I am working on a new style portraying people as all uniform, with really restricted and forced positions. They are more iconic stand-ins than actual people, that's the point. It's an odd and different poster/style.

About the poster:
COINTELPRO stands for "counter intelligence program" and was initiated by J. Edgar Hoover when he was director of the FBI (a position he held from May 1924 until May 1972). I have been reading a book by Jack Olsen called Last Man Standing, which is essentially a biography of (former?) black panther Geronimo Pratt. The book documents some of the actions the FBI took against the targets of the program; anyone Hoover deemed "subversive." Techniques were underhanded and deceitful, unconstitutional and unethical. Their goals included breaking up marriages, encouraging gang warfare, disintegrating social organizations, falsely labelling activists as police informers and driving leaders (namely Martin Luther King Jr) to suicide. Needless to say, all of the specific objectives were not met, but the scale of these actions was enormous and the people that were unjustly targeted suffered a lot because of what happened. I blame COINTELPRO for a lot of the trouble the United States has with race, though I understand race is a difficult issue for many societies everywhere to negotiate. COINTELPRO is one of those examples of what humans are capable of doing to each other that leaves me dumbfounded and depressed. That being said, learning about these things humanity does to itself is essential in dispelling our naivete and insuring that we are not caught off guard by its capacity for those things we'd rather not think about. It makes us better citizens.

Do you frequent your local public library? When I studied abroad, I got a real appreciation for them, because all of Oman has only one public library, which is in the state-run mosque in the capitol. Use it or lose it, you know? Anyway, I hope that you are all well.

I just want to say I am thankful for the police sometimes, but that guns just scare me generally, so cops do, too, and the FBI and CIA have a pretty frightening history. But thank you to the police that are well directed in their application of force!

Megacat


I wish I knew how to indent paragraphs in these posts. That would be awesome.

Lac

In 1958 my grandparents were spending their summer with their children in rural Idaho. The cabin they built on Lake Coeur d'Alene still stands today, and the families of their three children continue to use the cabin to this day! Early in July, 2008, I decided to try my hand at woodblock printing. I drew a contour image of the view from a front window at the cabin, divided the shapes into three colors, and then transferred the color-coded shapes onto three pieces of wood.

I didn't have the appropriate tools to be carving wood... instead I used a flat-head screwdriver and some kitchen tools. It was a struggle, but considering this is my first wood block carving, and my first multicolor print, I'm fairly proud of the result.

Party Time!

Hello readers,
I was writing some rhymes with my friend Joey today, and we discovered that we both have blogs that we actually update regularly. He is doubtlessly a better and more focused writer, but I know that's not what you're coming here for anyway, so I am not exactly worried about the competition. Here's Joey's blog. He's a smart guy who writes about Twin Cities politics, and he's who I'm reading.

The new image is one that I hoped would be accompanied by some well thought-out political commentary, but the deadline is upon me, and I guess I hope that you will be held over with some links about campaign finance and an understanding of my frustration with both presidential candidates' plans if they are elected. I think I'm partial to some sort of IRV alternative to our current situation. Here's a goofy poster.



Good luck to everybody representing down at Tacoma's port, regardless of intimidation tactics and abuse from the police, I hope you all do alright and that nobody is injured.
Charlie

The Senior Senator from Alaska

Hello, world. I'm Andrew, and have joined the Staticalaska blog. Don't ask me what that's going to mean, though. And speaking of Alaska, I hear Mr. "The Internet is a series of tubes" got pwned by the federal government. I wonder if they've finally decided he's no longer useful?

In other news, I have been hard at work in sunny California experimenting with printmaking, using rubber, linoleum and woods. In the spirit of the anti-G8 actions, resistance to war from within the military, as well as the upcoming RNC/DNC actions, included are some prints I did almost a month ago.

a brief thing.

Hey Everyone,
I am back in Minnesota on Monday, I played around with images much of the day (unsuccessfully), but I have decided I can't get anything looking better than this ink sketch I did early in the week. Hopefully there will be something elaborate next week. I love that you can kind of see the texture in the shadow I got overly excited about with a brush and ink.
Charlie

Ideas! Hit me with them!

I have realized that this site might often come off as horrible self-promotion, which is not the intention. The thing is that I often want to play with script or illustrating or layout stuff, and my default subject matter often has to do with Flock (this week) or staticalaska itself (last week). So, anyway, I was thinking that I could do design for people in exchange for actually having something printed, or because we are friends, or for any other number of reasons. This blog is mostly an outlet for experiments with visual art stuff, but I would happily dedicate myself to some sort of project somebody wants help or input or collaboration on. I will design a poster for you if you'd like!
Okay, that started as an attempt to justify so much stuff on the site that seems like self-promotion, but ended up sounding like some pursuit of work. Sorry on that.
Anyway, this week I have been playing with pen and ink, and leafy lettering. Here is my first attempt at this sort of thing. I think the coloring on the letters might develop more in the future, but I guess we'll see.
Peace!




Oh, the background is a free texture shared from Lost and Taken, a key hookup for any of you photoshoppers.

random banners

Hey all,
Music has been more of a focus for me lately than visual art stuff, but I played with some typography and banner layout stuff today. My learning curve I think has slowed down for the most part and now instead of it being entirely new concepts, illustrator has turned into establishing habits for efficiency. This means that it is sort of frustrating, but more and more concepts that I can think of I can actually execute now. It is kind of coming up with an on-the-fly order of operations for each step in an idea.
I'd like to work some on the site, so maybe eventually I will figure out how to design it more thoroughly. One of these banners might help serve in that capacity. Sorry about the formatting, it is getting late, and I made a couple mistakes in the order I did things, so I was already getting sort of tired.
I think I'm most excited about the one on the top right, because it is not flashy effects at all, and came more from experimenting than the others did.
stay positive,
Charlie

You Can Never Go Home

There are a couple images here. They are the same thing, but I wanted to do a couple versions--what started as initially just doing a color remix ended up being a change in background, too, as the grid was hard to change, and I didn't want a solid color in the background. The darker fill in the type didn't stand well on a white ground, so the revamp got major. They are both supposed to fit on letter-sized paper in case somehow my posting this on the internet ends up with one of these hitting a printer.
I can't get my scanner (a gift from Andrew) to cooperate with my computer, but I don't know what more to do. Maybe later I will be able to post more pen & ink style stuff. For now I will keep my sketchbook to myself.
I will be better at responding to comments on here, from now on, I got blogspot emailing me about them (I think).
I hope this finds you well,
Charlie

Pretty much a Ware-house

What up fam,
It's getting a bit late here in Tacoma, but I wanted to post this thing up before bedtime (which is as soon as possible). Converting this one to GIF format for the web changed the colors again, but for this image I was not very particular about them to begin with, so I didn't freak out about it this time. This image me hurriedly sort of aiming for Chris Ware style. He's so good! Martin, thank you for his stunning book.
The new job is cool, the youth are cool, no homework is cool, so life is pretty good lately, drawing and listening to TED lectures, rapping and making beats, researching earth science online so I can help teach. Mom, I am totally going to get your birthday present in the mail this week (I swear).
Charlie

corn in colors

I have been working on coloring drawings in Photoshop, and despite the fact that the color profiles are the same between my different adobe programs, taking it from doing type layout in Illustrator to photoshop annihilates the colors. Then I save it for the web, as a GIF, which brings imageready into the mix, which twists the colors around again. So, whatever, here's a poster with different-than-originally-planned colors.


And here is a drawing of some men in hats
(If I don't post next weekend it is because my computer is contemplating breaking again)

not teeth. (larger than teeth)

A comic! They are not teeth (which is feedback that I have gotten from a few people I've showed this to so far), they are a country and an international organization. This is pretty much goes out to the IPE majors out there.
Enjoy!

A lot of this comic is based on an article by Reed Lindsay from the Nation that came out on June 2nd. Here's a link, but I guess you only get to look at the start of the article if you don't subscribe. I read it at my local library. The article is called "Haiti on the Death Plan," the 'Death Plan' being many Haitians' name for the government's liberal economic policy.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080602/lindsay
Here are a few highlights from the article:

• More than 4.5 million Haitians spend more than half their income on food, and there has been rioting and strong public response to the increase in food prices over the last year.(p 22)
• Haiti is one of the most economically liberal countries in Latin America. (p 24)
• Their newly elected president has promised more food aid and has gotten rice prices to drop, but does not seem to plan on changing the economic policy of keeping inflation low no matter what. (p 24)

Spring

Hey team,
I have been moving and flying and experiencing the twin cities a lot lately, a lot of transitioning, and in the morning I am driving with my father to visit his parents. I love spending time with family, and having more time to have politically charged arguments for hours on end in a car never hurt a relationship, right? I am looking forward to it, then after Illinois we drive back and I head up to Ely, Minnesota for a visit. Then back to Tacoma via airplane, to start my job a couple days later.
Well I have to get up in less than seven hours and I want a snack, oral hygiene, then sleeping, so I got to post these now. I am not actually very happy with this poster (it is what scribbling on a computer looks like), and the desktop things don't line up perfectly, but I am learning and I figure if I waited for anything I was totally happy with, I would never post anything. The second two images are desktops. The middle image is the first tiling sort of thing I have tried to make with any level of complexity, and the last image is a picture of my desktop so you don't have to download it to see it in action. Once I get back to Tacoma and harness the power of the scanner Andrew gave me, expect a lot more ink and less digital: I have been getting sick of illustrator since I started trying to enter logo design contests online. And no, you will never see my submissions because I despise them. At least now I know I probably won't ever get a job doing this.
Peace,
Charlie

Newness

My computer is fixed! Andrew is an incredible and awesome and skilled dude! I have been working on a lot of new things; here are a few of them:

I've got some ink stuff I'll be posting pretty soon, and I think my work in Illustrator is starting to pan out. I am changing houses for a few days now, so there will be no posts for a bit.
Hopefully, posts will be coming a lot more often now that I'm not taking classes.
Charlie