Mister Reusch's Sketchbooks

Sketchbook 58, June 2010 - March 2011

2011-03-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

This sketchbook marked a time of big change. Devilicia & I realized by early July we needed a break from eachother & I moved a lot of my stuff to a basement apartment a 1/2 hour's bike ride away. My cellphone didn't work there, it was no-dogs-allowed, & I was internet-less, but I exercised a lot, ate better, and lost a buncha weight. It was a temporary place to sleep while we figured out whether to stay together or split up after 7 years. I kept my studio in Devilicia's apartment and worked on jobs there on weekdays (and played with the dogs) while she was at work. It was a pretty good arrangement during a tough time. I bought a car & hung out in my hometown with old friends a lot, too. We went to the beach more in 2 months than I'd been in years. Swimming, biking, beach pizza, and fireworks made the end of the summer pretty great.

Sketches for a big tattoo I'd been thinking about, with me in my reaper costume hugging my beloved Boston Terriers, Frankensteiny & Mr. Giles.

I worked on lots of Halloween paintings for an October show at Space 242, as well as Halloween event posters.

Detail sketches of a series still in progress:

unfinished painting in progress:

This old, unfinished "Birth of Venus" canvas

got totally re-painted

and is for sale in my Etsy shop here
(signed prints for sale, too)

random burlesque doodle

and the final painting
for sale in my Etsy shop and as a signed print

Black Cat Burlesque put on a big Spookshow at the Somerville Theatre, sponsored by Something Weird Video; Mike Vraney, Lisa Petrucci, and Frank Henenlotter flew out to film the show for an upcoming SWV documentary, and I got to meet Ghoul-a-Go-Go's Creighton!

final version, available in my Etsy shop here:

Sketches for the Coolidge Corner Theatre's Annual Halloween Horror Movie Marathon:

as an homage to this amazing poster:

final version, available in my Etsy shop:

J. Cannibal requested an image of him breaking free of an x-shaped crucifixion for his 10th Feast of Flesh zombie night poster:

available in my Etsy shop:

Sketches for what was originally a Halloween night tattoo event, but got bumped to November:

and the final version:

Once the Black Cat Burlesque Spookshow was over, Devilicia and I split up amicably, realizing we were a lot happier being apart. We agreed to share custody of the dogs, and I moved to a new apartment in my hometown and started dating Sheila, my good friend of 22 years. Despite my new car dying and needing another engine/ the stress of moving/ Sheila getting laid off and helping her move to a more affordable apartment/ moving for the 3rd time in 6 months, from my new apartment into Sheila's new pad/ Sheila's dad's heart surgery/ her elderly dog Coach passing away/ Giles's eye-removal surgery/ breaking my drawing hand in a stupid accident/ and Frank's 2 surgeries....I have seriously never been happier. Life with Sheila is hilarious and wicked fun, every day! I used the eyedropper tool and white gouache to paint her and Coach while at school:

I posed as Edgar Allan Poe for a 2-hour drawing session @ MassArt in my huge Poe mask, and doodled a quick flyer in my sketchbook to promote it:

quick sketchbook demos for using the eyedropper tool with white gouache for my Media Techniques class:

quick sketchbook acrylics demo for my Media Techniques class:

My friend Sarah modelled in metallic paint for the class 3 times over the semester:

random Lon Chaney as the Phantom watercolor doodles from my head:

sketches for the Mass Market 7 web-banner and poster:

I was commissioned to do a new version of the "Snow Angel" from a late 90s gigposter:

final version, available in my Etsy shop here:

more roughs and digital comps for commissioned paintings:

sketch & painting in progress:

In January 2011 I started teaching a new elective called Illustrative Masks, and students wear their finished projects as life drawing models:

I broke my drawing hand in January, so this 1st batch of 10-minute pose sketches were done with my left hand:

the cast was off by the time I drew these with my right hand:

Lastly, my old MassArt friend Tony Leone hired me for a book project requiring between 200-300 illustrations. These are some of the very early sketches in a different style than the direction I'll be using for the finals:

Sketchbook 57, March 2010 - June 2010

2010-05-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

pencil/ink/digital sketch for new El Pelon painting:

life drawings from this semester's Open Drawing sessions @ MassArt:

preliminary sketches and a digital color study for an upcoming book about tattoo art:

digital color studies for pet portraits:

sketches and photos for acrylic paintings in progress:
"Summer":

French Bulldog Rescue painting:

"Baroness Von Blitzen" for the upcoming "Good VS EEEEVIL" superhero/ supervillain smackdown show @ Space 242:

she's driving a stormcloud that shoots lightning at her enemies:

"La Muerta" (though after reading about "Lord Death Man" in the amazing Bat-Manga book, I might change her name to something better, like "Mega Corpse Woman", or "Ultra Cadaver-Maker Lady" or something:

sketches for the Mass Market 6 poster:

my model, Coraline:

random:
Frankensteiny sleeping

Mr. Giles rolling in the dirt:

sketch for the 2010 Monster Drawing sessions:

Peggy Sue drawn from memory:

drawn from my head, I totally screwed up the foot:

pencil, ink, and digital sketch for a super-fun poster job:

Sketchbook 56, December 2009 - February 2010

2010-01-04T20:43:00.000-08:00

pencil, india ink, and digital sketches for a commission of a friend's daughter with her gigantic guinea pig and deceased hamster, scaring off the man-sized fox she thinks lives under her driveway:

ink & digital color sketches for portrait of Violet, Jason & Eliza Zucco's Boston Terrier:

ink & digital color sketches for 3 large portrait commissions:

(color streaks zooming around to imply they're chasing eachother)

the finishes are shown on my Dog Art blog

sketches for SPACE 242's Robot-themed show:

the finished 16" x 20":

The original painting is for sale in my Etsy shop and signed digital prints are also available

another 16" x 20" in progress:

20" x 16" "Sundae-Bot" in progress:

finish:

The original painting is for sale in my Etsy shop and signed digital prints are also available

demo I did for my Black & White Illustration night class for using the eyedropper tool with washes, blotting, & white gouache (they requested Abe):

random:

2 sketches of my old friend Suzanne's pug Emma for a commissioned painting (ink with digital color):

more sketches for my "Year of the Dead" project:

sneak-peek @ a finish-in-progress:

sketches for 2 illustrations appearing in Beatdom issue # 6 for a story written by an old friend, Edaurdo Jones:

Sketchbook 55, August 2009 - December 2009

2009-08-16T10:07:00.001-07:00

I've been doing way more swimming than drawing this month, but here are a few new thingies from #55.
new Boston Terrier ink painting of my little Frankenstein (Mr. Giles designs are in the works!):

done specifically to make new art pints on my Etsy store:

and just released as t-shirts, hoodies and more on my new CafePress store

New black Pug ink painting:

and print version now on Etsy

up on CafePress too!

A few years ago I designed a super curvy "Birth of Venus" tattoo, and I started thinking it might make a cool 16" x 20" full-color acrylic painting and digital print. New rough sketch:

and the underpainting (inspired by the "On the Small Easel This Week" sneak peeks Ashley Wood posts on his blog)

More ink paintings for new dog t-shirts and hoodies:

and final:

now for sale on my Etsy shop

doodle for a new illustration:

first stab at the new Feast of Flesh 9 poster, 1/2 ink and brush, 1/2 digital:

I was roughing out the idea of showing 9 kinda graphic zombies moving in, but J. Cannibal and I agreed that since this is the 1st ever Feast scheduled for October, there should be way more of a Halloween vibe. I imagined trick-or-treaters dropping their buckets of candy and flashlights when they realized the zombie lurching down the sidewalk at them is FOR REALS:

the drawing still needs a ton of tightening up, more leaves blowing around, candy all over the ground, etc., but I added fast photoshop colors and dropped it into my comp just to see how it'd look:

another sketch with J. Cannibal as the headless horseman was picked:

the finish:

$20 signed posters are for sale on my Etsy store

I'm always drawing my monkeys when I'm not with them

squirrel monkey done for an eyedropper tool & white gouache demo in my Media Techniques morning class:

and a bat demo for my afternoon class (I ended up taping a 2nd page on so I could finish his wing):

sketches for a new humongous Edgar Allan Poe mask, soon to appear in Black Cat Burlesque performances:

photo of the finished mask:

morning class quick demo for using acrylics:

afternoon class acrylic demo of Mr. Giles, underlit (which was tough to visualize since his face is so flat):

sketches for a commissioned portrait of a client's wife and 2 dogs (pen, ink, Photoshop):

Poe poster sketches (ballpoint pen, Photoshop):

$20 posters for sale on my Etsy store

new Autumn painting in progress for French Bulldog Rescue Network fundraiser:

I bought 3 dozen donuts, and had both sections of my Media Tecniques class pick one they wanted to paint with gouache, then eat. These were my 2 demos:

sketch of Miss Southern Confort and Dame Cuchifrita of Brown Girls Burlesque for a Dr. Sketchy's poster:

the models:

random:

practicing with ink on top of acrylics on top of ink:

in-class watercolor demo of Frank the Tank, drawn from memory:

me when I was little, hiding from the ghost in my closet, with my big toe stuck in the hole in my feety pjs:

I saw this man on Longwood Ave. a couple months ago and thought his jacket was cooool:

sketches and digital color study for new Krampus painting in progress:

Sketchbook 54, May 2009 - July 2009

2009-07-31T21:40:00.000-07:00

I finally caught up to the present with this sketchbook archive! whew. It feels very, very cool to have 20 years' worth of sketchbook art up here! Coffee definitely helped me go through the 54 100-page books, scan images, re-size/ watermark/ upload/ them, and add notes over the last 2 years I was working on this. By the way, the excellent coffee sticker on the cover of this sketchbook is by the amazing Tom P. of Standard Design. You too can own this sweet image as a poster and a sticker!

random doodleheads on the Mass Art end-of-semester review form:

stuff I drew on the train back and forth to school:

rough sketches and digital color studies for illustrations in progress:

my friends Dottie Lux and Val Killmore are hard at work on a new B-movie called FEED about a voluptuous celebrity chef hiding a secret life as a cannibal. They asked me for help with the poster for a fundraiser to help them meet production costs.
sketches I whipped up overnight for a simple, strong graphic of a woman gnawing on "steak":

final version with text added by Dottie:

For Devilicia's birthday, she asked me to paint her as Snow White in the traditional costume ("but with way more boob"), trying to hide from the evil queen with the help of our backyard regulars "Action" and "Jackson", the 2 nuthatches, plus the squirrels, chickadees, grackles, mourning doves, titmice, Agatha the opossum, and our green-cheeked conure Coraline as her personal guide.
sketches/ digital color studies:

final art:

And speaking of Coraline, we've been trying to teach her to whistle the intro to Slayer's "Raining Blood" but so far, no luck. Devilicia went on a trip in June so I started painting Coraline in my sketchbook actually singing the lyrics. I emailed the paintings to Devilicia line by line as funny letters from home, but still have 1/2 the song to go (and Devilicia's been back for over a month):

hopefully I'll get the rest of the song finished up in Sketchbook #55.

1970s Black Sabbath doodle:

1986 Metallica:

demo I did for my summer night class about working with the eyedropper tool, ink wash, blotting, and white gouache:

another in-class demo (a Muppet self-portrait), this time for working with acrylics:

rough sketches for close-up portraits of the 4 seasons (I screwed up Autumn, but will keep going with Winter, Spring, and Summer):

Mr. Giles in the backyard:

more random doodles:

Sketchbook 53, December 2008 - April 2009

2009-07-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

I started off this sketchbook copying down the hilarious subject lines of spam emails I'd been getting:
"Your big proud friend in the pants will overshadow the Empire State Building"
"It's better to be gigantic than to be romantic"
"Do you want to feel like a fish in the river at diplomatic meetings?"
"You can kick other men with your stick!"
"It will be impossible not to notice the outstanding bulge inside your pants. Enter bravely!"
"Would you give up your lung just to be hung?"
"With a big friend in underwear you can go far, you can be a bright & shining star. Listen more than twice that your tool is nice! Enter bravely!"

sketches for a bull terrier painting I surprised my friends Irena and John Roman with:

I listed prints of the final painting on my Etsy store here

I drew my little monkeys on the train ride to MassArt, and feel like I'm finally able to draw Mr. Giles from memory and have it really look like him. Frank and Giles have similar markings, but really different eyes and expressions and personalities. Mr. Giles had a tough January with emergency surgery and a couple weeks of convalescence, right around his birthday, too...the vet gave us a whole test tube of large, calcium-based stones he removed from Giles' bladder. But this 9-year-old Hurricane Katrina refugee dog is one tough cookie. He's running around and acting like his crazy old self again.
Last year Devilicia and I went to see a friend give a poetry reading, and he was really good. Sitting there silently listening to some of the other readers was excruciatingly painful though. Instead of jumping up and screaming and running out of the claustrophobic room, I tried to tune everything out and just drew tiny pictures on a receipt Devilicia slipped me:

Mr. Giles's favorite outdoor activity is spinning in endless circles on his heiny, staring at the sky, before flopping over on his side and rolling in the dirt til he's totally brown and gray:

I did the above picture in my sketchbook as a demo for my Black & White Illustration class. We were talking about making pictures with the eyedropper tool, white gouache, and blotting with cheap paper towels. I'd been thinking about the Autumn day Devilicia shot photos of me with Frankensteiny and Mr. Giles back in Rhode Island:

more dog doodles of Mr. Giles, drawn from memory:

and Frankensteiny, from memory:

more stuff from the Open Drawing sessions at MassArt:

poster sketch and color study for my friend J. Cannibal's Feast of Flesh 8 zombie event:

13" x 19" signed posters are available on my Etsy store here

Devilicia and I came up with a funny new zombie act for this show. Video of the act is online here and here, and tons of photos are here

sketches for the mask I built for the act:

sketches for a birthday surprise painting commissioned by my old MassArt friend Jef Taylor for his wife Alexis of their 2 pitbulls, Maggie and Charlie, and their Boston Terrier, Jim:

digital color study:

sketch for a memorial portrait I painted for a friend:

the final is shown here

superpower I REALLY wish I had:

rough sketches for new paintings in progress:

random:

Sketchbook 52, October 2008 - December 2008

2009-06-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

I really blew through this one fast, probably because I'd volunteered to supervise the Open Drawing program at Mass Art, a 2-hour block on Wednesdays of free life drawing sessions open to all students and faculty. It made me realize how rusty my observational drawing skills have become:

if the models are running late (or don't show up at all), we all take turns doing 5-minute poses with props from the closet:

3 in-class demos I painted in my Media Techniques class for doing fast acrylic brushstrokes over your pencil lines with a single color, then washing the same, thinned out color over the whole picture, then adding a few more related colors over the underpainting. Each one took between 15-20 minutes:

Frankensteiny:

more doodles of my dogs:

sketches for the Ereshkigal and Pazuzu Painting I whipped up for Space 242's Halloween group show, inspired by an act that we perform as Black Cat Burlesque.

Photos and final painting are here

traditional/ digital sketches and color study for the Burning Embers book cover I was hired to do by author Charlie Close:

sketches for a surprise anniversary painting commissioned by horror fan Dennis Fesenmyer:

sketches for a commissioned portrait of Rocco the French Bulldog:

poster sketches for the MassArt Black & White Illustration book call for submissions:

sketches and color study for my 2008 Holiday Yeti postcard I hate myself for not finishing in time:

character in a project I'm working on:

random:

Sketchbook 51, June 2008 - September 2008

2009-05-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

quick paintings of Devilicia from my head:

sketches for my friends' Mary Widow and J. Cannibal's wedding invitation painting (pencil, ink, & Photoshop):

sketches for a commissioned wedding present (pencil, ink, & Photoshop):

sketches for J. Cannibal's Feast of Flesh poster:

quick demo of the eyedropper tool and white gouache for the summer class I taught:

sketches for "School's out FOREVER", a painting I did for the "Pop Euphoria" show I was part of; It was tough deciding what to paint for this show (Batman? Darth Vader? Godzilla? Wonder Woman?) but I went with 5th grade versions of me, my friend Tom Pappalardo of Standard Design, and my big sister Mary celebrating Godzilla incinerating the school we all went to.:

Photoshop color study:

the final:

Thanks again to AMAZING illustrator Veronica Hebard for inviting me to be part of the December 2008 "Pop Euphoria" charity art show to benefit Toys for Tots.

signed prints are available on my Etsy store

sketches for a commissioned portrait of Bruce and Pinot:

editorial sketches:

sketches for a revised "Devil, Dog, and Death" painting:

random doodles:

Mr. Giles in the backyard:

and as a demo for the fall Black & White Illustration class:

Fall 2008 I began overseeing the Open Drawing program at Mass Art on Wednesdays, where models pose for 2 hours in drawing sessions open to the whole school:

Sketchbook 50, November 2007 - June 2008

2009-05-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

sketches for a big commissioned portrait of my friends, Liz and Forrest Frazier of Salem, MA, and their cat Spooky:

Photoshop color study:

sketch for the "Breast Defense" painting did on the plaster cast of Devilcia.

photos of the process and finish, and info:

Breast Defense

Devilicia from Black Cat Burlesque took part in the plaster casting of performers at the 2006 Exotic World Festival in Las Vegas. The casts are then shipped to artists to customize, then shipped to auctions run by Breast Defense where all proceeds go to benefit breast cancer research.
For Devilicia's cast I painted a little devil holding balloons with the BCB logo on them.
Painting a thick coat of Gesso:

Transfer of the linework with acrylic:

Some of the underpainting:

Final product:

Info copied from the Breast Defense myspace page:
Breast Defense: Glamour Girls For Early Detection is a partnership between The Burlesque Hall of Fame and Keep A Breast, uniting top artists, performers and pinup models to raise awareness for breast cancer prevention and treatment.

Casting for Breast Defense began in June 2007, during Exotic World Weekend, the longest-running event of its kind and the world's premier gathering of burlesque performers and enthusiasts. From June 8-10, over 40 women had their 'assets' immortalized for the cause--including such legendary "vintage vixens" as Tempest Storm, Tura Satana, BC survivor Kitten Natividad, Dixie Evans and many of today's top neo-burlesque starlets, inlcuding Miss Exotic Worlds Immodesty Blaize (2007), Julie Atlas Muz (2006), Michelle L'amour (2005), Erochica Bamboo (2003) and Stephanie Blake (1997 & 1998).

Following the casting, each mold was given to a different artist to customize--with the first round of finished casts set to debut at Florida's Casa Monica Hotel in October 2007, as part of The Gallery at Screen Arts contribution to a citywide art walk for breast cancer honoring national Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

In June 2008, the entire collection will be displayed in Downtown Las Vegas, as part of the city's First Friday Exhibition Series. Both exhibitions will be open to the public, and all casts will be auctioned online at www.keep-a-breast.org, with proceeds split between the Burlesque Hall of Fame and Keep A Breast's youth education programs.

Among the many amazing artists participating in this project include: Pilar Alvarez, Attaboy, AV Phibes, Shawn Barber, Gary Baseman, Megan Besmirched, Tim Biskup, Chase, Sas Christian, Molly Crabapple, Joshua Ellingson, Sarah Emerson, Scott Ewalt, PJ Fidler, Mark George, Mike Giant, Kim Gordon, Derek Hess, Greg Hildebrandt, Ronnie Land, Charlene Lanzel, Tonya Lee, George Long, Elizabeth McGrath, Jerry Misko, Mark Mothersbaugh, Emma Mount, Krysztof Nemeth, Mitch O'Connell, Annie Owens, Joshua Petker, Iggy Pop, Paul Pope, Sara Ray, Mister Reusch, Tony Rodrigues, KRK Ryden, Laura Satana, Gabriel Shaffer, Nicole Steen, Kat von D, Casey Weldon, and more.

About Keep A Breast: The Keep A Breast Foundation™ is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization. Our mission is to help eradicate breast cancer by exposing young people to methods of prevention, early detection and support. Through art events, educational programs and fundraising efforts, we seek to increase breast cancer awareness among young people so they are better equipped to make choices and develop habits that will benefit their long-term health and well-being.

About the Burlesque Hall of Fame:The Burlesque Hall of Fame™ is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization. Our mission is to inspire, educate and entertain the public, fostering an appreciation for and understanding of the unique history and heritage of vintage Burlesque--including but not limited to the art, artifacts and personal histories of its biggest names and brightest stars.

sketches for the Feast of Flesh 6 poster, 1/2 traditional, 1/2 digital:

the final:

One memorable Drink And Draw sketchbook night at Charlie's Kitchen, a bunch of us kept the jukebox playing a steady stream of Motorhead, old Sabbath, old Metallica, Slayer, Misfits, AC/ DC, and Iron Maiden. I ended up doodling Bruce Dickinson on the Powerslave tour:

early 80s Ozzy:

old Slayer:

good ol Cliff Burton:

and Lemmy

in-class demo I did, where students had to copy a photo realistically, but add the rest of the picture from their imagination. I drew the dachshund puppies from a photo:

in-class demo I did for working with the eyedropper tool and white gouache:

another in-class sketch for a simple image showing strong motion, inspired by "JAWS 2":

Devilicia as a Muppet:

Mr. Giles:

editorial sketches for the Phoenix:

Fantagraphics books sponsored the SUPERTRASH FEST at the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon, a marathon of trashy movies with live burlesque and an artshow in February 2008. Artists were invited to come up with their own movie poster renditions for their favorite trashy movies, and the posters were hung in the theater. The best ones will be printed in a collection by Fantagraphics.

This is one of my entries: Fulci's "ZOMBI 2" where a topless scuba diver in a g-string has to fight off a live shark, then a zombie walking across the bottom of the ocean, before the shark and zombie bite pieces off eachother. The first time I saw this scene my jaw hit the floor at the increasing insanity:

Sketch:

My 2nd entry was for "NUDE FOR SATAN". I've got to admit I thought the movie was really awful, but the title alone is hilarious and awesome.

sketch:

The devil girl has black horizontal slits for pupils, like a goat. I wanted to make something really eye-catching and kind of scary and fun and ridiculous at the same time. Like if Slayer put out an album of music for 60s go-go dancers, this would be the cover.

The evil pope skeleton next to the floating Devil is supposed to be the False Prophet. (8 years of Catholic school and they never told us about the Unholy Trinity of the Devil, The Anti-Christ or the False Prophet. Instead, I found out about these guys in junior high watching the Omen movies on channel 38's "Movie Loft" where every October they'd show unedited horror movies every night.)

"Save the Date" sketches I made for my friends in Black Cat Burlesque, J. Cannibal and Mary Widow, for their October 2008 wedding:

sketch of Sachi and Manju for a painting commissioned by Harmonix CEO, Alex Rigopulos:

Sketchbook 49, June 2007 - November 2007

2009-05-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

(the owl's from a poster that got damaged one of the squillion times I moved)

Busy busy busy time. I got hired by Jason Kendall (of the Amazing Crowns) at Harmonix to create 20 illustrations for the first edition of Rock Band. These were my roughs:

Tak Toyoshima @ the Weekly Dig hired me to make a cover for their "Good Bostonians" issue. At first he asked for 2 people with the text going across their t-shirts, but I sold him on a parade float pulled by Boston Terriers ( my own Frankensteiny, Mr. Giles, and Frank's buddy Moka):

ideas for J. Cannibal's site:

Baron Shivers of So-Cal's infamous surf monsters, the Ghastly Ones, got in contact about putting on a show with Black Cat Burlesque for the Ghastly's first ever East Coast tour. Poster ideas:

and the finish:

sketches for the monster mask I built for Lux/ Killmore's "Attack of the Coney Island Killer Crawfish" movie:

and the final product on the back porch:

and on location at Coney Island (photo by Stacie Joy):

sketch of Dottie Lux and Val Killmore's beautiful bulldog, Peggy Sue:

and the finish:

existing spooky art I re-worked a bit for a possible licensing deal:

poster sketches for the 2nd Boston Dr. Sketchy's that Devilicia and I posed at (as Katrina von Tassel-Twirler & the Headless Horseman:

finish:

photos are here

editorial sketches:

evolution of the bank robber:

demo I did in class for using the eyedropper tool and white gouache
(Frank goes nuts when Devilicia comes home every day, and Mr. Giles gets mad at Frank for being hyper, and then they turn on eachother):

I got hired to paint a wedding reception----I shot a couple hundred photos and did sketches right there, then did comps and the actual painting at home afterwards:

the bride and groom hired me to paint their parents' homes, too, as surprise gifts. sketches and Photoshop color studies:

random:

Sketchbook 48, May 2007 - June 2007

2009-05-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

Another big mish-mash of new and old stuff collaged together.

Fast & dirty color studies for my "Year of the Dead" painting series:

t-shirt design stuff:

Feast of Flesh 5 poster girl sketch:

Project Bread, the group that organizes Boston's annual 20-mile Walk For Hunger fundraiser, had a contest for holiday card designs. I came up with these and was really bummed none of my designs were picked (especially after I saw the winning illustrations. oh well.)

my other finished submissions:

sketches for Boston Buddies:

and French Bulldog Rescue Network:

Devilicia doing computer stuff:

Me as a muppet:

Old stuff:

Old Phoenix illos:

unfinished dry-brush experiment for an old MassArt portrait of Tim Burton:

"R" is for "Rotten Resurrection Man":

Cliff Burton:

1989 spot illo I did for my high school newspaper for an article about Haverhill's homeless:

Sketchbook 47, February 2007 - May 2007

2009-05-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

This one's another 100 lb. monster loaded with then-current drawings and older loose stuff I scotch-taped in. I was teaching my 3rd semester of Black & White illustration at Mass Art, and scored a 3-painting assignment with StrideRite days before I came down with awful kidney stones. I didn't tell the design staff for fear of losing the job, but I spent about a week rolled up in a ball. 3 trips to the Emergency room, constant throwing up from pain, it was a nightmare. I kept up with the sketch deadlines though:

(Photoshop color added to pencil roughs)

quick poses by Devilicia @ the first Boston "Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School Cabaret Life Drawing" sessions :

photos from the event are here and here :

J. Cannibal and I decided that the first bunch of zombie heads on the Feast Of Flesh posters would get progressively more and more decayed as the series continued. This guy ended up on the posters for FoF3 in Boston and FoF4 in NYC:

fast Photoshop color study:

random warm-up doodles:

sketches for my "Year of the Dead" series:

old stuff (some from my days as a Mass Art student) scotch-taped in, some unfinished:

Sketchbook 46, November 2006 - February 2007

2009-05-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

another 11" x 14", this time with nothing old scotch-taped in. I was in my second semester of teaching illustration at Mass Art, and painting way more commissions for clients than spending time on editorial and poster jobs.
The following all started traditionally, with Photoshop color added to some.

Davidson:

Cello, another painting commissioned by Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulous for "PaRappa the Rapper" creator, Masaya Matsuura:

Abby and Gunther:

One woman started the commission process, but never responded again after I submitted sketches of her dog, Tessa. Because of her, I changed my policies: NO sketches until a deposit of 1/2 the agreed upon fee is paid. This would've been fun, too: a Frenchie drinking absinthe at a Parisian cafe

My landlord commissioned a painting of his son and German Shepherd:

my friend Jessie Mae's nephews:

Boston artist/ musician/ superstar Dan McCarthy commissioned a portrait of his Boston Terrier, James, as a Christmas gift for his girlfriend. This was the sketch:

Check out his website for some amazing work.

sketches for a Vampirella commission:

more "Year of the Dead" sketches:

my old housemate at a "Drink & Draw" session:

my friend Aliza Shapiro of Truth Serum organized the first Boston incarnation of illustrator/ burlesque performer Molly Crabapple's "Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School Cabaret Life Drawing" sessions . Devilicia and I were the first models, and I designed the poster.
sketch:

the finished poster was loose and I included the ring binding on purpose:

photos from the event are here and here :

and I did an illustration for the Boston Phoenix newspaper article promoting it:

in-class demo I did for using the eyedropper tool and white gouache:

character studies for an illustration of "the Creep", for my old friend Tom P.'s amazing series, Broken Lines, issue #1:

Go to www.broken-lines.com, buy the books, and your life will automatically become way better. Trust me.

random, mindless warm-ups:

unfinished stormtrooper kid:

Sketchbook 45, June 2006 - October 2006

2009-04-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

another bloated, 11" x 14" mish mash of then-current stuff and tons of older work taped in.

2006:

sketch for a jacket painting I made for my friend Dottie Lux:

poster sketch for "Creepshow at the Freakshow" Coney Island Sideshow Halloween:

sketch for New York Burlesque Festival poster contest:

and a Photoshop color study:

sketch for Wasabassco Burlesque" "Evil Night" poster (illustrator/ art director/ Wasabassco producer Bill Morton wisely advised me to show the devil girl's face the split-second before she gets pied to make this illo better):

Coolidge Corner Theatre Halloween Marathon poster sketch:

Hurricane Katrina benefit poster:

sketches for a surprise gift painting of a client's fiancee and dog getting ice cream from a skeleton at the Mexican "Day of the Dead" festival:

I started dressing up in home-made monster masks and costumes to play guitar at MassArt as a life-drawing model:

the band Devil Driver approached me about creating 15 t-shirt designs. These are some of the preliminary ideas I came up with:

"Year of the Dead" sketches:

random ladies:

dog sketches for the "Season" series I did for Boston Buddies and French Bulldog Rescue Network:

pet potrait sketch:

old MassArt degree project sketches for a Halloween story I wrote and illustrated:

random older stuff:

unfinished MassArt assignment color study:

another MassArt assignment (my friend Sheila snuck in to edit this):

very old Clyde and Floyd Gunky doodle:

Sketchbook 44, April 2006 - June 2006

2009-04-21T06:20:00.001-07:00

I went back to an 11" x 14" sketchbook, and started scotch-taping tons of older, loose drawings in along with current stuff just to cut down on the piles of random art stacked up all over my studio. This monster is like 3" thick.
Stuff from 2006 and 2005:

sketch for a double birthday painting I did for my old house-mates, illustrators Corey Smigliani and Peter Gueth:

"Midnights at the Coolidge" t-shirt design:

I got hired by my old MassArt friend Tyler Evans, now vice-president of award-winning bike company Independent Fabrication, to illustrate their 2007 12" x 12" catalog cover:

I ended up going with valkyries in tube socks and sneakers giving the thumbs-up to a new IF bike coming out of the forge:

sketches for a Halloween decoration project I'm still working on:

I took part in another live art competition/ painted skatedeck benefit auction ("Unrefined Hunger"), this time at the Boston Center for the Arts/ Cyclorama. Joe Keinberger and I tag-teamed a giant canvas. I planned my side out ahead of time:

family portrait sketch:

poster sketches:

sketches for the 2006 "Exotic World" Burlesque Festival poster:

sketches for pet portraits commissioned by Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulous:

sketches for a proposed mural at El Pelon Taqueria:

my friend Tammy Hines commissioned a large painting of the 4 seasons:

prints of the finished painting are available here

sketches for a rockabilly vampire anniversary painting commissioned by my friend Shaerie Mead:

sketches for a commission of Adriane Madden and her 2 pugs, Karma and Kismet:

The following is all older stuff taped in, ranging from the early 1990s to 2005.
Old Mass Art sketches for assignments:

old holiday card sketches:

I wanted to do a Halloween alphabet book for my senior year Degree Project but it didn't get approved. I remember doing these rough color studies one night for my proposal:

old random stuff:

(why is Batman 10 feet tall?)

old editorial sketches for the Boston Phoenix, Lollipop Magazine, Hermenaut, and more:

Sketchbook 43, September 2005 - April 2006

2009-02-28T09:07:00.000-08:00

Devilicia and I had moved to our 2nd Rhode Island apartment by this point, and we adopted Niles, a Boston Terrier refugee from Hurricane Katrina. Luckily he and Frankensteiny hit it off as soon as Niles got out of the truck that drove him up from the South. Devilicia renamed him "Giles" after the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" character. And I was invited by my former professor Linda Bourke to start teaching a Black & White Illustration class at Massachusetts College of Art at the end of 2005. I've been there ever since, and really love teaching.

Sketches for a Boston Phoenix Halloween Illo:

the one that ran:

sketch for painting I donated to the Edward Gorey Alphabet Auction:

spooks:

Castle Bran:

sketches for a Medusa painting I still need to do:

Devilicia dancing with our friend Leanne in Salem (from memory)

sketches for my Krampus card:

La Gata Negra poster sketch for their insane-o "YULETIDE THUNDER: Season's Beatings" event:

photos from the matches are here

Pug winter painting:

drawings I submitted to a R.I. non-profit art program for kids:

sketches for a "Knitting into the Blogosphere" project Devilicia's old friend hired me for:

the Glamazons hired me to do a big promo image for them. I took the line "Taking the World By Storm" and drew them giant-size, using bolts of lightning to pole-dance on the tops of skyscrapers:

sketch for a birthday card I made for my friend, burlesque clown Dottie Lux, of her girlfriend, filmmaker Val Killmore and their awesome bulldog, Peggy Sue, bursting out of a birthday cake:

in-class demo I did for my Black & White Illo class on drawing with the eye-dropper tool and white gouache (it doesn't REALLY look like Boris Karloff):

I began designing posters for fellow Black Cat Burlesque member/ real-life undertaker/ Black Ocean founder/ former Guerrilla Poet J. Cannibal's now notorious "Feast of Flesh" zombie events at the Coolidge Corner Theatre:

I was invited to come up with my version of a retro pin-up magazine for a show at the Commerce Gallery, and painted Devilicia with a jellyroll:

final version:

I was invited to participate in the Weekly Dig-sponsored live art competition, "digART" at the Roxy in Boston. Artists had 4 hours to create large scale paintings on canvas from scratch before a huge live audience; I dressed up as Dr. Frankenstein and painted the other members of Black Cat Burlesque posing for my "Trouble on Transylvania Ave" painting. (We were allowed to bring sketches):

photos from the event are on my blog

random mindless doodles:

Sketchbook 42, January 2005 - September 2005

2009-02-28T09:06:00.000-08:00

This one's a biggie.
wedding invitation sketches for my friends Josh and Rebecca, founders of Salem's Arcane Nonesuch:

sketches for a commissioned painting of a client's wife:

another witchy painting commission:

drawings of little Frankensteiny:

poster sketches:

I'm still addicted to doodling random heads:

I came up with logos for Boston Buddies Boston Terrier Rescue

and French Bulldog Rescue Network

sketches for Halloween paintings I was working on for upcoming gallery shows:

Tattoo design for a man whose father was a magician; he performed a trick with a skunk, a fez, a top hat, and a large Queen of Hearts tapestry:

Another tattoo design, of a really voluptuous version of the "Birth of Venus":

and the final result:

A Channel 5 reporter and cameraman from the TV show "Chronicle" came to my studio to interview me about my scary artwork and spooky collections. I drew this vampire with the eyedropper tool on camera:

editorial sketches:

promo stuff:

La Gata Negra character sketch for "Lady Frankenstein":

French Bulldog winter painting:

Sketchbook 41, May 2004 - January 2005

2009-02-28T09:05:00.000-08:00

Sketches for new, simple www.MisterReusch.com homepage icons:

the Boston Phoenix hired me to make a one-page Halloween comic, so I drew the "Flirting with Death" act Devilicia and I perform as Black Cat Burlesque:

The printed version is online here
Character sketches for La Gata Negra's "Conqueror Worm":

"El Gecko":

"The Irish Twins":

and the "Bad Habits":

LGN t-shirt designs:

Life-drawings of Devilicia in the living room:

Phoenix newspaper cover roughs:

Editorial sketches, for Boston Police profiling:

and all-white juries:

Poster sketches:

Black Cat Burlesque promo poster I never finished:

A client commissioned a painting of 3 curvy 60s go-go dancers with weird bodypaint:

Sugar Plump Fairy giving a Yeti dreams of treats:

Random:

Sketchbook 40, January 2004 - May 2004

2009-02-28T09:04:00.000-08:00

Devilicia and I got our own apartment in Rhode Island, and finally got a Boston Terrier we named Frankenstein. My productivity went WAY down once this amazing 4-month-old monkeydog entered our lives. I managed to get some illustration stuff done, though.

Sketches for a Boston Globe calendar section front and back cover story about new rock bands touring old bars. My art director printed out my finished illustrations as iron-on transfers, and had a model photographed wearing the shirt:

commissioned dog portrait sketches:

front and back cd cover sketches for the band Electrolux:

insane-o t-shirt design for the store, Danger Planet:

Win Fream, formerly a designer at JDK, moved to Bauer-Nike and hired me to design a total-art-coverage hockey stick. It would be their 30th stick design, so the theme started out as "XXX" and I was directed to come up with pin-up ladies:

goalie in the "butterfly position":

I wasn't surprised when this direction was shot down. The new direction was "total carnage", and once again I was weirded out how in this culture, images of death and violence are totally ok and cool and preferred over images implying sex.
blade designs:

sketches for images on the stick itself:

I finished all the art, but what I feared happened: it was decided that applying these water-release decals to the sticks was too difficult, and the whole project was scrapped. I have one of the few sticks ever produced. It was fun working with Win and Sole Kitchen designer Andrew Szurley on this project, and I was sad no one would ever get to see this crazy hockey stick.

Boston Phoenix Moving Guide cover sketches, featuring my good friend Dan Blakeslee and his wife Kellie-Jaye:

Providence Phoenix cover story about artists getting evicted from their Olneyville art spaces in the middle of winter:

Boston Phoenix story about spreading the seeds of war in Iraq for future generations:

Phoenix story about "big box" stores killing off mom and pop businesses:

Poster sketch for a burlesque show my friend Darcey Leonard produced:

Black Cat Burlesque did a month-long residency with Electrolux:

Devilicia and her friends formed the La Gata Negra League of Masked Lady Wrestlers, and I helped brainstorm costumes and gimmicks. I did their posters, t-shirt design, art for a LGN comicbook, and helped out ringside as various costumed henchmen.

Devilicia:

Lon Chaney:

old scrap of rejected spookshow poster:

my friend Laura offered to be my enforcer for deadbeat clients:

comic character design:

Sketchbook 39, June 2003 - January 2004

2009-02-28T09:02:00.000-08:00

Looking back, this period was totally insane-o. I was working like crazy on editorial jobs, posters, t-shirt designs, private commissions, and more. Devilicia and I had just started dating and spent every possible minute together. She was working as a mortician's apprentice and was on call at all hours of the day. I got a front page cover story in the Boston Globe Arts section about my scary art. A good friend passed away from cancer. I was banned from taking part in a group art show, made up of my friends, by the curator because she was friends with my ex-girlfriend.
Through the Keyhole Burlesque dissolved during a mini-tour with Jonathan Richman (the two other women soon re-formed as "Thru the Keyhole" with many new performers), and Devilicia and I formed Black Cat Burlesque, a new spook-troupe inspired by horror and b-movies. I began constructing more huge monster masks, making costumes, and designing glow-in-the-dark t-shirts for BCB. We were joined that summer by another couple Devilicia met through the funeral business, whose stage names became J. Cannibal and Mary Widow. And the meeting where everything fell into place happened in a playground at 11pm. Black Cat Burlesque's first group outing was a Coolidge Corner Theatre-friends-only midnight viewing of the Guitar Wolf zombie masterpiece, "Wild Zero", an hour later.

early BCB.com sketches, based on an act Devilcia used to perform as "Miss Firecracker":

Devilicia founded "Soulilujah", a classic soul night at the club, Zuzu, lugging her music collection to the venue in full-go-go gear, DJing, and being the first person on the dancefloor. I drew her for the flyer:

I drew poster sketches for a 25-year-anniversary Paradise Rock Club commemorative poster show:

The Boston Phoenix hired me to paint a section cover for the Paradise's anniversary, too:

Our friends in Beat Science hired me to design a tshirt for them:

(I finally started adding Photoshop colors to my scanned sketches):

The World Famous Pontani sisters hired me to draw them for a beer koozie:

portrait sketches of a client's French Bulldogs:

Switching gears, Devilicia's boss at the funeral home commissioned a huge zombie painting. She and her husband requested that their cat who'd passed away be included in the picture:

they went with this one:

El Pelon Taqueria hired me to design a postcard; I drew Devilicia's luchadora character eating tacos as "the Late-Morning Breakfast of Champions":

Phoenix cover story about the Horror Writers' Association coming to Portland, Maine:

the one they went with:

Black Cat Burlesque did a lot of shows that Fall:

We performed with the Groovie Ghoulies on Halloween Night!

other Halloween-themed assignments:

A Boston doggy day care Halloween card, with Devilicia and her deceased min-pin Coco and our friend Faye and her bulldog, Banjo:

promo card for Morbid Industries:

holiday invitation for Eat Well:

holiday card for Rock 'N' Roll Library:

Phoenix story about heat getting shut off when people can't pay:

I really wanted a black pug I'd name "Count Pugula":

random:

Sketchbook 38, November 2002 - June 2003

2009-02-22T06:22:00.001-08:00

(self-portrait by Devilicia, known at the time as Miss Firecracker of Through the Keyhole Burlesque)
This book marks the beginning of my relationship with Devilicia. At the time, we collaborated on a dream project with our friend Clinton McClung of the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline to produce a one-night only midnight burlesque spookshow. Afterwards, we began dating and have been together ever since.

photo of us by Tammy Hines
ideas for the "Spooks-a-Poppin Burlesque Horror Show" poster:

fire-breathing skull pasties with fluorescent orange tassels I designed:

huge monster props on stage:

and end results:

cut-out mask souvenir:

the final product:

every 10th mask was printed on yellow cardstock with different text:

burlesque sketches inspired by Devilicia:

Through the Keyhole Burlesque had a Mexican Wrestling/ Burlesque show:

sketches for El Pelon Taqueria's 3rd Annual Hot Chile Pepper Eating Contest Poster:

Deek from WBCN hired me to design a zombie poster for a show he was producing:

Krampus doodle:

editorial assignment sketches:

random:

Sketchbook 37, May 2002 - November 2002

2009-02-22T06:21:00.000-08:00

Editorial assignment sketches:

This one's loaded with rough sketches for gallery shows. The October "Kreature-Triple-Feature" show I took part in with John Detrich and Stephen Blickenstaff at the now-departed Gallery Bink in Portland, Oregon, debuted my "Rollin' Reapers":

I licensed the "Low-Rider" painting to Little Devil Brand for their Halloween postcard:

"Organ Grind" (became a Black Cat Burlesque live act a few years later):

Halloween pin-up girls:

"1,001 Transylvanian Nights":

Sketches for the "Tri-polar" show with Scott Getchell and Kevin Banks at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts:
"Cruising"

"Devil, Dog, & Death"

"Go-Go Gorilla"

"Calorie-Bomb Squad"---I was inspired by Mel Ramos's paintings and I painted, I think, 8 or 9 curvy ladies displaying some of my favorite foods....candy bars, Ring Dings, Superchunk peanut butter, raspberry fluff, beer:

Poster sketches:

I got commissioned to paint a black and white picture showing a robot, a skull, and a naked lady.
Remote-controlled robot delivering an ice cream soda:

Sweeping up a skull:

couple:

He went with "Tech Support", my play on those b-movie posters showing a robot walking around with an unconscious starlet in its arms:

Random:

Sketchbook 36, October 2001-May 2002

2009-01-17T00:49:00.000-08:00

Final sketch for No-Shadow Kick's "In The Snow" cd single

and a test print of the 3-color silkscreen. Even though I had screenprinting master and old housemate Bob Maloney's help, I still needed to make 600 prints just to get the needed 300 GOOD prints:

sketches for my 2002 holiday postcard I named "Frosti" after the cool little instrumental of the same name by Bjork. She evolved into who I pictured being Jack Frost's girlfriend:

winter stationery sketch and test print:

rejected sketch for ALS Therapy Development Foundation's holiday card (they ended up using it in 2003):

ALS-TDF also hired me to make 8 full-color postcard designs illustrating their core values. Everyone at ALS was really cool, but the job required 8 million sketches and I ended up getting really frustrated that they just didn't know what they wanted to see:

(my small note to self on this page reads: "Saturday. Buy Jagermeister. Drink it.")

I got hired by Llewellyn Worldwide to do some illustrations for their Teen Witch Datebook. Looking up spells online:

telling your best friend you're a witch:

Phoenix editorial sketches:
Phoenix writer witnessing a shooting

the taxman biting blue-collar and white collar workers equally:

story about a politician so shamed by the media for getting busted at a peepshow that he killed himself:

unrequited email flirting:

Worcester Massachusetts police intimidating anti-war protesters:

the war between adults who think they should educate teens about sex, and those who are against sex-ed:

cover sketches for the Phoenix's Valentine's Day issue:

my friend Salty Dave as cupid coming home to a surprise:

Salty Dave getting the names of the World Famous Pontani sisters tattooed by a punk rock cupid (Salty and I had caught the Pontanis' shows with Los Straightjackets a few times. It's weird to think years later I'd be a co-founder of Black Cat Burlesque, performing on the same stages as The Pontanis in Boston and NYC and Vegas, hanging out with them, crashing at Angie Pontani's boyfriend's apartment.)

Salty Dave:

my old friend Leah in her "Mr. Jones" lab coat:

my "Friends Who Aren't People" series:

(this ghost was the real deal):

sketches for my old friend, author and long-time patron Tammy Hines, who commissioned a few little animal paintings for her boyfriend's kids:

self-portrait with my homemade devil mask, done from imagination without a mirror:

I love how Ozzy ends every show screaming, "THANK-YOU-GOODNIGHT-WE-LOVE-YOU-AAAAAALLLLLLL!!!"
I figured no matter what we do, Ozzy still loves us. (This isn't supposed to be Ozzy's daughter, Kelly, just a random curvy lady wearing a shirt I thought up. I don't even think I knew about "the Osbournes" show at this point):

Spring finally came to Boston:

I keep meaning to paint a girl in tan/ pink/ white pajamas jumping around with an orange flying-v guitar in her bedroom while confused dogs look on, but haven't figured out the right composition yet:

sketches for the Phoenix "Sexy Summer Reading" guide:

sketches for El Pelon Taqueria's Hot Chile Pepper Eating Contest poster

(As I type this, El Pelon has just burned down for the 2nd time in 2 winters, though all my framed original art hung up there survived both fires. There's been a little water damage to the paintings, though, so I'm re-painting all my stuff for them and giving it to them once they re-open.)

sketches for my Halloween 2002 show at Gallery Bink (R.I.P.) in Portland Oregon with Stephen Blickenstaff and John Detrich (I came up with the title "Kreature-Triple-Feature" as an homage to my favorite childhood show, Channel 56's "Creature Double Feature"; the intro was and still is pretty much my favorite thing in the universe, and it made a HUGE impression on me as a little kid) :

random:

Dogless days were starting to take their toll on me. I dreamed of someday owning a Boston Terrier named Frankenstein, a black French bulldog named Ghoulita Mamacita, and a black pug named Count Pugula. These days we've got our little Frankensteiny, who coincidentally looks a lot like this drawing I'd done years before he was even born:

Sketchbook 35, July 2001-October 2001

2009-01-17T00:48:00.000-08:00

This is another biggie. I was 28 and working on new paintings for a Halloween-themed solo exhibit at Dagmar's (R.I.P.), promo stuff, posters, editorial jobs, and more.

I titled this sketchbook zombie "wetnap", thinking it'd be funny if he cleaned himself up after each kill with one of those "moist towelette" wetnaps

sketch for my "Late Arrival" painting:

"Not-so-far-too" (Tom P. thought up that name years before):

sketch for "The Angel of Candy Corn" painting:

roughs ideas for the show poster (I still had Ed Wood's "Orgy of the Dead" in mind, and was drawing women's legs way too long, especially between the knee and ankle):

I went through a tough time due to girl problems and dumb decisions I'd made. I tried painting out all the badness in a weird series of self-portraits. Putting it down on paper always seemed easier than talking to other people about heavy stuff. I also went running a lot and worked out like crazy, losing 9lbs. in a week.

watching the fireworks at Hampton beach with Sheila:

Painting done on September 11th

These are all editorial sketches for the Phoenix. This one's about Boston's Catholic Church covering up sexual abuse (the Phoenix's Kristen Lombardi broke the story a full year before the Boston Globe got onto this)

pollution:

imbalance of power:

sketches for the Phoenix Halloween guide cover:

sketch for the Humanoids Halloween night concert poster:

sketch for Weekly Dig's Scissorfight cover:

sketch for Tom P.'s Red Cent story:

sketches for a graphic novel I've had in my head forever:

my old housemate, amazing illustrator Corey Smigliani

sketches for the Phoenix holiday guide (I think):

"In The Snow" cd single cover sketches for my friends, No-Shadow Kick:

this sketch got printed on the cd itself:

random:

she looks like her head totally shrunk in the dryer:

Sketchbook 34, February - July 2001 Part 2

2009-01-11T22:06:00.000-08:00

Burton hired me to design art for 3 mini "snowdecks", which were skateboard-sized snowboards without bindings. The theme was duality, and the direction was raw, fast, and black & white, as if the rider had sat on the curb and drawn on the deck with Sharpie....which is what I used to do on skateboards as a teenager.
First was a good-and-evil "2-Face", and eventually the 2 faces began to share some facial features instead of being totally separate:

the one they went with:

( Now that I'm teaching, I'm realizing how many illustration students don't put time and effort into preliminary sketches. Some clients approve the first sketch an illustrator submits, but most others, like Burton, want to see an idea evolve through TONS of sketches until the illustrator nails it.)

the 2nd deck needed to show a kid and a demon sharing the same body but (eventually) with 2 heads.
this time it took 15 tries

to get to this guy:

the last one, "The Devil Within", went way faster. I was inspired by Spiritualist accounts of mediums going into trances with ectoplasm emanating from their eyes, ears, noses and mouths, taking the form of different spirits.

(this rejected sketch became a Butthole Surfers poster)

the winner:

and I did a 2nd Burton Boardercross helmet:

I tried to get the ol' Cherry 2000 "Taint Fairy" on the helmet, this time flowing flames onto a skull:

but they ended up choosing a reaper

with graveyard scenes in his tattered sleeves:

Just like the first helmet, the art needed to wrap easily onto the helmet surface as individually-cut water-release decals. Wicked time consuming to design these! I kept printing out sections, running them under the faucet, and checking to see how difficult it was to apply the art sections to my prototype helmet.

Sketchbook 34, February 2001-July 2001 part 1

2009-01-11T21:10:00.000-08:00

This one's a biggie. I turned 28 and was wicked busy doing editorial jobs, posters, t-shirts, 3 new snowdecks for Burton, and another helmet for them, too.
Little skeleton for my business card at the time:

shark for a self-promo mailer:

Halloween doodle that eventually became the "Rise & Shine" Phoenix Halloween Guide cover, as well as a greeting card/ postcard/ party invitation for Ghastly Greetings, AND a live performance by Black Cat Burlesque in 2003:

These are all Phoenix sketches, this one for a story about school shootings:

the one they picked:

for a Vagina Monologues story:

for story about public perception of methadone treatment in prison:

for a story about teenage girls in jail:

for the Summer Drinks Guide cover:

and a spot illo showing a satyr chasing a nymph across the wine labels:

line-art rough for an Access magazine story about surfing the web faster:

Something Weird Video box cover sketch for a dvd compilation of 50s teen scare films called "Boozers and Losers" (I ended up geting rid of the bike, just showed the drunk teen running down Death with him dropping his martini):

random doodles:

sketches for a Scissorfight poster, each one inspired by a different song.
"Cycloptic Skull":

"Stove By Whale":

"Scream of the Wendigo":

"Roman Boxing Glove":

they ended up picking "The Gruesome Death of Edward Teach":

Sketchbook 33, October 2000 - January 2001

2008-03-08T20:55:00.000-08:00

this book starts off with a lot of sketches for editorial jobs, but gradually gets filled up with more personal projects towards the end.
These were all for freelance assignments:

sketches for my own stationery:

xerox test print of final stationery art on left edge of green paper:

xerox test print of final stationery art on right edge of gray paper (original art owned by Kenji "Thundadome" Quinn, announcer for Boston Roller Derby events):

sketches for my 2000 holiday postcard. I wanted a cool little elf with clunky boots interacting with a French Bulldog, though I was still drawing the Frenchie ears pointed at the time, instead of rounded like they're supposed to be:

unfinished color study, inspired by the sky in the final chase scene of "Bram Stoker's Dracula", when the clouds part a little during a snowstorm to show the sunset:

alternate idea of a taller elf girl skating "Happy Holidays" into the ice with the tip of her skate blade:

more pin-up sketches for Varla magazine of Jami Deadly:

and Mimi:

this ink, acrylic, and gouache sketchbook painting was published in Jared Eberhardt's book, "BLOWER: snowboarding inside out":

bellydancer:

"Junior" here has become a greeting card and postcard from Ghastly Greetings, and a pendant from Arcane Nonesuch:

this Frankenstein monster doodle became the basis for my "Chopper" painting:

ideas for a painting of a curvy Black Widow and her hearse:

Unused idea for a Spring" postcard:

sketch for another painting I didn't get to yet, of a really voluptuous woman winning a beauty pageant while the usual media-approved anorexic runners-up look on:

Sketchbook 32, June 2000 - October 2000

2008-02-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

This was a busy time. I was doing lots of editorial art, pin-ups, Halloween stuff to send out in the fall, and a boardercross helmet for R.E.D. (Burton).
For the helmet, designer Rich Curren gave me some art direction and the latest prototype helmet. Some ideas I came up with:

Once the "skull-encasement" design was approved, I wrapped tracing paper around the prototype helmet and scotch-taped it down tight. Then I did an acrylic black and white painting on the tracing paper, photographed it, and emailed it off for approval. Then I had to cut the tracing paper off the helmet in sections, and begin to finalize each skull section as separate illustrations that could be applied easily to the helmet as decals. It was very time-consuming, especially since these decals had to look right on several different sizes of the helmets, and I had to work around vents and ridges. I'd be constantly reworking sections, cutting them out, running them under water, and then doing the "water test"----seeing if the cut-out wet section could be applied easily to the bare surface of the helmet with minimal adjusting. You have to take into account the factory workers applying all of these decals and how quickly and easily it'd go for them, too. If it worked on my end, I'd email or fax Rich the sections up at JDK in Vermont, and he'd cut out my printouts and do his own water tests on his helmet to see how it was looking.
2 sketched out sections before I had to cut slits in them to make them wrap easier:

I was really proud of the finished product. Rich sent me one, and I wear it as a bike helmet in Boston. In the winter, when I've got sunglasses and a black facemask on under the helmet, I feel like Darth Vader or a Stormtrooper or something.

I met this woman on a company picnic. She sat down across from me and flashed me for like an hour. I drew this later at home:

this one was published in Double Negative:

random girlie art:

I started doing pin-ups for Varla magazine, which had just started coming out. These were rough sketches for paintings I did based on the models' interests (Persephone wrote that she was into graveyard picnics at night, etc.) Looking at these now, they've all got pretty badly-rendered hands:

sketch for an "Impending Porn Scenario" story in Hermenaut magazine:

and the final they ended up choosing:

rejected front cover design for the Phoenix's "Best of" issue:

"Evolution of the Grocer" sketch for the Industry Standard, from corner market butcher who kills your chicken for you, to 50s supermarket guy, to home delivery

Portland Phoenix cover spot illo and sketch sequence of a heroin junkie's downward spiral:

sketches and final art for a Phoenix story about invasion of privacy:

Industry Standard European edition for story about hazards of shopping online without trying on shoes first:

these spot illos accompanied the main illo, showing Santa got his tiny skates after all.

in 2007 I repainted these, 11" x 14" with acrylic and fluorescent:

Halloween card ideas:

these 2 random doodles, probably inspired by Ed Wood's "Orgy of the Dead" movie, ended up getting used for the poster of the 2003 "Spooks-a-Poppin Burlesque Horror Show" I put together with Clinton McClung and Devilicia at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, back when her stage name was Miss Firecracker. I don't think I knew either of them at this point, though:

this ghoul was printed in a 2-page spread of my stuff in Jared Eberhardt's "BLOWER: snowboarding inside out" book:

imaginary girl:

Sketchbook 31, March 2000 - June 2000

2008-02-03T08:34:00.000-08:00

more early pin-up sketches:

Little Devil finally decided on these "Death Dive" and "Flamethrower" t-shirt designs, but they were never printed:

I was drawing bug-eyed, flat-faced dogs more and more. Here's a couple really bad attempts at French bulldogs from memory, not observation:

Boston Terriers started showing up in my editorial assignments for the Phoenix, the Industry Standard, & The Boston Book Review:

detail:

more editorial sketches:
"burning man dunk tank" for Hermenaut magazine, before adding greys with gouache:

corpses getting dragged through Iraq streets for Boston Book Review:

summertime map of New England for the Phoenix:

WTO protest in Washington for the Phoenix:

warring newsies for the Phoenix:

gay pride march hookups for the Phoenix:

sewing the city and green areas together for the Phoenix, before painting in greys:

stuff just for me:

thank you card to my parents and sister showing Wally, the family dog:

Sketchbook 30, October 1999 - February 2000

2008-01-08T11:01:00.000-08:00

So this book is from the end of the 90s, when I was 26. I remember being in middle school in the 80s thinking the year 2000 seemed so far away, and that 26 was really old. I think this was right around the time I thought it'd be funny to start signing my name "Mister Reusch" on pictures instead of just "Reusch", in the hopes of fooling people that I was some really old, established artist guy with my act together.

More rejected sketches for Little Devil:

I love comics and have tons of them, but almost never draw comicbook characters, so these are pretty rare:

Hellboy surprised by floating woods spirit:

Hellboy surprising Boogeyman about to eat a baby (unfinished)

sketch for holiday stationery:

and Xerox test:

years later I repainted this in acrylic:

Phoenix cover sketches about underage drinking:

rejected poster sketch for Cambridge Arts Council:

more Phoenix sketches:

editorial stuff for the Industry Standard:

Boston Book Review article on "Broken Wings":

poster sketches for an Alabama Thunder Pussy show with my old housemate Bob's ex-band Miligram opening:

Right about now I was realizing how sick of the media's skeletal female "ideal" I was. I started putting voluptuous women in all my freelance assignments, and doing pin-up doodles for possible paintings in my sketchbooks:

Sketchbook 29, June 1999 - October 1999

2008-01-08T06:47:00.000-08:00

I noticed in this book there are tons of drawings taped onto the sketchbook pages, and the Sharpie I'd been using has started to bleed all purpley everywhere.
editorial sketches for the Providence Phoenix and Boston Phoenix newspapers:

Phoenix covers used to be 11" x 17", but were folded in 1/2 on the newsstand----so cover art needed to tell the whole story above the fold while still leaving room for the logo, headline, and subheads. It could be pretty challenging to try to find a design that worked within these confines. These are 3 rejected cover sketches for a story about a drug epidemic and resulting crime up in Maine:

"too little, too late" sketch for hate crime laws:

(I snuck my old housemate and now MassArt teaching buddy Bob Maloney in there playing bass):

I was asked to get rid of the DJ and feel like this color comp is a lot less lively:

Phoenix Halloween guide cover sketch (The Damned later hired me to repaint this as a tour shirt design with a few changes):

sketches for the Boston Book Review's Crime section before I added grey tones:

sketches for the invitation to my solo gallery show at Space 1026 in Philadelphia:

sketches done for Davis Partners when they were still called Tom Davis & Co. for a project with Reebok; they wanted a woman running in cold wind represented by tons of motion

self-portraits from my head:

In the summer I used to go down to a pond , put on mechanic coveralls to protect me from mosquitoes, and use a headlight to hypnotize frogs sitting on lilypads. Once the light hit them, they'd freeze, and I'd pick them up and look at them up close. I felt like a National Geographic or Discovery Channel guy studying wildlife:

random stuff:

poster sketches for a hair-cut-a-thon benefit in Harvard Square:

the 1026 show led to me getting hooked up with Little Devil Brand Co. These are rejected t-shirt designs for them:

Sketchbook 28, January 1999 - June 1999

2007-12-28T13:53:00.002-08:00

Thumbnail sketches for concert posters:

based on this:

the color study above was for a poster that was supposed to be paid for by Newbury Comics, since each band had at least one member who worked there. They backed out for some reason, so the full-color hand-painted poster I made

was never reproduced the way it was supposed to be----my client printed the posters in black and white and HAND-COLORED EACH AND EVERY COPY with a set of Crayola fluorescent markers. Crazy.
Sketches for Phoenix editorial jobs:

sexual harrassment in high schools:

girl gangs:

punk rock pro-life kids (the writer of this story wanted input on these covers, he was coming up to Boston for a hockey game and asked to meet me inside an ATM booth to go over sketches. Again, crazy.)

Phoenix final for book review of "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men":

"Property of Sallie Mae" was supposed to go on the black ball and chain but had to be dropped to prevent a lawsuit:

Story about students expelled for bringing weapons to school:

Alcoholism story sketches:

I lived with 4 other freelance illustrators, and caught myself drawing super-angular figures the way my housemate Corey Smigliani did:

sketch for Hermenaut magazine illo:

illo for Lollipop magazine;

the rest is random stuff I did for myself:

eyedropper tool heads:

homemade bellydancer stationery:

the first time I ever drew a Boston Terrier!

(all the dog art I've made since is at Dogs By Reusch)
this witch ended up in my "Trick or Treat painting, now available as a greeting card from Ghastly Greetings:

Sketchbook 27, August 1998 - January 1999

2007-12-27T21:22:00.002-08:00

This book's loaded with messy roughs for concert posters and editorial jobs. These are poster sketches for a show that got canceled:

I reused this idea for the Boston Phoenix Halloween section cover, and it won a New England Press Association award. Now it's a greeting card from Ghastly Greetings, too:

and this one became the Butchies poster, though that show got canceled too, due to a fire in the venue just before the show:

Zombie!

I did a bunch of fall and winter Phoenix illos right in this sketchbook. This one's about Goth kids cleaning up cemeteries:

School guidance counselor caught changing his daughter's grades:

Bad college deans:

College kids doing the "walk of shame", trying to avoid eachother:

My friend Rachel watching Christmas specials with the rats in her apartment for a story about celebrating the holidays alone. The tails were supposed to look like candy canes:

Sheila and her cat Tigger reading cookie recipes for a holiday baking story:

color study for cover story about evil HMO taking over Blackstone Valley:

roughs for spot illos in ski/ snowboard guide:

paper and pencils versus computers in the classroom story:

logo designs for Double Negative:

the house across the street, printed in DN:

monster guy also printed in DN:

My old friend Tammy playing bass in the Good Furies, painted the day after the show:

Amazing artist Sean Griffin at the Furies show:

self-portrait on the train. I almost always do self-portraits from my head without using a mirror. I'm lazy and like to try to see things more from my imagination than from observation lots of the time:

My friend Heather on New Year's Eve:

simple pin-up painting sketches:

Sketchbook 26, June 1998-August 1998 Part 2

2007-12-27T00:36:00.000-08:00

The whole time I was doing the Burton designs and getting sick, I was also doing editorial jobs for the Boston Phoenix, some poster stuff, and the Cherry 2000 cd art.
Phoenix sketches for a story about a woman denied entrance to a battered women's shelter because she didn't speak English; her abuser followed her there and beat her:

cover sketch for the Apartment Living section:

cover sketch for City Living section:

cover sketch for Traveling in New England cover; I put the woman in front of Ingaldsby's, my favorite apple orchard and farm stand:

sketches for the Phoenix Literary Section for a book about gang violence, I think called "Wastelands":

Poster sketch for WFNX; they wanted it to look like a poster I'd already done for Shiva Speedway and Sleater-Kinney. It was my summer of being asked to copy myself. I based the spacegirl on a super-voluptuous redhead I'd met in New Orleans who ran a toystore, and the tin robot co-pilot is the walking, spark-shooting robot I bought from her:

rejected Phoenix cover idea based on a photo I shot of my friends No-Shadow Kick:

Phoenix story about a Goth version of "Jeopardy":

My old friend Tim Page hired me to design a label for his custom bike parts company. I was looking at a lot of Bruce Timm's Batman Animated cartoons and Dan Clowes' early Eightball comics, and was definitely influenced by their retro-cartoon character designs when I drew these ladies:

Still working on that Cherry 2000 "Taint" cd cover:

They settled on this one:

but wanted flesh tones on her instead of the marble-white skin

My old housemate Dave and I'd go to our friend Sheila's place pretty often for tv night. In retrospect, I don't think she looks like this at all.

Color study for a Cherry 2000 poster, based on one of the rejected Burton sketches. I cut up this picture and arranged the pieces on the final poster to illustrate "I was a broke man" lyrics from one of their songs

Sketchbook 26, June 1998-August 1998 Part 1

2007-12-26T23:23:00.000-08:00

I got hired by JDK, the Burlington VT design company that used to do all the work for Burton Snowboards, to come up with 3 board designs for Burton's first "7 Series". The art needed to be scary and tough to reflect the 7 sponsored team members who'd be riding these, and JDK designer Lance Violette picked out poster art and sketchbook paintings I'd done already to base the new paintings on. Originally he wanted the 3 designs to look like my band posters with lots of hand-drawn text but eventually that idea ended up not getting used.
Early sketches for a die-cut insert piece:

The boards needed 3 scary characters with a unifying feature. The stitches on this guy ended up being the common element:

Back in high school and the first 2 years of art school, I'd sent out samples of my art to skateboard companies but didn't get any assignments. I put that stuff on the back burner while I started doing editorial and poster art in 1995-1998, and was really out of the skateboard/ snowboard loop. Lance needed to tell me to keep my flamehead guy different from the Spitfire wheels guy, who I was unaware of.

Flamehead guy, based on my melting-guy for a Galveston poster, was finally okayed:

"Stitchface" was the 2nd design, and was based on the "Guy Smiley" sketchbook painting printed in Double Negative. He was the easiest and fastest design to get approved and finish. All these final designs were painted 6' x 2' on Masonite:

Mr. Factory-Face Smokestack-Head guy took the longest to figure out. He's the only one not based on something I'd already done, and Lance wanted him industrial and heavy.

I didn't have a computer or scanner or anything at the time, so I was constantly redrawing everything, over and over and over

more text samples:

During this period I got really run down. I didn't have an air conditioner and was painting every day in a 100 degree attic in my boxers. One night I went to see some bands play at the Middle East, everybody was sweaty and mooshed together, and my friend Kristen accidentally did the "say it, don't spray it" laugh in my face while telling a joke, then her eyes got big and wide and she said "I'm getting over mono! I hope you don't get it." I didn't think you could get mono more than once but I was wrong. I had to bike like crazy the next day in a heat wave and by the time I got home I was sick. I had to go the emergency room a few days later for a high fever and swollen throat, and they gave me antibiotics I was allergic to-----they figured I'd outgrown my allergies. I hadn't. Once I'd gone home, my fever shot back up, I turned bright red and itchy, and my throat closed up to a pinhole. I knew I couldn't afford an ambulance so my roommate called a cab, but it never came, so we took the bus and walked back to the hospital. Back at the ER a doctor put a camera on a cord up my nose and fed it back so he could see what was going on with my throat. I could barely talk and had written down my symptoms and the antibiotics I'm allergic to down on paper so I wouldn't have to talk but the stupid doctor wouldn't even look at the paper, he just kept yelling "what's wrong with you? talk to me!" I wanted to punch his face in. I was a mess.
And I still had deadlines to meet. Burton does everything 2 years in advance, and my parents were like, "Let them wait a couple weeks! You're a mess." I hung out with my family at the beach for a few days but still brought my drawing stuff and they were mad at me for not taking it easy. My parents bought me an air conditioner and drove me back to my apartment after a few days, I got everything done for Burton a few days late but they were cool about it.

Sketchbook 25, March 1998 - June 1998

2007-11-08T17:40:00.000-08:00

This book's loaded with mostly indecipherable thumbnail sketches for jobs. These are the few exceptions.
Spy sketch for the Phoenix:

Another Cherry 2000 cd cover sketch:

WFNX poster sketch:

they requested something similar to the Sleater Kinney/ Shiva Speedway poster I'd painted the year before, so I changed it to a redheaded toy store owner and the robot I bought from her in New Orleans:

I got hired to paint more Phoenix Summer Preview covers and interior illos. My roommate Bob Maloney and I are were seriously hooked on the X-Files at the time and I drew him driving around New England with Dana Sculley for all the "where to go for summer food/ entertainment" articles. That was one cool thing I really liked about working regularly for a local weekly paper, I would draw my friends and family in lots of the pictures and everyone got a kick out of it. Big crowd scenes were fun, I'd stick tons of friends in there. The art director knew what I was doing, and, based just on my drawings of their likenesses, she even requested that my friends pose for photos for other articles. So a bunch of my roommates and friends were the models for that year's holiday gift guide, it was really cool.

Sketchbook 24, 1997-March 1998

2007-11-08T14:45:00.000-08:00

This book has a lot more stuff done just for me instead of job sketches

Most of my self-portraits are done from my head without a mirror, I think mostly because I get lazy

Sheila:

Phoenix sketch:

illo for Lollipop:

Cherry 2000 hired me to paint the cover for their "Taint" cd. I started thinking about things being contaminated and rotten, and came up with this evil version of the Tooth Fairy or ("Taint Fairy") who blows stars on you when you sleep and wherever the stars land you become rotten and tainted:

Sketchbook 23, August 1997 - December 1997

2007-11-06T14:44:00.000-08:00

This book is from when I was 24. I think I was only working at the restaurant on weekends, and the rest of the time doing freelance jobs. I can't remember much else about this period.
I collaged in the newspaper for some reason:

sketches for homemade stationery:

This devil was printed on the cover of Aftertaste magazine issue 1, and is available as a pendant from Salem's custom jewelry company, Arcane Nonesuch:

bad day writing covered up by a bad day painting:

poster sketches:

sketch for a big clown mask I made that year:

and sketch for a big Frankenstein monster mask I made years later, I think in 2003:

Halloween flyer for my old apartment at 53 Paul Gore Street #2 taped into my sketchbook; I shot some Polaroids of the house, shot some photos of myself in my homemade clown mask, Xeroxed the Polaroids so they'd look all grainy, cut myself out and glued my clown photo xerox to the house Xerox, drew in the bats and added the text with white gouache.

sketch for Halloween postcard and test print:

My friend Pete ran the lights for a production of "Cabaret" and gave me free tickets. I don't like musicals but went anyways and painted some of the main characters from memory after I came home:

(and I think this is when I realized I really liked chubby girls. A friend went with me to see the play and afterwards complained that there were a couple dancers "who SHOULD NOT have been on stage". He was talking about the two I painted. They were really curvy and vivacious and jiggly and looked like they were having a lot more fun than the other performers, who were all pretty thin. I told him he was just plain wrong.)
the Phoenix hired me to paint the front cover of the "Seasons" holiday issue, 4 interior covers, and a ton of interior illos. 1997 was like my biggest high-profile Phoenix year. These are some of the cover sketches of Jack Frost:

I thought it'd be cool to unify the spot illos in this sketch for their literary section cover by giving each character glasses, something smoking or steaming next to them (a pipe, cocoa, coffee, and something cooking), and position them in front of a window with snow falling outside:

rough sketch for a Phoenix holiday drinks guide featuring Lily, a cool Pug on my street( maybe the first time I stuck a bug-eyed, flat-faced dog in one of my editorial assignments!):

more Phoenix holiday issue roughs:

rough sketch for a story about having to visit awful in-laws at Christmastime:

random:

Sketchbook 22, April 1997 - August 1997

2007-11-06T13:16:00.001-08:00

This was a wicked busy period. There were a few times when I had to crank out 10 or 12 finished illustrations overnight. Looking back now at some of the pictures, they could've been better but I did the best I could with the time I had and tried to have fun. Which is kind of my way of looking at life these days. Busy, busy, busy days and nights.
Thumbnail sketches for my first 11" x 17" hand-painted band posters:

I got hired by the Boston Phoenix to make 3 spot illustrations a week for a new series where an author recounted horrible/ funny/ gross things from his childhood and teenage years. Here a back-brace saved him from a bully breaking a ping-pong paddle on him:

He picked his nose until he hemorrhaged:

He realized the girl he had the hots for was starting to get hair in her armpits:

He had to visit a proctologist as a teenager after putting a hairbrush up his anus too many times:

He got punched in the throat during a German bar fight:

He realized he'd caught a venereal disease:

The Phoenix also hired me to paint 2 11" x 17" front covers, 3 7" x 10" section covers, and a ton of interior spot illustrations for the Summer Preview issues.
Week one cover sketch:

Week two cover sketch:

some of the zillions of interior illos:

I managed to get my friend Kevin from the Kabooms in there:

my family's new dog Wally made it in, too:

and our former dog Dudley got printed too:

editorial illustrations for Lollipop magazine:

Iggy Pop illo for Lollipop:

illos for the Phoenix Literary Section:

Worcester Phoenix mail-order brides cover:

Double Negative cover sketches and cover:

I went to see friends graduate from MassArt, and simultaneously bumped into my ex-girlfriend, and a girl I currently had the hots for, and another girl I'd dated. They'd come from 3 different directions, and were suddenly standing around me, it was super-awkward. I introduced everybody by name, and they all kind of stopped talking at once, and there was a long silence, and all of them just walked away. I don't think at the time I'd seen any of those super-awkward Ben Stiller comedies yet, the ones where he ends up in these situations that make me cringe and pull my hood up if I'm wearing a hoodie, but it was totally like I was Ben Stiller in a super-awkward situation. I painted this when I got home:

(and to follow-up on the awesome awkwardness here, I also wrote in my sketchbook that night that it was probably time to just become "asexual like a Sea-Monkey", since I was striking out with the ladies and not interested in guys. That summer, I went home for my dad's birthday, and once I'd gone to sleep in my old room, my parents went through my stuff. I have a long, sad history of my parents going through my stuff once I've gone to bed, dating back to primary school. I never figured out if my parents were looking for pipe-bombs, or cocaine, or illegal immigrants, or what, but there were a few times when my dad confronted me early in the morning with angry/ bewildered questions about things I'd written or drawn in what I figured were my own personal sketchbooks. The total invasion of privacy here was steamrolled under with heavy-duty shaming for a variety of offenses that now seem wicked ridiculous. ANYWAYS, the day after my dad's birthday, he drove me to the train station and sprung the thousand-dollar question on me: what did I MEAN, that it was "time to become asexual like a Sea-Monkey?" Fun times.)

the girl I had the hots for and a flower she brought me:

Tito, an awesome dog on my old street:

Wally sitting in my parents' yard:

more band poster sketches:

Fettgirl, back before the prequel movies when Boba Fett could've actually been a woman:

I think it's funny that my friends asked me to draw an "outer-space bumblebee girl" for this flyer, and these days my girlfriend has a not-so-secret identity as a masked wrestler superhero in a bee costume:

sketches for the band Galveston's 7" vinyl single. They didn't have the money to print these in color, so they hand-painted the yellow on their black and white copies.

my ex-girlfriend came over for pizza and a walk around Jamaica Pond. She stayed on my mind afterwards so I ended up painting these from memory after she'd gone home:

Worcester Phoenix cover sketches and final:

"One in 10" (Phoenix gay and lesbian section) cover:

Sketchbook 21, November 1996-March 1997

2007-10-08T21:10:00.000-07:00

(sticker and cover doodles by Rich Kaponas when he was working at a copy shop near MassArt. Theses days he's living in Hollywood and the director of "Ranchero")
So at the time of this book I was 23, back in Boston, in my first apartment, just broke up with my girlfriend, doing dishes all day at a restaurant, staying up all nights doing the editorial illustration jobs that were starting to come faster and faster, getting sick from the crazy schedule, starting to go out to see local bands a lot, and starting to paint my first concert posters, beginning with Chevy Heston

imaginary girl with poorly done hands and feet:

This guy was printed in Double Negative Magazine and helped me get hired by Burton Snowboards later on; he was also printed in former JDK Design art director Jared Eberhardt's book BLOWER:snowboardinginsideout
AND was also licensed out to 5150 Snowboards for their "COVERT" deck, (which was the last name of my favorite professor at MassArt)

This reminds me of a place I like to eat at in Brooklyn, though I'd never been there at the time I painted this:

One night I was waiting at a bus stop on Huntington Avenue, trying to get my crappy old Walkman to play. The sound kept cutting out. I looked up and a super cute girl on an old bike with a shopping bag hooked on the handlebars biked by; we made eye contact and just as she opened her mouth to say something to me, my Walkman blared back to life. I didn't hear what she said, but she turned her head and kept looking back as she biked up the street. My bus pulled up and I thought maybe we'd pass her so I could jump out ahead of her to say "Hi! What did you say?" or something brilliant like that but we never caught up to her. Stupid Walkman.

My first winter up in the unheated attic, I got sick. Food poisoning, followed by conjuntivitis in both eyes and mono. Fun times! I don't look like this but definitely felt like this guy:

I put up the awesome 60s fake white Christmas tree my friend James Felix McKenney gave me when he moved to California (Rich's co-worker back in the day, now another awesome filmmaker...."Cannibalistic", "Satan Hates You", "Automatons", and more), next to my futon and ate all my soup next to it. Colored lights always cheer me up

Girl I started seeing at the time:

Me with my great uncle Bob's hat and my Building #19 Treetorns

sketch for a painting I never did of a girl with a snake tongue:

Illo for the Boston Book Review for a novel about a killer of priests:

sketches for a Boston Phoenix article about gays in China:

Phoenix sketches for a story about a guy worried that UFOs were going to forget to abduct him:

Boston Book Review sketch and Xerox of the final on tan paper:

Boston Phoenix sketch for article about drugged up rave kids blacking out:

Phoenix sketch for their Literary Section's review of a novel set in the 60s dealing with prejudice on college campuses, and the final:

Phoenix sketch for article about Valentine's day trends

Phoenix spot illos done right in my sketchbook for article profiling different kinds of scratch ticket addicts:

(I drew Rich Kaponas for this one):

Phoenix thumbnail sketches and final for story about the elderly getting evicted in winter:

sketches for another Phoenix job, about sexual harassment and how the jerk was caught:

Sketchbook 20, August 1996-November 1996

2007-09-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

Seriously crazy days and nights here. I was working 39 hours a week during the day at the restaurant and staying awake all night doing freelance jobs. I also got 18 stitches in a finger on my drawing hand due to a restaurant injury, then got in a fight with a bunch of thugs a few days later and one guy tried to gouge my eyes out. So in one week I got my first Phoenix cover, a crazy gross finger, and crazy scratches down my face and swollen-shut eyes. I lost my contact lenses in the fight, too. Awesome.
Mister Melting Head here ended up getting re-used later on a last-minute band poster, and eventually helped get me hired by Burton Snowboards:

Illo for an article about Jagermeister-induced blackouts:

This random sketchbook drawing was printed in Double Negative:

Super-last-minute Phoenix illo drawn in my sketchbook on a torn piece of paper in a cafe while I was waiting for a show at the Middle East to start. It was about municipal police going out of control. You can see the Jack O' Lantern painting on the following page peeking through:

My college friend Josh Hooten started doing design for Punk Planet and I got offered a cover and a bunch of interior illos dealing with the Democratic and Republican conventions. The cover idea was meant to convey that politics were much scarier than Halloween:

Your standard 2-faced, forked-tongue politician:

Handlers trying to keep sleazy politician on leash from molesting his co-worker:

Militia family portrait for Punk Planet:

My ex moved back to Boston and we ended up hanging out and then going out again briefly (which I knew wouldn't last, which lead to more "bad day" paintings, heh. As confused as I was at the time, I actually like the paintings I got out of it).

She had a little black kitten with a large head that I ended up drawing everywhere. Little Kitty became the Black Cat Burlesque logo years later:

I drew her in an article about bitter old people in Boston hating young voters:

Phoenix illo about college student dorms right in Boston's "combat zone":

Stuff Magazine illo about women going in and out of abortion clinics surrounded by warring protesters from the Church of Euthanasia and Operation Rescue:

Phoenix "Back to School" issue illo about a college student trying to concentrate while his roommate has sex:

and students making money by modeling at nearby art schools:

Phoenix story illo about young single moms trying to finish their schooling:

Phoenix illo about nurses unable to do their job because of the Man's budget cuts:

Phoenix sketches and final illo for story about students taking part in experiments to make money; a student had just died following an experiment at the time. It was tricky trying to fit the disapproving judge into the composition:

the rest of these were done just for fun:

Sketchbook 19, April 1996-August 1996

2007-09-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

This was a rough period. My family had to put our dog to sleep and I was really crushed. It was the right thing to do, but there was a huge hole in my life. I was working part-time at the end of a conveyor belt at a local printshop, packing flyers into boxes as fast as possible. My hands became,basically, big red papercuts. Most of the full-timers were missing fingers from reaching into the big presses past the safety bars to clear paper jams. At night I was cranking out editorial illustrations for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Book Review. Things with my girlfriend at the time fell apart.
In early summer I was able to move back to Boston with some friends from MassArt and I got a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant 2 streets away. This was the beginning of my 7 years in a huge unheated attic that had its own bats; in Summer, temperatures in my room would hit 100 degrees and in Winter, thick frost would totally cover the INSIDE of the windows. I was called the "Heat Miser" and the "Cold Miser" depending on the season.

my striped-t-shirt girls were getting curvier:

I got into the habit of painting these "bad day" paintings when I was really down/ depressed/ frustrated/ etc....they were cathartic because I got a lot of my bad feelings out, and once they hit the paper I felt a lot better. Like, I was detached from them afterwards, and had these dark messy paintings done by some other guy who wasn't around anymore.

These are all editorial sketches and some finishes.
Boston Phoenix Book Review of "Accordion Crimes"; this sketch got printed accidentally instead of the slightly cleaner final I submitted:

Boston Phoenix story about long school days for little kids; they printed the fourth sketch:

(this one has a skull kid in the background for some reason! what was I doing?!)

Boston Phoenix story about the Man preventing same-sex couples from adopting kids, even if the kids want to be adopted by the couples:

Boston Phoenix story about little kids huffing aerosol cans:

Boston Phoenix story about a government mass-mailing campaign to abused women that informed them of all the services available to help them get away safely from their abusers

Boston Book Review illo for their Crime page:

Rejected Boston Phoenix sketch for story about domestic terrorists:

Boston Phoenix illo about same-sex abuse:

Boston Phoenix illo for story about a gay foreigner seeking political asylum in Boston:

Phoenix again, for story about medical marijuana denied to terminally ill patients:

The Phoenix, sketch for article about government spying:

Sketch for the Phoenix, for a story about corrupt Boston Transportation Department workers stealing money from everybody:

The Phoenix reprinted the "Boundaries" comic I'd done for the MassArt comic (also printed in Jef Taylor's "Don't Shoot! It's Only Comics" anthology) and I redrew this panel:

Illos for a Phoenix story about the Catholic church's efforts to "cure" lesbians and get them married to men:

Sketches for a commissioned painting by longtime buyer Tammy Hines based on a short story she'd written:

Illo for a Stuff Magazine story about men who cheat:

Phoenix sketch for story on homophobic judge:

Phoenix sketch for story about scientists burning another scientist for heresy (he had original ideas about causes/ cures for HIV):

Sketchbook 18, December 1995-March 1996

2007-07-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

This was a pretty bleak time. I quit the retail job because it was awful, and worked off and on for a temp agency. One memorable job was shoveling out a parking lot so people at an electric company could get to big tubes buried under thick ice. My foreman couldn't stop swearing or stuttering, usually at the same time. I was mailing out promo postcards to art directors every week, hoping to get art jobs instead.
weird heavy paintings:

It seems like the headlines are always bad, tons of random violence, terrorist attacks, innocent people getting murdered, all over the world but especially in the Middle East. I try to put myself in others' shoes pretty often, and this one came about from trying to imagine if the one I loved was suddenly killed by a terrorist....the shock, grief, horror, and anger of these people caught in the middle must be unbelievable

this "bad-day" sketchbook painting ended up being appropriate for a Boston Book Review spot illustration:

a masked monster nurse slipping a masked monster doctor a scalpel? what was I thinking?

more hospital badness:

Black and white version of a rejected cover for Lollipop magazine:

"The River-Bottom Man" was inspired by a gross story one of my fireman cousins told about pulling a huge bloated corpse out of the river. Fish had eaten the man's eyes, fingers, toes, etc. except for one finger....which came off in a cop's hand. So the cop let all the liquified stuff inside the finger-skin fall out, then slipped the finger over his own finger and was waving it around in the faces of the other cops and firemen on the scene to gross them out:

some less-depressing stuff:

"Don't cheat off my paper":

holiday card sketch:

and the actual card:

I hung out in coffeehouses with Tom at night and we drew in our sketchbooks and played "Bummy-Rummy", which was like regular gin rummy except you used 4 decks of cards, got 14 cards instead of 7, and discarded into a whole tabletop of cards placed face-down in no order. Games basically never ended.

My family's old dog Dudley's health was starting to fail. We'd had him since I was in 4th grade. He'd been rescued from the pound twice, about to be put to sleep both times, before a different cousin gave him to us. Here he's sleeping on the kitchen linoleum:

Girlfriend, drawn from memory

we had some tough times and I tried to put all my bad days into my sketchbook rather than talk to people about it

2 more sketchbook paintings I turned into promo postcards:

I finally got an assignment from the Boston Phoenix! After 9 months of constant postcard mailings, they hired me to make a spot illustration for a story about sexual harassment via email at the workplace. Here's the sketch that got approved. At the last minute I was told that the company in question would sue the Phoenix if they were represented as the monster in my illustration. I didn't want the assignment to slip away, so I painted another version without the monster insanely fast. It got printed.

I was lucky and soon got another Phoenix assignment, this time for a story about little kids bringing guns to school. They picked the last sketch for the final, and it ran as is:

Sketchbook 17, August 1995-November 1995

2007-07-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

This book starts and ends with comics. I'd do a thumbnail page layout in pencil, figuring out how big the panels should be, then draw/ paint the individual panels in my sketchbook twice the size, then Xerox them back down to 1/2 the size, cut them out, and tape them onto black painted layouts to be Xeroxed again.. I was heavily influenced by printmaking...woodcuts, blockprints, and the comic art of Ted McKeever. By using lots of scumbling and blotting and Xeroxing the finished sketchbook paintings, I found I could achieve a block-printy look in a fraction of the time it'd take to do a real woodcut.
This one was called "Boundaries", written by my friend Tom of Standard Design, published in the MassArt comicbook Forty-3, and reprinted in the Boston Phoenix. For these 5 pages I rubber-cemented torn pieces of paper for the hand-written text boxes. They've deteriorated a lot since then:

Some of the pre-Xerox panels:
The Tooth Fairy (later redrawn and used as a band poster for my friends The Kabooms):

The Boogeyman busting out of the narrator's closet:

Greegor the Little Kid Eater:

I was sending out tons of homemade postcards to art directors, Xeroxed right from these sketchbook paintings:

In the meantime I got a super-non-fulfilling part-time job in retail. Nothing is more inspiring to succeed as an artist than having to work shitty dayjobs. I doodled on the hour-long train rides going back and forth from work a lot with a Uniball pen:

After work I'd do more messy eyedropper and gouache sketchbook paintings back at my parents' place:

"not sharing":

"black bird":

Thumbnail sketches for a Halloween postcard:

girlfriend at the time, from memory:

Anybody who's ever looked through my sketchbooks knows they're loaded with weird lists. This book has a funny list of "head" insults to call people that my friends Peter Gueth and Jamie Gilb and I came up with on a long bus ride to NYC to visit our friend Matt Smith. Some good ones to use if you want to simultaneously insult and confuse your enemies:
"Stick-head, 2 x 4-head, fire extinguisher-head, deodorant-head, tunnel-head, halibut-head, machete-head, hill-head, acorn-head, light saber-head, bowling-ball-head, nunchucks-head, fist-head, pear-head, hibatchi-head, cigar-head, thumb-head, bean-head, toilet-head, ground beef-head,...."
"Afterschool Special". This was created for Jef Taylor's Boston comic anthology, "Don't Shoot, It's Only Comics!"'s wordless issue. Looking back, I really overdid the scumbling, sacrificing clarity for texture. If you can't make out what's going on, 3 bullies steal a smaller kid's hat and start beating him up. A huge monster disguised as a kid shows up, crushes 2 bullies' heads, bites the head off the 3rd bully, returns the little kid's hat, and then they play in the sandbox together.

I think as a kid, it took me a long time to understand that life isn't fair, especially if you try to obey the rules and be good. I had to go to a Catholic school for 8 years and was really naive, and so I got picked on/ beat up a lot. It confused the hell out of me, like, you're supposed to "turn the other cheek" and let kids whale on you...and if you chose to not fight back and tell a teacher instead that you're getting bullied, they'd bring out the the whole "No One Likes a Tattle-Tale" shit...and if you DO fight back, YOU'RE the one who ends up getting caught and punished. I wasn't street smart or anything, and I'd get really really sad that the other kids were just so mean, like, I was constantly surprised by it. Then in 6th grade I just snapped and started getting in crazy fights pretty often. It was very cathartic. And I started listening to Metallica and Slayer right in junior high too, so that helped a lot-----the music was so angry and aggressive and I totally identified with it. I turned into the total stereotypical sullen teenager for a while, and I remember my dad getting mad at me, asking "What happened to you? You used to be a happy kid!", and me yelling "Real life happened to me!" Ah, the past.
So basically, this comic is like my childhood revenge dreams come true: A huge monster shows up and rights the wrongs of the schoolyard. I think I should redo this in full-color and send it to Fantagraphics for one of their anthologies or something.

Sketchbook 16, June 1995-August 1995

2007-06-21T21:34:00.000-07:00

So I'd just turned 22, had a BFA from MassArt in illustration, and was working for the summer as a camp counselor in my hometown. Holy Moly, I forgot what a big deal kids cutting each other in line is. (Actually, I've yelled at people at bus stations and drug stores recently for just cutting in front of me, "What the hell, am I the Invisible Man? Get behind me!") People, don't cut each other in line. Even little kids know it's WRONG.
Anyways, these are pictures inspired by some of the awesome 6-year olds in my group. (I drew them from memory, not at camp. The days were too busy swimming, playing wiffle ball, doing arts and crafts using gimp, etc. I carried a little sketchbook around with me to doodle in, though, and the kids drew in it, too):

girlfriend at the time, from memory:

and from a photo:

This guy was at Hodgie's ice cream stand, a place famous for giving ridiculously huge cones and sundaes. He was trying to carry 4 cones, sputtering, "look at these ding-a-ling cones that ding-a-ling kid ding-a-ling gave me, what the ding-a-ling". you could tell he was dying to say the f-word:

I saw the band Clutch a zillion times in the early-mid 90s. This guy in the crowd really stood out and made me think of one of the lyrics, "Like Marlon Brando. But BIGGER." The other people in the drawing are pretty weak:

A slightly-cleaned up version of this was published in a magazine called Lollipop with an article:

I'd finally started doing quick pencil sketches before going in with the eye-dropper tool and ink, and was mixing white gouache in and blotting that as well. These were still messy weird sketchbook paintings but they were finally moving a little beyond just close-ups of faces and shoulders, into little situations:

"The Return of Headless Joe" (actually, a beagle named Homerun Joe chewed up the back cover of this sketchbook):

One of the first sketchbook paintings I turned into a self-promo postcard (4 to a sheet, gray cardstock hand-cut with Xacto knife at Kinko's self-serve station):

Jeff Weisner printed this painting along with a few others in his awesome zine Double Negative; the people at JDK who design all the snowboards for Burton saw the zine and hired me to paint the first Seven Series based on my sketchbook paintings:

I drew this woman from my head, pretty mindlessly, and a bunch of people who saw it afterward got all, "who's that? do you have her number? hook me up!". It surprised me:

random:

This isn't supposed to be anybody I know....I don't know the age or gender, just that I painted this and am seriously freaked out by my own picture. Seriously! I'm scared of this. and it's the last page of the book:

Sketchbook 15, January 1995-June 1995

2007-06-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

This one is my last book while at MassArt. It felt the same as senior year of high school....I just wanted it over, I wanted to get out into the "real world". Anyways, I was doing lots more mindless messing around with the eyedropper tool and india ink:

I turned this into a business card. No wonder it took a while for the assignments to start coming in:

(and now that I'm actually teaching at MassArt, I'm amazed by just how much more professional all the illustration seniors' promo materials look, compared to my 1995 class. Even the loose, messy-style stuff these days looks really polished, somehow.)
Imaginary Mob guy "Big Louie" getting whacked:

Jet from Sam Black Church:

Somehow my name was left off the posters for the senior illustration portfolio show, so I made my own and hung them up around campus. I wrote "Better than a knuckle-sandwich!" above this random sketchbook drawing with all the info hand-written below. Definitely didn't look like the other really professional-looking poster:

My old friend Chris, who used to sign his name, "Big Gator, the Stinkin' World Champion":

2 sketches for my degree project about a creepy town called Madville where spooky stuff happened all the time:

My girlfriend at the time, drawn from memory. I discovered in high school that most people I knew were camera shy, AND didn't want to sit for me, so I worked hard at developing my memory so that I could look at someone quickly and mentally record details about their appearance to draw later. It's been a helpful tool as an illustrator to have this big mental filing cabinet of expressions, hairstyles, clothing, body types, etc. (Plus, I felt like the wicked lame "I'm an ARTIST" guys hitting on girls, trying to get them to pose nekkid, made artists look really bad. Like, "If you want to ask her out, ask her out, but don't pretend you want to draw her when really, you're just trying to get her to get nekkid". I made up lots of weird conduct rules for myself at the time based on ways to avoid acting lame like other people around me.)

One of my former illustration teachers and his favorite quote:

Anatomy drawings copied from a book because I was forgetting everything:

Sketchbook 14, November 1994-January 1995

2007-06-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

This entry's a biggie. 14 was my first 11" x 14" sketchbook, what I use most of the time these days. I totally fell in love with drawing with the eyedropper tool and india ink, blotting with cheap paper towels and napkins (more expensive ones usually had a pattern that showed on the sketchpaper). I'd fill up 10 pages at a sitting, not planning the pictures out in pencil, just experimenting as I went. It's weird to see how much my style has changed since then. Sometimes I think I should go back to this style, but with color, backgrounds, and interaction between characters so the illustrations would be more than just close-ups of weird people's heads and shoulders:

More stripes!

Tightie-whities:

Inspired by memory of my cousin's daughter on Christmas eve:

The baby wasn't supposed to look creepy:

I saw a lot of SBC shows but this isn't me or anyone in particular:

Meghan reading:

Apparently I brought different-size Rapidographs to my critical studies classes to do life-drawings. Notes on Hamlet and my friend Trish:

Sketchbook 13, September 1994-November 1994

2007-06-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

This is from the start of my senior year at MassArt when I was 21, and it's missing a lot of pages for some reason. Pretty dark. I was listening to lots of Godlesh and Ministry:

I ended up doing a 4-color screenprint of this little acrylic sketchbook painting, called "Sisters":

Sketch for the assignment, "What you see just before seeing a dead body":

Grim Reaper kite:

Imaginary mob hitman:

I started going to a nearby bar called Flann O'Brien's with my friends pretty regularly (though it's not a self-portrait, haha):

Sketchbook 12, May 1994-August 1994

2007-05-18T10:59:00.000-07:00

This one's from the end of Junior year and Summer before Senior year at MassArt. I worked at a summer day-camp in Haverhill (and won "Counselor of the Year"! But I was so tired of camp that I skipped the end-of-camp party and took my dog for ice cream instead. The next day the boss gave me the plaque I was supposed to have received the night before. I was surprised I'd won and felt like a dink for skipping. Oh well) and started going on road trips with my friends. I think this was the summer I almost drowned in a big reservoir on the 4th of July. Trying to swim across a big deep reservoir after running around in a heat wave without really eating or sleeping for a few days is a bad idea.

Kate with her new Bono glasses:

Anthony:

Random:

Sketch for "Anxiety" painting assignment:

Doodle I ended up using as a poster for the "Last-Minute Larry" art show at MassArt, made up of (if I remember correctly) Paul Alix, Jeremy Majewski, Peter Gueth, Dave Forbes, Alethea Roy, Chris "Big Gator, the Stinking World Champion" Melchin, Bob Maloney, and me. I remember John Quackenbush sang and played guitar in a corner at the opening, somebody secretly hung up photos from a porn magazine on the wall (making my poster appropriate, now that I think about it), and there was a frat-movie scenario where the public safety people locked up the kegs we'd bought for the opening in the President's office because Pete had written we were only going to buy one six-pack (?) on the stupid forms ahead of time. After the opening we got the kegs back and had to roll them up to somebody's apartment in Mission Hill for the after party:

My parents from a photo:

Sheila:

Meghan

Jeremy:

Miki from Lush. I loved this band's first couple albums and saw them at Lollapalooza and Local 186 (R.I.P.) in Allston:

I started to really get into painting with cheap black acrylic

I started using ink with the eyedropper and blotting, but wouldn't allow myself to go in with white gouache to touch-up areas, for some reason. Maybe because I'd trained myself to be so neat with the Rapidographs, I wanted the ink paintings to be dead-on, too. Dumb.

This father and daughter were the only survivors of some disaster in my head:

Sketchbook 11, March 1994-May 1994

2007-05-17T20:53:00.000-07:00

More Jack the Ripper sketches for skool:

Creepy kids love thunderstorms:

The ol' "draw shiney circles on everybody's noses and cheeks" thing was hard to get past, even when I worked with color. I could've just left those areas lighter than the rest of her face. But no.

ideas for a linoleum print:

test print:

I've knew Tom P. since first grade, way before he became Standard Design. At MassArt he was known as Goat for a while. Tom is an all-around kick-ass good guy.

Sketcbook 10, January 1994 -March 1994

2007-05-17T20:50:00.000-07:00

More stuff from my junior year at MassArt. There are tons of scratchy thumbnail drawings in this book that are probably incomprehensible to anyone but me.
Some exceptions:

My old friend Nicole:

Tet & Romas:

My Dad:

STILL drawing those long-haired girls in striped shirts! jeez. Check out the career advice from Jason Miller:

Some thumbnails for a 3-piece Jack the Ripper assignment (I remember being totally horrified by the crime scene photo of his final victim, Mary Kelly, in the research books I got out of the MassArt library for this assignment):

Pied Piper assignment thumbnails:

I was going to lots of hardcore shows and thought about doing my degree project on the club scene. 2 thumbnail versions of kids getting searched for weapons outside a club (the rockabilly guy was a bouncer at Axis):

thumbnails for a gangster drive-by scene:

thumbnails for a Floyd Covert assignment where we needed to show something about to happen that our characters weren't expecting; I drew a monster lurking behind a tree about to scare Trick-or-Treaters:

Sketchbook 9, November 1993-January 1994

2007-05-07T21:18:00.000-07:00

Man, I was cranking through these sketchbooks every 3 months! More stuff from Junior year at MassArt.
My old pal Brooke:

My friend Paul said, "I can't wait til you stop drawing like this" when he saw these elves. The shiny-nose-and-cheeks-style was definitely a fad for a few of us.

The Sticker Sheet. I drew these with Rapidograph pen in my sketchbook, xeroxed a zillion of them on sticker sheets, and gave them out as Christmas presents instead of a print like I'd been doing in previous years.

This one's got really bad hands

Fire and the guy crowdsurfing have nothing to do with eachother, just weird overlapping drawings:

Naked John, rebel of the nursing home:

Weird lecherous guy on a couch with a woman

Sketchbook 8, September 1993-November 1993

2007-05-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

This is from the beginning of my Junior year at MassArt. I got a big single room in the dorm and was just on fire to draw draw draw, for myself AND for school. I think this is when my personality finally began to come through in my assignments.
Sketch for (I think) my first ever poster; MassArt published a big 11" x 17" photocopy zine called "The Rag", anything and everything submitted to the editors got published. There'd be multi-media "Rag Shows" for each new release, with food, beer, music, and people doing buck nekkid performance art more often than not.

My friend Jason Miller did crazy hand-drawn type and inspired me to start doing my own:

Sketch for a portrait assignment:

I re-discovered the joys of dying markers:

Apparently I was really into drawing long-haired girls in striped shirts:

More "back of head" drawings from my academic classes:

Zombies!

My friend Sheila worked at a summer daycamp where a certain kid would do this awesome arm gesture to "assert himself". His initials were "BB" and I ended up making a sticker of him:

My friend Peter, who my favorite teacher once called a "chronic case of Teutonic lassitude"...Pete was late for a class a lot:

I got REALLY into creating weird patterns to put on people's clothing. Here are some I started in an academic class but gave up on because I was supposed to be paying attention

Woo! Woo!

Sketch for an alphabet book project; Q is for Quiltmaker

I ended up using this guy in an ad for Forty-3, the MassArt Comicbook:

Sketch for an assignment where I needed to show 3 generations of one family in one image....I wanted the baby to be reaching for the ghost of his grandmother in a cemetery but couldn't make it work:

She ended up becoming the "Snowangel" for a rock poster in 1998:

Sketchbook 7 Part 2

2007-05-06T18:46:00.000-07:00

More stuff from this book, which covers April 1993-September 1993. I was 19 years old, finishing up sophomore year at Massart.

My old friend Jason Arnone:

Melissa:

Meghan's cat, Patrick (badly drawn arms on that chair):

Girl I saw at a hardcore show:

Sometimes I scare the crap out of myself:

Sketchbook 7, April 1993-September 1993

2007-03-31T16:27:00.000-07:00

This book was a lot more fun....I was finally getting to take some illustration classes and drawing constantly, both for school and just for myself. I also broke up with my girlfriend of 2-plus years and became a lot more social. Some of the friends I made at this point still meet up every Friday night at a bar in Jamaica Plain for "Drink and Draw" sketchbook nights, it's a lot of fun. Fun counts for a lot with me.

Pencil and color sketches for what ended up being a punk rock mother and child painting I did with little kid tempera on gessoed black matteboard....I was really into Andrew Wyeth's egg tempera drybrush paintings, but I was (and still am) all about instant results. If I get all fired up with an idea, I just want to draw/ paint it out ASAP and not lose time prepping and customizing my surface. Wyeth's egg tempera method sounded like it took forever to prepare and the primary school color tempera paints I had were ready to roll. Plus I was thrifty....after the first semester reviews tons of students who did poorly threw all their assignments (mounted with rubber cement on nice black matteboard) in the trash. I reclaimed them, peeled off the crappy drawings, and ended up with a huge pile of good black matteboard to paint on. I hate plain white surfaces and preferred to work on black or dark blue colors for years:

Sketch of my friend Adam:

My friend Paul:

My friend Tom of Standard Design and the band No-Shadow Kick:

Creepy guy in long underwear (I'm actually scared of my own drawing):

My old friend Dave, who was in Tom's old band:

Sketch for my page of the "Jack" story a bunch of us collaborated on for FORTY-3:

Sketchbook 6, September 1992 to April 1993

2007-03-31T16:05:00.000-07:00

Sophomore year at MassArt. Pretty slim pickins here, mostly boring sketches for school projects I'd never show anybody now. In the beginning I was having a hard time injecting my personality into the assignments. This is stuff I doodled:

this drawing popped out of my head, based on no one, but I've got to admit I have a big crush on her, even all these years later:

Creepy clown with fingerpuppets sketch I did for my "Saturday Night Special" Forty-3 cover:

I'd usually end up drawing all my friends during the long critical studies classes (somehow I managed to pass them all):

Sketches for the MassArt comic book stories I was working on; some got finished, some didn't. Some of these I think I'll redo big, in color, now that I look at them:

These are sketches from the "Shades" series I did, inspired by 7 random lines in Peter Straub's awesome "If You Could See Me Now" novel. I added a few more lines of my own.
"One Went To Seed":

"One Kept a Vigil" (wraith woman sitting on the surface of a lake at night. I never could get her quite right):

"One Had The Last Word" (Clyde Gunky dancing on a grave):

Sketchbook 5

2007-03-29T20:11:00.000-07:00

I think my first real 9" x 12" sketchbook, July 1991 to April 1992, so it's most of my freshman year at MassArt. I stuck with 9" x 12" and 11" x 14" books from this point on. I was spending most of my time experiencing life on my own for the first time, exploring Boston, and doing assignments.

These are mostly sharp pencil or ballpoint pen, continuous lines, no preliminary sketching.

the idea for the "One Swam in Blood" panel of my "Shades" comic in the MassArt comicbook, FORTY-3, (later recycled for the poster for Cherry 2000's 7" "Blood Red" single release party):

this guy was inspired by John Cleese:

I ended up making limited edition stipple prints of this "Folly" guy and a jacket painting:

Another sketch for a limited edition stipple print: Clyde Gunky playing with a Hot Wheels hearse while Floyd reads the obituaries:

one-minute life-drawing sketches done with the eyedropper tool and india ink:

1991 Odds and Ends

2007-03-05T21:10:00.000-08:00

Freshman year at MassArt I had to keep a separate sketchbook for my Artists' Seminar class, an 8.5" x 11" hardcover that I pretty much left alone after that semester. Here's a couple spreads from that:

Detail:

Something inspired by stuff I'd written earlier that year in high school creative writing class:

"Metallica ABC: Anticipating "Blackened"'s Crescendo, Delirious Eardrums Faithfully Genuflect. Hetfield's Incendiary Jamming, Kirk's Leads Match Newstead's Outrageous Picking. Quirky Rhythms Slamming Tamas, Ulrich Violently Wallops Xylophonic Yellow Zildians".
What a geek I was.

Details:

Sketchbook 4

2007-03-05T18:48:00.000-08:00

These are from my second semester of freshman year at MassArt, January to May of 1992.
Cheapy watercolor set from middle school:

(I'd discovered Edward Gorey's "Amphigorey" books, loaded with morbid rhymes, and came up with one of my own):

Floyd and Clyde Gunky (Clyde's got some bad shading on his temple)

Creepy comic sketches for the stuff I did for MassArt's comicbook, Forty-3, created and edited by Tom of Standard Design:

sketches for a 3 color linocut and the disappointing final product:

the first of what came to be many sketchbook girls wearing striped shirts:

Sketchbook 3, Autumn 1990-Winter 1991

2007-02-19T21:58:00.000-08:00

On to Sketchbook 3, from senior year of Haverhill High into my first year at Massachusetts College of Art. I finally started to loosen up and get away from the Rapidographs every so often. The sketches sloooowly started to become more lively instead of page after page of 1" tech-pen heads.
Clyde Gunky skateboarding (My friend Adam had clippers and would shave my head every few weeks, and this is the sketch for a painting I did on his tshirt as payment.

Polaroid of the finished shirt:

Floyd and Clyde sketch for a print I made as a high school graduation picture (I used to make crazy detailed pen and ink 8.5" x 11" holiday cards and get them professionally printed at a hometown printshop, then pass them out in high school):

more Floyd Gunky Sketches:

Study for "October" painting:

and the finished product:

Study for "Progressive Degeneration" print:

and the pen and ink finish:

detail:

Still drawing little heads

Still drawing Metallica

Girlfriend at the time

Pushead praying to a skull:

Sketchbook 2, Winter 1989-Summer 1990

2007-02-12T21:32:00.000-08:00

This is stuff from the end of junior year at Haverhill High School into senior year.
Still drawing lots of tiny Rapidograph heads:

My Winnie the Pooh bear is as old as I am, and is so threadbare you can see the tiny bean bag filling in his hands and feet

Still drawing Metallica (mostly from memory at this point, since I drew them so often)

Metallica Muppets!

I started listening to other stuff though, mostly on WFNX, like Jane's Addiction:

and U2

and The Cure's "Disintegration" album had just come out:

Robert Smith and James Hetfield Muppets:

imaginary line outside a punk/ metal show:

Halloween characters:

Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera:

and I created Clyde Gunky, the evil twin brother of Floyd:

Mister Reusch's Sketchbook Archive

2007-02-08T18:57:00.000-08:00

Tonight I realized I'm about to start my 47th 100-page sketchbook, and I sat down and flipped through all 46 books. Some of the covers are falling off, some of the pages are badly smudged, but there was still a lot of stuff in there that made me laugh out loud, stuff I'd totally forgotten about, and plenty of stuff that made me cringe. So I decided to start a big online sketchbook archive, starting with my first actual sketchbook. Hopefully I won't be a decrepit old man by the time I get all my old sketches posted.

All art is copyright Mister Reusch. Reproduction of any/ all images without prior permission from me is strictly prohibited and constitutes copyright infringement. High-resolution digital prints are available for these images, just contact me.

Anyways, here we go!
SKETCHBOOK # 1: Summer-Fall, 1989.

I was starting my junior year of high school, addicted to drawing microscopic faces with a Rapidograph .000 pen, and listening to Metallica constantly (I drew them constantly, too). Most of these sketches are smaller than an inch on the longest side. No wonder I'm blind these days. I almost never did pencil sketches back then, these are straight Rapidograph on sketchbook:

I created the character of "Floyd Gunky", a creepy zombie metalhead, inspired by the Grinch, Iron Maiden's mascot Eddie, Megadeth's mascot Vic Rattlehead, and the guys in Metallica:

a rare instance of actual sketches, for a high school art project where I had to draw a dream:

and the final 14" x 17" tech pen final:

and our old family dog, Dudley, in the yard: