I always get a lot of illustration work done when school is in session, since I draw for my school’s paper– the Columbia Daily Spectator.  It’s a great way to get more of my stuff in print and keep my portfolio up to date, plus I met some amazing people there.

Anyway, here are a couple illustrations I’m pretty happy with from September.

This was drawn for an article about the film adaptation of The Help.  I haven’t actually seen it… good thing its website had screenshots.

I am very familiar with these guys (yes, even the frat boy… I grew up in a big college town, what can I say).  Last summer Jon and I found out that Hey Arnold was on Netflix, and we freaked out!  This was drawn for an article on 90s Nickelodeon nostalgia, which hasn’t been published yet.  I spent plenty of time in front of the TV as a kid, and I’m so grateful that there was a real effort at that point to show funny, well-drawn cartoons and not just half-hour action figure commercials (though there were still some of those, too…).  Plus… I was Catdog for Halloween when I was eight.

Well well well, look who’s back from SPX!  It’s yer ol’ pal, Steph.

I took the bus down to DC/Bethesda with my good friends Kate and Daryl, where we shared a table with Li-Or Zaltzman and Tom Hart (also good friends).  Tom and I were debuting our comics-themed newspaper, Seriously Comics.

It’s a fun, dumb tribute to New York City’s indie/alternative comics scene.  We interviewed some great people (Gary Panter, Dash Shaw, Keith Mayerson) and made fun of our friends (too many to count).

This was my first SPX, and probably the best comics show I’ve ever been to.  It was also my first show with my new mini-comic (Nate the Nonconformist Crashes a Party), which did really well!  I almost ran out of copies by the end of the show.  Surely a sign of success.  From now on, I need to make bigger print runs.

For most of the past spring/summer, I was fortunate enough to get an internship animating at Brooklyn-based Augenblick Studios.  Augenblick is best known for its work on the first season of Superjail!, along with the Comedy Central show Ugly Americans, which the studio currently works on.  One of the great things about this internship (aside from working with some amazingly dedicated and funny people) was the amount of DRAWING I got to do!

At Augenblick, interns work as inbetweeners for the studio’s lead animators.  Oftentimes this would involve drawing hands, which gave me a lot of practice in terms of drawing hands in different positions/angles.  Animating also taught be a lot about acting, body language, hand movement, etc.  I immediately started to get a lot better at these things in my own comics after starting my internship.  I also did some background clean-up, leading to… you guessed it… a TON of improvement on backgrounds in my own work.

All in all, my internship at Augenblick was amazing and taught me a lot about animating.  I even got to record some background chatter on a few Ugly Americans episodes… but that’s another story.

Whacking spiders in Vermont

The last few months have been completely nuts.  I just finished a month of work at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT.  It was quite the change of pace from city life.  Right now I’m visiting family for a few days, then it’s back to Manhattan and Columbia University.  But…

What’s this???

Is that a new mini-comic?!?  Yes, it is!

One of the perks of working at CCS is the fact that I got 24-hour access to its incredible production lab, run by bookmaking wizard and all-around good guy Jon Chad.  I had been working on this comic for a while, and Jon helped me put it all together as a book during my last few days in White River Junction.  It had been a while since I had last screenprinted before CCS, though I did it a lot in high school.  That being said, these 2-color prints look GREAT!

The new mini-comic is called Nate the Nonconformist Crashes a Party, and it’s 32 pages long.  Though it’s officially debuting at SPX next week, I brought some copies to Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor, and so far it’s gotten a good response.  People started picking it up right away.

Speaking of which… I’ll be at the Small Press Expo with my lovely student art collective, Coffee Spoons Comics, in just a little over a week!  We’ll be sharing a table with Tom Hart.  Tom and I will be debuting a new zine/newspaper we’ve been working on, called Seriously Comics.  It features some great interviews with cartoonists like Dash Shaw and Gary Panter.  This will be my first time exhibiting at SPX, and I can’t wait.

A lot more happened this summer, but I’ll leave that for another blog post.

-Steph

Illustrations for an article on women in film.

Here’s an illustration for the Columbia Political Review.  About money and Switzerland.  I didn’t write the article.

Making this quick, since I have to be at my music theory class in five minutes.

Anyway, this August I am going to be an intern at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont!

The internship will last for a month and I’m really excited.  Looking forward to meeting all the great artists there, as well as spending a little time out of the city this summer (much as I love it here)!

Another Columbia Spectator illustration, this time for an article about puppets in serious theater.  As a kid who grew up on the muppets it was definitely fun to draw.

Right now I’m interning for the great indie cartoonist Tom Hart.  I did this illustration for a book he’s working on about comics teaching (he teaches at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan).