The Isle of Elsi Book Two Kickstarter is now LIVE!!!

The goal for this project is to print the second book collection of my award-winning, Eisner-nominated webcomic, Isle of Elsi! It's a fun, all-ages, fantasy comic with dragons, wizards, talking wolves and lots of silly wordplay. They are the best comics I've ever made!

I'm offering lots of print reward tiers including copies of Book One, an activity book, and comic books!

My amazingly talented wife, Claire Sanders, has created some incredible 9" plush toys of the "ite" characters, as well as two 13" Nogard the Dragon plush toys!

Please check out the Kickstarter page for more info, and I would appreciate it so much if you could help me spread the word about this campaign! Below are social media posts that can be easily shared!

• Instagram
• Twitter
• Facebook

And all of the images above can be downloaded in this google drive folder, if you would like to share any of them with your friends and family. Thanks so much for your help! Together we can make this book a reality!

About a month after I illustrated the poster for weezer's Indie Rock Roadtrip summer tour I was hired by weezer to help create the concert visuals for all their performances this summer. I illustrated 711 assets and animated 99 loops which were then composited together, animated, and plussed by the incredibly talented team at SRND Studios in Brooklyn, NY under the direction of Brian Palmer and Brad Palmer.

Also the stage design for this show was directly based on the cover art for the It’s Been So Long weezer fan club single which I illustrated back in 2019 with lots of reference help from Karl Koch. Obviously, working on these tour visuals was a dream job for me! I worked hard to put in a ton of easter eggs and deep weezer lore for hardcore fans. I hope everyone has fun rocking out this summer! The photos above are from the first night of the tour in Alabama, taken by weezer fan club member Britton Wade.

Some folks have been asking me "Wow, how'd you get that gig?" so I put together this weezer page on my illustration site, documenting the past 13 years of projects I've done for weezer and the weezer fan club. You can also check out my book weezer fan which goes into great detail about how I went from fan to working with the band.

On June 7, 2023 I will launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of the second hardback book collection of Isle of Elsi! Check back here on June 7th for a link to the campaign, or follow @isleofelsi on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks in advance for any help spreading the word about this!

I had the honor of illustrating the tour poster for weezer's upcoming summer tour, the Indie Rock Roadtrip! I guess Rivers really liked the album art I created for the "It's Been So Long" Weezer Fan Club exclusive 7" so he wanted this tour to have the same vibe. I was hired to illustrate this poster with a very quick turnaround (less than a week!). It was art directed by Karl Koch and Brendan Walter at Crush Music.

It launched yesterday and it has been really cool seeing all the ways these assets have been used, including in the tour announcement video and weezer changing all their social media icons to the interstate =w= sign! I also turned in some other art with this poster which may be used for various merch, and it's looking like there might be some other places where my art turns up during this tour this summer!

All of this is a bit surreal, and really a dream job for me. If you don't know about my relationship with weezer (my all-time favorite band) check out my book Weezer Fan which you can read for free over in the Phase Seven Comics archive, or buy in print or as a $0+ eBook. As they say in The Sweater Song, "Life is so rad!"

One of my creative goals for 2023 is to complete all the online animation classes I've signed up for over the past few years. (There's not enough time to do all the assignments, so I may just watch the videos for some courses and take notes).

I've allowed myself to sign up for one final new course: 2D Animation: Walk Cycle & Character Movement over at Animation Mentor. This workshop is six weeks (mid-February to the end of March) and is taught by Jay Jackson who worked as a traditional animator at the Disney Studio in the '80s and '90s, and at many other studios over the years. Mr. Jackson will be providing feedback via video critiques and then the class meets over live video once a week. I'm really excited to learn from a real animator, after mostly teaching myself using books and online classes. This workshop is a big investment for me, but I hope it'll help push my animation skills up to the next level!

The Animation Mentor online learning platform is super impressive, with lots of ways to interact with other students' and their work (most of them are studying 3D computer animation). Each student has their own profile page, where you are allowed to link to a demo reel, so I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to create my first one!

Demo reels are like a portfolio of recent work for animators looking for work. I'm not actually looking to get hired right now, but it was fun editing together a single video that collected a bunch of what I've learned so far. It's like a snapshot of where my skills were before this last big year of classes.

Starting next year I hope to continue my learning by doing! I'm (slowly) working on an idea for an animated short, which I hope to finish before I turn 50. Wish me luck!