If Adventure Has a Name

It must be Nicolas Cage. All I can say about this one is, I hope enough people buy it because I can't wait to start on the sequel.

The Norton Itch

I put up a new painting, Fortean Norton. And by "new" I mean I started it 2006, had it in a storage tub for two and half years, showed it in an unfinished too-green state at the Gallery 1988 show this summer, and now after a bit more tinkering it's maybe possibly completed (there's another painting from that show I have yet to put online; it's also being reworked). The inspiration is a tremendous drawing of Edward Norton my brother Darrin did many years ago:


I wanted to see if I could give that sketch dimensionality, and also get out of 'gluing celebrity heads onto funny bodies' mode and try out an outsider art/horrible-drippy-people style. Parts of it were really fun to paint but I'm not sure if those parts ever came together into a confident and resolved painting.


The fox mask is something my friend Alexa made in real life, and the little gremlin faces--representing trophies from Norton's globe-spanning travels--are knickknacks from her parents' house. The picture of Mothman, well, that's just a picture of Mothman.

In One Week

I'll be at table 258 at San Francisco's Alternative Press Expo next weekend. APE is just like a comic book convention, but with lots of new art & comics to sample and no cosplayers or movie studios. So I guess it's nothing like a comic book convention. It runs Saturday October 17th from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm, and Sunday the 18th from 11:00 to 6:00. Admission is ten bucks or something, or completely free if you have your pass from this year's San Diego comic-con.

I'll have a bunch of T-shirts, posters, prints, and cards for sale at reduced prices (I've got to make room for new Christmas products), and I'll be around to sign stuff the whole time. Just a few tables down will be a bunch of bros from Topatoco as well (see map above).

It sure is fun to meet people!

Cited!

p. 88 of this:



p. 91 of this:



It feels good and tingly to look in the index of something and see your name and then a number.

I have the previous book by (one of) the authors of the SVU Guide, and it is super-informative and kinda dishy with its interviews. So I expect the same from this one.

The TV Guide Special contains a lot of endearing Jerry Orbach stories, and some swell photographs a certain artist will be stealing for future projects. I got mine at a Target.

I would say both are essential reading for critical minds.

Happy 20

Tonight, at 8:00 pm EST on NBC, "Law & Order" enters its twentieth year. I'll be celebrating in my own little way, by making fantastical new L&O art all year long.

Like this Jack McCoy shirt, which I think I'm going to order up and then it'll be available on brandonbird.com in about 2 or 3 weeks.

What a scoop!

I don't have any artwork ready this week, but here's something I've been sitting on all summer, waiting to confirm with my Hollywood sources. Finally, I can announce the full cast of Star Trek 2: The Next Generation:










I've also heard rumblings of Tom Hanks as the film's Romulan villain.

Twisted, Mutated Freaks

Against the Brotherhood of Mutants! This was the first concept I had for the Stan Lee show, before deciding to go with a duck-laden Magneto. Maybe not my most brilliantest concept, but after having it rattle around for a year it was sort of like, "Yeah... this still amuses me for some reason. I guess I'll have to paint it."

I also wanted to do a trial run for this style, in preparation for another, larger thing I'm working on. It's basically one of the horrible pop-art paintings I made in high school but done using oil instead of acrylics: instead of having the colors be flat and static, there can be subtle wet-into-wet effects, and instead of having all the lines be solid black they can vary in weight and translucency. The downside is having to wait a million hours for each layer to dry.