Your work was not among those selected...

Apologies for a long delay between posts! I've been sick and that has kept me laying low over the last two weeks or so.

And though my Pueo painting was not selected for the 2008 Birds in Art catalog, an annual art competition coordinated by the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, I was excited to have entered my first art competition, which resulted in a letter I received in the mail that says "Your work was not among those selected..." Oh well!

And as promised from the last post on bunny love, I am going to talk about turtle love in this post.

I grew up playing with turtles who wandered on over to our yard from a nearby pond. They were painteds and I'd put them in a little red wagon I had and gave them a ride around the lawn. Not so good for the turtles, I'm sure, as they were just lost and wanting to get back to the pond. But for a kid like me, they were hours of entertainment and I would always let them go. My comic below illustrates why I think turtles are so cool (click to enlarge).



After graduation from college and a stint working nearly minimum wage at the Fantagraphics Books warehouse and office in Seattle, I decided to do something with my degree and go work at a National Park. I love Fantagraphics Books but I had always wanted to work outside with wildlife and had no idea how to get such a job at that time. Nowadays, there are a lot of resources on environmental careers in addition to there being more environmental job opportunities in general.

At the time, I found out about a Hawksbill Sea Turtle Conservation Program run by Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawai'i that needed full-time volunteers. Housing and food money would be provided, in addition to getting some field experience in endangered wildlife conservation as well as the added perks of living and working in a National Park. Might I add that the park also encompasses the world's most active volcano, Kilauea. In fact, the Kilauea caldera, which was only a 10 minute walk from our government housing, has recently been registering small earthquakes and slight contractions with the renewed activity of its eruption point, Pu'u O'o.

I spent two seasons working for this program in 1996 and 1997: one season as a full-time volunteer, the second season as part-time paid/part-time volunteer. My time with the turtle program was incredible and very formative. In addition to the joy of living in Hawai'i without paying rent and working at a wage job, I made life-long friends, learned about Hawai'i's history and culture, slept on remote beaches, got experience in wildlife conservation, appeared in the hawksbill sea turtle documentary Red Turtle Rising (best documentary of 2000 at the Hawai'i International Film Festival), and worked with these ancient-looking sea turtles.






Most important of all, I became comfortable in the skin I'm in. But that's a whole 'nutha story.

Anyhow, it wasn't all beach and fun. Through my experience, I learned how Hawai'i has some serious issues with habitat loss, dwindling wildlife populations, and the displacement of its native and local people population, it's kama'aina, due to the rising costs of living, loss of land ownership and its history of having been colonized and overthrown by the United States of America. There are interesting developments on acknowledging Hawaiian sovereignty currently in the works.

Because of working on this program, sea turtles and turtles in general inspired a lot of art in me naturally. I am still excited by the turtles that I see in New York City, especially by the elusive snapper turtle, a native of the area. And though my art didn't make it into the Birds in Art catalog of 2008, my sea turtle design made it permanently onto a fellow turtle-lover's body. Recently, my friend Marta got a tattoo of my baby sea turtle design on her hip!!






Now that's commitment to turtle love, and very flattering to me as an artist to have one of my designs permanently inked onto someone's body other than my own (I have a defpo tat).

Mahalo nui, Marta!! And "a hui hou" to the turtles of the world!

Bunny Love

Wow, I just found out about an art project that I wish I was a part of. Clicking through some convoluted path in the web on a rather wet rainy day, I ran into "the essence of rabbit" (be sure to zoom into the mandala) , a hypnotizing mandala of over a thousand bunny images by more than 500 artists. Sure, I'm a few years late in finding out about this project and now all copies of this poster are sold out, but still, they coulda called me to contribute a bunny or two :). Like, I'd be happy to have lent my bunny image as modeled by Michael.



Those who know me, know I love rabbits, and the image of rabbits appears frequently through my artwork, especially in my comics. My bunny muse was Goo, a rabbit I had when I was in high school (about a decade and a half ago). After all, how could one resist creating art and devoting web posts to a rabbit such as this one?





I documented the life of Goo in a three-paged comic many years ago for Doochisuck, my comic zine. And though he was domesticated and not meant for a life in the wild, his days in a cage were a lot like this below after I went off to college and couldn't bring him with me.



Being caged sucks and my mom ended up giving him to a family that had three kids who could play with him and let him out regularly. But in the end, his story (as I know it) ended like this:




Non-Goo bunnies would also appear in my comics too. Click below image to enlarge, read and laugh out loud. Well, I hope you laugh.





Next up, Turtle Love, stay tuned. And as always, thanks for visiting!

Octopus on Bike

I'm currently working on a submission for a friend of a friend's bike magazine, whose next issue will have stories on biking in New York City. I love biking in New York City, and as the temperature gets warmer, it's time for me to dust off my bike. I'm a warm- and dry-weather leisure biker, not very hardcore like the messengers you see tearing down Broadway during rush hour with no helmet on, bus bearing down upon them. I got my big yellow bike with upright handles, helmet on my head, NYC biking map in the bag, big fat chain for locking up, going at my own pace either across the greenway of Queens or down to the Atlantic Ocean through Brooklyn. One of my biking goals this summer is to circumnavigate Manhattan. Speaking of circumnavigating Manhattan, this Saturday is Shorewalker's the Big Saunter, where participants will circle Manhattan along its shoreline (wherever you can) on foot, about 35 miles total, starting at 7:30 am. Website is here for more info: http://www.shorewalkers.org/.

So the first thing that came to mind for this illustration was an octopus on a bike (a get-up which I have donned before for a Seattle city ride, my big octopus on my head, sock nautiluses tied all over my bike, devil ray perched on the handlebars leading the way, etc.).



So first I came up with the sketch.



Then I dug around for an old sketch I did of a herd of devil rays swimming through the ocean.



Then I put the two together into one layout:



And came up with this after many hours and layers of acrylic paint (click on image to enlarge, it's fun to see it big):




The coral in the bottom right and upper left went through the most changes from the original sketch, becoming quite blurred and undefined. The coral wasn't turning out the way I wanted it to, so I just started loosening up and slapping paint on, blurring as I went and adding layers and colors. It freed me up a little, which you gotta be when you're an octopus riding a bike across the ocean floor.