Updates on here will begin trickling in after this week; until then, you can follow me at sadsadkiddie.tumblr.com or @rattusRose , for a more up-to-date look at what I’ve been up to.

In the meantime, here’s something I just finished; I did this month’s banner over at 72 demons, a kickstarter book project I’m participating in.

Pulled from my 72demons blurb:

I decided to pull heavily from the natural world for my banner demons. Using animal imagery that typically evokes thoughts of pestilence or horror, I wanted to use expression and color to saturate the characters with a kind of unrestrained and manic glee. Do they want to hug you or eat you?

aww yeah. <3

I also participated in Hourly Comics Day, but they exist in a hodgepodge of scans and cell phone pictures on twitpic right now. I need to reformat a few of them before I stick ‘em on here.

Not dead, I promise. more soon.

-c

On October 14th, straiGHT ouTTA deviantART opened @ Carnegie Mellon’s The Frame Gallery – a foray into the world of internet persona, obsession, fetish, history, worship, performance and absurdity.

You can find the flickr gallery here -Tara Helfer, Tim Sherman, Honor Randall, Meagan Trott and myself put together a low-fi gallery show in the middle of October that was meant to let us get in touch with our nerdy, nerdy roots. Riffing on pop/internet/fan/furry/sub-cultures, each artist delivered work that emulated and exaggerated boiled-down versions of their  pre-Carnegie Mellon selves.

Artists wandered the crowd costumed to match their work, encouraging visitors to comment on the make-shift messageboards that hung next to every piece, and to join them in MIDI karaoke at the front of the space.

Footage of the performers was livestreamed and linked to 4chan, who actively ignored our (somewhat) musical love letter to the internet.

Meagan wailed into the mic and photoshopped herself into oblivion.

Tim VJed the event, splicing youtube videos and internet cats on the fly into unholy super cat videos the likes of which cannot be unseen.

Honor tapped into her inner cam-whore, enshrining pictures of herself, friends, and absolute strangers into an ode to the cell phone self- portrait.

Tara painted a series of Internt-Famous Cats and ran around terrifying people in a horse mask.

My contributions to the show were a print of Let Slip the Sparkledogs of War

and Andy Warhoof, a 44″ x 44″ print

An Internet Artist  Pseudo-Manifesto

I have plenty of things I should be doing, but twitterdoodles & the second season of Mad Men are taking precedence tonight- gotta unwind somehow, yeah?

I want to draw happy, toothy things now and forever.

<3

Other than beginning my SUPER SECRET SENIOR STUDIO project, much of September was devoted to prepping for the month of October… which quickly turned into a bit of a clusterfuck.
My tendency to agree to EVERYTHING THAT COMES MY WAY is getting a little out of hand.

(the empty days are the days I get to sleep.)

Still, being this busy puts me in a state of frazzled bliss I much prefer over the alternative. Late September, I participated in the Pittsburgh Gallery Crawl for the first time, throwing in work with the local indie comics collective Unicorn Mountain. Curated by the lovely Tara Helfer, we took over the boardroom of the downtown Planned Parenthood and threw open it’s doors to anyone willing to brave it through the ring of pro-life protestors that had gathered outside.

My bat illustrations got to hang in between some lovely Gabe Felice paintings and Anya Weitzman’s painting of some lady bits; check out the flickr page to see the Showcase.

The same batties are traveling to Ohio at the end of the month for the Make Believe Monster’s Ball, a party/gallery show on the 28th; my bats get around, y’all.

Also attending the show is a nightmare portrait I did of dear Tara and her worst nightmare, the demise of her beloved cornsnake, Sol.
Sol’s alive and well (and keeps coming out of his hiding spot to watch me dress in the morning, the pervert), but this is what she gets for drawing me cradling dead rats, dammit.

All prints will be framed and for sale, so if you happen to be in the Columbus area and see something you fancy, you should totally buy all of it without hesitation.

I’m also curating/participating in a show at The Frame, Carnegie Mellon’s gallery space, this coming Friday.

My friends and I all climbed out of the ashes of crappy internet art to make something of ourselves in Pittsburgh; it’s only fitting we pay a little respect to our hilarious, terrible roots. And yes, that is a Portraif of the Artist as a Fourteen Year Old Girl on the bottom right there.

We’re setting up a text-to-comment thread system for each work and  projecting & recording MIDI karaoke, among other things. There will be a lot of cat and My Little Pony art. There will be a GIANT print of Let Slip the Sparkledogs of War. Should be a good time, if you bring your sense of humor. <3

Speaking of good times, I would be completely remiss if I didn’t say anything about the VIA Music & New Media Festival that shook Pittsburgh this weekend. I was a crew member and thus there all damn weekend: my brain is still kinda mushy from the experience, so I’m just going to direct you to the VIA website and twitter feed and say SHAME ON YOU if you were in the area and didn’t go for at least a night. The people were wonderful, the music was wonderful, the visuals were wonderful: please ponder the errors of your ways.

<3

Tara was telling me something or other about how the people who draw sparkledogs on deviantart get into fights a lot.

And this happened.

click for full size view

I didn’t know/don’t know anything really about sparkledogs… I just kind of imagined them as skittle-colored pooches with scene hair.

School is back in, which means I’m making stuff more often, which means updates should become a little more frequent.

whoo. <3

In the meantime, for sketches & things, check out my tumblr.

Unless you came here from my tumblr

in which case,

good for you,

you made it.

Make yourself at home.

<3

I spent a chunk of Sunday working out colors for ol’ Purson, here. I don’t know how I feel about his purple boots, but I think the rest of his outfit is pretty up to snuff. I’ll keep updating as he develops. I’m still not tied down to this particular illustration for my submission, but working with it is helping me figure out Purson’s personality- he’s so vain, he probably thinks this post is about him.

I’m at work waiting for a clip of video to render, so I thought I’d throw a few sketchbook pages up here in the meantime. rattus rex rose was done a few weeks ago, with winsor & newton inks in a 3″x 5″ book- it started as a tattoo design (don’t judge meeee) but turned into a study for another, larger painting. I got lazy with the roses, though. :<

king purson #20 was part of a brainstorming session I did for my page of the illustrated ars goetia, a project started by my roomate/collaborator/friend/all-around bad-ass Tara Helfer. 72 artists will eventually be involved, each choosing a demon to re-intrepret- she’s planning on taking the whole thing to kickstarter and self-publishing the beast of a book once we get everything put together.

I got King Purson, who is obviously the best out of the 72:

“In demonology, Purson is a Great King of Hell, being served and obeyed by twenty-two legions of demons. He knows of hidden things, can find treasures, and tells past, present and future. Taking a human or aerial body he answers truly of all secret and divine things of Earth and the creation of the world. He also brings good familiars.

Purson is depicted as a man with the face of a lion, carrying a ferocious viper in his hand, and riding a bear. Before him there can be heard many trumpets sounding.”

Purson knows all, can find everything, has a lion head, and rides bears.

Be still my nerdy, artsy fartsy heart.

I’m still not sure if I’m going the ultra-detailed stupid-amounts-of-lineart route for Purson, or if I’m braking out the cutesey/stylized/color-crazy side of my arsenal. Obviously another brainstorming session is in order.

<3