I thought my days of standing in the back row for school photos where over but I guess not. Here is the group shot with all of the artists and the band.

The gallery got pretty packed pretty fast…

It was hard to get to some of the guys as they were swarmed at all times. Here is a meeting of the minds… Rick Rubin, Flea and Lars Ulrich.

Sherpard Fairey was in the show as one of the artists and spent some time DJing as well. I think I scared him upon meeting him. I’m no whiz about reading body language but his says there won’t be a second date.

Later in the evening I got a chance to really talk to him and art it up. He was a cool guy and easy to talk to. Here we are in front of his piece which he also made prints of.

I spent a good amount of time hanging out and talking with  Corey Taylor, the lead singer of the band Slipknot and Stone Sour. He was a real pleasure to hang out with a good guy all around.

Corey was there supporting his good friend and fellow band member, Shawn Crahan, who is the percussionist and a founding member of Slipknot. He had a giant sculptural piece in the show. Shawn, too, was real down to earth and easy to talk to. You may also start to notice a theme of me putting arms around and on people as I often don’t know where to put them. They can be heavy so it’s nice to take a break and shift the weight of them onto other people.

I was able to use my long chopstick arms to grab Flea for a quick pic before he ran off between my legs.

It sounds hard to believe that you can be a few feet away from these guys and never get a chance to talk to them because it really was that busy and everyone wanted a piece. So, the only Metallica member I really got to hang out with was the bassist, Robert Trujillo. I figured it was going to be a quick hi/bye but he actually really wanted to talk about the piece I had done. I asked him if he wanted the story behind it all and he did so ran through the whole thing.

UGH… again with those fucking arms…

While in LA I got to spend a good amount of time with my buddy of over a decade, Victor Llamas. This is the guy whom I somehow trusted to take the photographs when I rented a chimp and he did the interview as well but you might remember him from romantic comedies such as THIS.

Buddy and fellow artist, Shawn Barber. He did a cool dead soldier piece which I was unable to get a good pic of it.

My girlfriend, Debsue, and I made the road trip together and had a pretty good time. It was a nice change of pace for the both of us. She’s also the one behind these pics and many others. I tend to bring my camera to events and on trips but never seem to take any pics. Thankfully she made up for the 5 or so crappy pics I took.

I really like this greyscale piece that Nicola Verlato did. It was high on the wall (even for me) so getting a good shot of it was difficult.

The following day, Nicola invited me over to his studio where he is feverishly preparing for a gallery show. It was inspirational to say the least. I don’t want to show too much of his studio because I know how artists like to keep works under wraps until they are ready to be seen. I’m off camera teaching him my head-palming technique.

Time for one last drink before getting on the road…

Until It Sleeps
30″ x 40″
Ink on paper

I thought I’d share some process shots of how I went about creating a double-pager for my recent comic, ’68: Jungle Jim, which just came out through Image Comics. It’s written by Mark Kidwell, illustrated by me and colored-up by Jay Fotos. In any event, here is a flashback in the comic which I decided to ink in a choppy, watercolor-esque kind of way to best illustrate the change in story telling. All of the artwork from this comic is also available for sale right here…

http://n8vandyke.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/68-jungle-jim-art-sale/

Here you have my thumbnails, the finished inks and ending with the final print version colored by Jay…

http://www.n8vandyke.com/temp/68_JJ_SALE.pdf

I finally got it all together and running… I think:) It’s a little later than I had hoped to post it but I had to make sure it was all polished and ready. Feel free to pass it around. Just follow this link…

http://www.n8vandyke.com/temp/N8_Sale.pdf

Thanks, everyone! Hope you find something you like.