Just a reminder to all you loyal readers that my latest instructional book from Watson-Guptill, PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION, is being published this coming June 20th (coincidentally, my wife Eve’s birthday).
David Chelsea is reading: Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story
by Peter Bagge
Continue reading Coming In June: Perspective In Action!
I made something of a format shift on my Patreon page a while back, without actually announcing it- when I began serializing my webcomic ARE YOU BEING WATCHED?, I switched from posting new comics in a big eight-page pile on the first Thursday of the month to posting two pages every week. All well and good, but that left me without anything particular to post for First Thursday. This month, I am experimenting with two ideas to fill the gap- looping gifs and fan art.
Blog Post about my Patreon page
David Chelsea is reading:
The Boundaries of Desire: A Century of Good Sex, Bad Laws, and Changing Identities
by Eric Berkowitz
Continue reading First Thursday on Patreon: Fan Art Vs. Looping Gifs
There’s been a bit of a change of plan- or more like a total collapse of plan- since the last time I posted about this project, three paintings in spherical perspective on bowling balls created to be auctioned online by Space Object Gallery. Their curator, Mary Wright, died last weekend. My condolences go out to her family and friends (I myself never met Mary- we corresponded entirely by e-mail).
David Chelsea is reading:
Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee
by Bee Wilson
Continue reading Immersive Panorama: The Comics Convention.
Three bowling balls to be auctioned at Space Object in early May. Details forthcoming.
Video by Milan Erceg
GIF conversions by Jacob Mercy
David Chelsea is listening to:
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell
by Deborah Solomon
Continue reading Watch This Space
Animated gif created in The CircleCam.
As I said in my last blog post, I will be appearing at the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle at the end of March selling copies of all of my books, drawing sketches, doing on-the-spot perspective critiques, and all the other stuff I do at cons. I will also be bringing along the project that has been preoccupying me for most of the year: a series of three spherical cartoon paintings on bowling balls which nicely combine two of my main interests, comics and unusual forms of perspective.
David Chelsea is reading:
The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe
by David I. Kertzer
Continue reading Work in Progress: Bowling Balls
Here is an example of the kind of 360º perspective I was doing just before I began drawing and painting on spheres. This drawing of my sister Anny’s living room is from 1994.
David Chelsea is reading:
Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind
by Richard Fortey
Continue reading Icosahedral Perspective: Anny’s House
I am rerunning a blog post about one of my spherical paintings from 2009, because it is in the show WELCOME TO MY WORLD, opening this Friday at 23 Sandy Gallery here in Portland:
David Chelsea is reading:
And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
by Charles J. Shields
Continue reading Re-up: Rebecca’s Room
I am in a show opening this Friday at Portland’s 23 Sandy Gallery, WELCOME TO MY WORLD, along with other area artists Mary Bennett, Allison Bruns, Chandra Cerrito, Susan Collard, Anna & Leo Daedalus with Samuel Miller, Kerry Davis, Tamara English, Adrianne Feldstein & Sonja Sujo, Heidi Kirkpatrick, Laura LeHew, David Meeker, Bonnie Meltzer, Cynthia Nawalinski, Jim Neidhardt, Jane Schiffhauer, Joanna Thomas, Robert Tomlinson and Renee Zangara. I quote from the catalogue on the gallery website:
“A stellar list of area artists were invited to consider a similar, unusual, three-dimensional object as canvas—a vintage world globe. This invitational exhibition was conceived and co-curated by new-to-Portland artist, Robert Tomlinson and is co-curated and hosted by 23 Sandy Gallery. The artists were asked to transform, build, infuse, reduce or reinvent the globe using the expressive power of cartography, exploring the form of the globe to create a compelling new work of art.”
David Chelsea is listening to:
Unfamiliar Fishes
by Sarah Vowell
Continue reading Welcome To My World
Here’s a piece from Think Ink, the group show opening tonight at Steele Gallery in Seattle. This image of Portland’s Skidmore Fountain is the first spherical painting where I worked from photo reference. In the pre-digital era (1999) this meant standing at one spot and taking pictures in all directions, having the resultant roll of film developed, and then spreading the prints on the floor and linking them up in various ways to map out the 360° image.
David Chelsea is reading:
Nemesis by Philip Roth
Continue reading Spherical Perspective: Skidmore Fountain
There are a few images seen early in life that I can call formative; an early Crumb panel glimpsed in an issue of Newsweek, a dark painting of a brutish bartender answering an old-fashioned wall telephone, framed and mounted for unknown reasons on my grandmother’s kitchen wall, which frightened me for years until I examined it closely and found it to be a cartoon by Jack Davis- and a drawing in dizzying curvilinear perspective of a group of bizarre buglike creatures climbing up and down unsupported staircases and curling themselves into wheels to roll down long corridors, which I saw in some Time/Life science book when I was about ten years old. It was only years later that I learned the name of the artist, M.C. Escher, when I saw the drawing again in a collection of his work. I made many attempts to draw pictures in the style of that image, but I could never manage to get the perspective right. Continue reading Escher: the Bowling Ball