Kevin Cannon visit to SCAD

During the Winter 2014 quarter, I was able to invite cartoonist Kevin Cannon of Big Time Attic down as part of the Mini-Comics Expo. Athena was a able to convince him to come down. We do an expo once a year. It's my big event for the year.

As part of his visit Kevin gave a lecture at the Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation (my favorite place to host a lecture--it has a little chapel for speakers). So I got to introduce his talk.

Silas the Alien: In the Briny Deep

This is a little mini-comics that I made for my Mini-Comics class. We are doing an inter-campus exchange. The SCAD sequential art department at the following campuses: Savannah, Atlanta, and Lacoste are all exchanging minis (just a quarter-size letter/a4 page, which gives you 6 pages of comic plus a front and back cover). Each student makes around 60 copies of their comic (easy to print on campus since it's only a single sheet front a back--cost is nil) and in turn each will receive 60 comics from the other students. I think I will try and organize this exchange each Winter Quarter.

Admittedly I crapped this one out pretty fast. Here's the pencils:

Hair Cut Guts Redux

Since I reworked the cover of Playing to the Haircuts, I decided to throw some some gray tones over the inside pages. The story is really just a few pages of Julie and Fred vaudevillian banter. Everything looks fancier when you print it on cream off-white paper. Here's a page.

Playing to the Haircuts - screenprinting.

Each year my Mini-Comics class picks a theme for which we all create a mini-comic. These go into a box set. In 2008 we did the Ology Anthology where each person chooses an area study; I created a comic called Nephology (the study of clouds). In 2009 we did the Hat Box where everyone chose a different hat to base a story; I did a comic called Herman's Dunce Cap.
In 2010 the class did a set of stories based on Rhyming Disorders (I forget the name right now). I was knee-deep in department chair duties, so I didn't get to make a book that year.

This year (2011) we did the Hoakum House Theatre, where everyone created a story of a Vaudeville act. I created a dinky little story called Playing To the Haircuts (which means that your act is so bad, the audience is leaving). A requirement for these sets is that the cover must be silkscreened. Here's what I did for my vaudeville cover. It's a plum-colored Canson paper (quite a tooth) with light mint ink:

That's what went into the set, but when I printed another round I wanted to add a second color to the print. Sometimes when I want a second color on a print but don't want to burn a second screen I'll just tape off certain areas on the under-side of the screen and print a transparent layer over a few sections. Here's the taped-up screen:

I blocked off the background so that the characters would have the yellow layer. You can see the blocked off areas from the squeegee side when I hold it up the window:

I printed it up and it looked like this:
I didn't like it, so I re-taped the screen opposite (so the background would get the yellow ink):

That's the final version.