cloudy/co News

I am a piler. I have always been a piler. I make piles out of mail, drawings, laundry, magazines, etc., like a lot of other creative people do, I think. It’s just a different way to organize. That is: not to. I beat back the piles every few months, but they always come back. It’s okay. I accept it. I am a piler.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, my pals over at Vahalla Studios have launched a series of 18 prints called Show the Love. You can buy the entire set for just $50, or get each individual print (like mine!) for $10 apiece.

It’s a fantastic lineup of artists who have put together a lot of fun work! And if you’re in Kansas City, go by tonight, Feb 5th, from 6-10pm, to pick up a set in-person. Vahalla’s new digs are at 2111 Washington, Kansas City, MO.

I just have two short announcements that combine Haiti relief efforts with the art you love:

The first is that over at the Cloudy Collection, we’ve and redirected our fundraising to the Red Cross’s Haiti relief efforts. Now until the end of January, for each print set purchased (Ed. 3/Ed. 4) we will send $5 to the Red Cross’s Haiti fund. Also, for each subscription purchased, we will send $25 to the Haiti fund.

And second, the Robots & Monsters project has opened its doors early for its next round in order to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders and their efforts in Haiti. For $50, you get a robot or a monster drawn by people like John Martz, Adam “Ape Lad” Koford, Joe Alterio, me, and a few other great artists. The project has raised almost $20,000 for various causes over the past three years.

Whether you want to buy some new art or not, I encourage everyone to do whatever they can to help in Haiti. You can give directly to the Red Cross here, Doctors Without Borders here, and there are a lot of other great NGOs doing good work.

Coming soon to the mailing list.

First things first: Volume I, Edition 4 of the Cloudy Collection is now available! “Repeat/Repeat” is a set of seven letterpress prints on the theme of variations on repeating patterns with art by Will Bryant, Dustin “UPSO” Hostetler, Mike Perry, Heather Ross, Julia Rothman, Bob Staake, and me, David Huyck. As usual, these prints are just $35 USD for all seven prints, with free shipping to the US and Canada! These are some seriously great prints!

Next up: never miss another print set! Cloudy Collection subscriptions start with Volume II! In addition to all the great prints you’ve come to know, you’ll also get an exclusive, subscriber-only t-shirt collaboratively designed by Volume I artist Elio and me, plus a variety of other bonuses and surprises. Get all the details here.

And finally, don’t miss the Edition 3 prints, now $5 off until New Year’s.

More Cloudy Collection announcements will come in the new year, but for now, isn’t this enough? What more do you want from me?

thanks to Dan Wyke for the cell phone photo!

Well I’m probably one of the last people to write up his SPX experience, but WOW I had an amazing weekend in Bethesda, MD! Rather than rehash a lot of what has already been said about the weekend, I’ll tell my favorite parts and link to the rest. (Plus I didn’t bring a camera, so I only have borrowed photos.)

First of all, many thanks to my fabulous hosts Kristin and Corey Enck! Kristin is a grad school friend, and Corey is her freshly-minted husband (they got married in August!), though I’ve known Corey almost as long as I’ve known Kristin. I barely spent any time in their home in DC, but the bed was comfy and the kitchen had fresh apple pie in it – what more could I need?

Second, another thank-you to Kristin, and also to Megan Halsband and Lou Joseph, two more friendly faces from my days at Carolina, who showed up at my table at SPX. Lou deserves a double thank-you (or quadruple, or even more) for inviting me to participate in the Infinite Folio two years ago. It was for that project that I first drew the cloud-full-of-eyes that I am so obsessed with these days.

thank you to Scott Edelman for the purchase and write-up

And yet more thank yous to give out: to all of you who came by my table and talked or asked for doodles, and especially those of you who paid good money for some of my work, THANK YOU for doing your part to help make this a viable career for me! It is always great to make and meet new friends and fans, especially face-to-face. (some kind words by Scott Edelman are posted here)

Kate Beaton, Scott Campbell, Dustin Harbin, and little old me...

Finally, to my peers and heroes who adopted me into their circle of bro-ship and made my weekend super-extra-fantastically fun, thank you to Dustin Harbin, Kate Beaton, and Cloudy Collection artist (and so much more!) Scott Campbell. I hesitate to list all the other names, because I will surely miss some of you, but it was fantastic to meet you, Phil McAndrew, Steve Wolfhard, Pen Ward, Eleanor Davis, Richard Stevens, Meredith Gran, Jah Furry, Brian Heater, Joe Lambert and his wife Rebecca, Will Dinski (who I first met in Minneapolis), and of course my table buddy, Dan Wyke.

Okay, so rather than try to retell stories that have been told by better storytellers than me, here are some great posts about the weekend by people I spent a lot of time with:
• Dustin Harbin’s tale in three parts, plus a comic: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and the comic
• Dan Wyke’s write-up

a crazy doodle request fulfilled! - thanks, Beth Isaacson!

It’s been an exciting few weeks over here, and the next few promise more fun! Besides the fact that we’ve been turning the harvest from our plum tree into prunes, fruit leather, and jam, last week (on 09/09/09) we released the latest edition of the Cloudy Collection, “The Scarlet Lettering”! Check it out, and hurry if you want a set from the “Hovels & Hideaways” edition: they are almost gone.

The other big news is that the world-renowned blog of illustration, Drawn!, has redesigned, and in the process, I’ve joined the ranks of contributors! Along with the other two new contributors, Cloudy Collection alumni Meg Hunt and S.Britt, I hope to add my own perspective to the website. So far, I’ve done three posts, and I’ve got another two or three lined up for later this week. Find my posts here.

And for those of you in the Minneapolis area, cancel your plans for Saturday: the opening of Pink Hobo’s Pinewood Derby Art Car Show starts at 7pm! And be sure to stick around until 10 – they’re renting a track and racing the cars! I wish I could be there for the fun – I expect photos and video of the races from those of you who are there!

Finally, here’s a list of the things I’m gathering to take with me to SPX at the end of the month:

• two brand new mini-comics: At Least It’s Company and Please Pay Attention
• four brand new screenprints
• my TIGER! letterpress print
• any Cloudy Collection prints and ephemera I still have by that time
• some new, leery-eyed pin-back buttons (see below)
• more of my Mountain Man mini-comics
• some new postcards
• any other surprises I can pull off by then (tick-tock! time is slipping by!)

The Washington State University’s Art Department is holding its biannual faculty exhibition this fall. I am showing a selection from my 2007 installation, A Safe Distance. If you are in the Pullman/Moscow area, come out for the opening on Friday, August 28th at 5pm. The work will be showing from August 27th through September 26th.

The summer has flown by, but I have a few little somethings to show for it. The first example is a set of three mini-comics I made for the Little Funny project in Minneapolis. A prominent side-project to Big Funny, which is a huge (48-page, 3-feet wide) all-comics newspaper in blatant defiance of the notion that print is dead, Little Funny swings to the other extreme with a series of 29 different tiny comics collected in random assortments of 6 minis and sold for $2 out of a retired and repurposed cigarette vending machine. My comics are issues 25, 26, and 27, and tell short, wordless stories about Mountain Man.

The Little Funny comics will be available alongside the Big Funny exhibition at the Altered Esthetics gallery in Minneapolis. The opening is tomorrow night, August 7th, 2009, from 7-11pm, at Altered Esthetics, 1224 Quincy St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413. So all you Minneapolites (Minneapoloids? Minneapolans?), show some love and buy some comics!

After a lot of thinking and planning, and not a little bit of fussing, cloudyco.com is alive! I’ve felt for some time that I’ve grown away from The Bunch of Monkeys Workshop moniker, and so a little under a year ago, I started my journey towards a new name.

The transition started in January when I invited six great artists to help me launch the Cloudy Collection letterpress print project. After that turned out more successfully than I could have hoped, I realized the beast was loose and we were on our way.

A couple weeks ago I silently launched CloudyCloudy, the home for my paintings and drawings and sculptural work. I see my commercial work like illustration and design as living on a continuum with my fine art work, so some pieces that I have made destined for a gallery may show up here on cloudy/co, and other work that some might consider illustration may make sense over on CloudyCloudy as well. Wherever you find my work, I hope it sticks to your ribs. In a good way.

And now today I launch cloudy/co! If you are considering hiring me for a project– as an illustrator, designer, or as a consultant in some capacity– take a look around and let me know what you like. No project is too big; none is too small. We just have to find the right fit.

In the meantime, you can follow official cloudy/co blabbery on twitter here, or you can listen to my sporadic personal outbursts over here (and my latest posts from this twitter account show up on the right of this page.) You can also sign up for my mailing list over on the right of the page.

I hope to hear from you soon!

The second edition of the Cloudy Collection is now available! This newest set includes art from Vera Brosgol, S.Britt, Elio, Vincent Stall, Scott Campbell, Bwana Spoons, and me, David Huyck (my print pictured below).

Get yourself a set for just $35 with free shipping to the US and Canada.