Greetings to whomever takes time to read this! So I've been living in California for the past month or so, spending the summer with my girlfriend's parents in San Marcos (RENT-FREE!). Seeing as it seemed near impossible to get a part-time job in this town and this economy, I decided to dedicate all of this glorious free time to making as much illustration as possible. After finishing 'La Macchina Perduta,' I put myself to the task of working on some comics for a friend in L.A. (all based on a comic, Plan B, we made together five years ago). But, now, once again I'M FREE to make whatever it is I please! So hopefully a can get a nice group of new pieces finished in the next few weeks!

So, using the power of Deviant Art (and a calculator), I did a little analysis on my piece, La Macchina Perduta. I found the percentage of overall favorites each received in the attempt to gain some new kind of understanding about how the public might view my work. So (these numbers are not up to date, but I'm sure that the percentages won't change too much) in order of lowest to highest:

Part 1: 6%
Part 6: 9%
Part 4: 10%
Part 3: 12%
Part 5: 16%
Part 7: 17%
Part 2: 29%

I was interested to find that those pieces with highest color saturation and those in which lighter values accounted for more of the composition were much more popular. I suppose that this serves once again as an example of how differently I view such pictures than the rest of the world. I found, after a gradual process of self-discovery in Rome, that the general aesthetic of a piece is less important to me than the communication of the intended narrative. Therefore colors are used primarily in service to the story.

Yellow leaves and green grass are wonderful. I love them as much as the next guy. But for me, purply gray highways, hungry distant blacknesses near gas stations, and dull swaths of pinkish land have their own special, telling beauty.

This is why my pieces are often filled with my beloved unsaturated, un-nameable grays and sometimes weighted down with deep-colored darkness. I want to create a world of quiet mystery and surprise within the mundane, full of moments that feel old and half-remembered as opposed to shiny and new. I suppose it is possible that viewers might get lost in the attempted subtlety of a world of images lacking in communicative, clear, bright colors. But why not let them be just a little bit lost, so that they can understand at a slightly slower pace than the usual instantaneous kind, and form new, more complex feelings about an image?

I just hope that I'm not setting out on a road to nowhere...