Hello all,
Now that it's mid August, I figured I would do a quick July recap to help bring things up to speed with my journal entries. Better late than never, I guess. Anyhow, here's the quick and easy recap for July:

Things I learned:
During the month of July, I spent a great deal of time working with Copic Sketch Markers (take a look at my gallery and you'll see what I mean). As dumb as this may sound, the most valuable discovery I made was to utilize grays for shadows. Until I started using grays for shadows, I was using darker values of the same color (dark flesh tone, dark green, etc). Once I started using grays, I saw the quality of my shadows improve. My process also got quicker since I was using less colors... not to mention, I no longer need to worry about purchasing every single shade of a given color... if I want it darker, I'll add gray.

Books I Read:
I'm not ashamed to say that I didn't read much of anything in July. I did, however, read the first two volumes of "Chew" by John Layman and Rob Guillory. This comic book is amazing. Hands down the best thing I've read in years. I haven't been this excited by a comic book since The Goon first came out. For anyone who hasn't read it, go read it NOW!

Shows I watched:
After years of hearing folks at work talk about what a great show it was, I finally, finally watched the first two seasons of "Pushing Daisies" on Netflix and I loved every minute of it. The show was perfect. It had Scooby Doo style mysteries, quirky characters, beautiful visuals, perfect narration, and heart warming charm... so it was obviously CANCELED! Why wouldn't it be, right? Oh well, I'm at least glad I got to watch the first two seasons. If you haven't already, make sure you add this show to your Netflix Queue.

Artists I drooled over:
More than likely since I was reading "Chew," my favorite artists last month was Rob Guillory. I just couldn't get enough of this guy's style. His characters are cool, funky, light, and bad ass all at the same time. His light weight line work has a quick, almost scribbled feel that just screams "fun" and his backgrounds are jammed full of so many sight gags you have to read the page two or three times to soak them all in.


That's it for my July Recap. I'll try to post a bit more regularly from now on.
Later,
Josh

A little over a year ago, I started posting on deviantArt to supplement my personal website. My immediate thoughts on deviantArt were pretty positive. I was really impressed by the community's willingness to provide feedback (both positive and constructively negative). As much as I loved deviantArt, I wasn't sure I was willing to abandon my beloved mustachemayhem.com that I'd spent countless hours designing, coding, and constantly tweaking. But the more and more time I spent here, I realized that deviantArt was a much better way to get my work out there. So today, I officially cancelled my godaddy hosting plan for mustachemayhem.com, making deviantArt my new, permanent home.

A lot of the art I'll be posting on here will be concept sketches, lunchtime doodles, and morning warm-ups where I play around with shape, form and expression. Every once in a while I'll be posting a finished piece and eventually I'll be posting pages from my upcoming comic, "Mustache Mayhem's Doomsday Extravaganza."

As for the journal, mostly I'm going to write about things that I've learned on any given week while playing around with different mediums, tools and techniques. I'll share other stuff too, but mostly it's my goal to use this as a journal to track my own progress as an artist.

Thanks to everyone who has made me feel so welcome in the community.
Later,
-Josh

Hello everyone! I just wanted to post up a little something to let people know that I'll working on getting my deviant art page set up over the next few weeks. So check back later for more updates.
Thanks for checking out my page.
-JMV