Can someone loan February some days?

Feb 24, 2025

In case you're here to look at art and don't much care about anything else- you'll find all that stuff near the end of this lengthy rant on what's been going on with me haha.

So here's a quick breakdown of stuff that’s happened:
• End of January I was interviewed by the Quad City Times about my artwork and career over the past two decades. It was a really fun time- unfortunately, they were having issues with their printing press and a hard copy of the interview never came out.
• I did a podcast with a local show, CEI, about art stuff- and how I've navigated through a long freelance life. It's a new show so they don't have many episodes, but I think they're off to a great start. I was interviewed by Atlanta Dawn, who is the creator/curator of a gallery in East Moline called...
• Art On The Bend, hosts a new artist every month at a local brewery/venue The Rust Belt. This month was my turn and on the 13th we had a fun reception where I invited artists to come out and art jam with me. The turnout wasn't as much as we expected, due to a snowstorm the night previous- but those who did come were super awesome and I had a blast. Here's the flyer I did for it!

• My day job at the print shop got a little crazy at the start of the month. My boss had to fly out of the country to handle a family emergency, so me and the other three employees there had to hold down the fort. Luckily my boss was able to give me a crash course on some of the more complicated printers and after a few rough days, we managed to get a nice work flow going. I don't know what it is about this job but man it is super rewarding. I get to work on my graphic design skills and when there isn't design work I run a machine that lets my brain meditate on story ideas or even do thumbnails for comics I'm working on. And my boss is super awesome- the vibe there is just so damn good.

I've been getting a lot of hours under my belt learning Adobe Illustrator for the past several months, it's been a real blessing. So much so that I'm really starting to hate photoshop now for any sort of graphic design.

In the midst of trying to find a particular font to recreate a client's business card, I stumbled upon this pretty amazing site:

https://fontsinuse.com/tags/301/1960s

The site is pretty amazing- but I was super excited to see that they had a section that showed off a bunch of album/book covers from the 60s. So much amazing graphic design was being done across many different avenues back then, it's great to be able to swim through all of this and soak in multiple styles in a matter of seconds. I also stumbled on some really neat old-school musicians!
Here are some of my favorites!

(here's one I've actually read lol)
https://fontsinuse.com/uses/54932/starship-troopers-by-robert-heinlein-four-squ

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein (Four Square)

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/22411/country-joe-and-the-fish-greatest-hits-album-

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/8446/moondog-and-moondog-2-album-art

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/49245/regan-s-planet-by-robert-silverberg

https://fontsinuse.com/uses/49239/clash-of-star-kings-by-avram-davidson

This guy is an absolute legend.

Oh hey okay so I love lurking in this KEI TRUCKS subreddit and omg this chunker just... look at it. I have no idea who posted it or what the thread is, so I have no idea what kind of van it is, but damn man I would make this my daily driver in a heartbeat. Getting a Kei truck is one of those bucket list milestones for me. They're relatively cheap compared to buying a normal car, especially if you can figure out all the intricacies of how to import one- otherwise, there are places like this that do all the leg work for you.

You can of course go a little nuts and spend like 24k and get a DBZ-looking baby monster like this 2022 Daihatsu Japanese HARDCARGO

BUT ANYWAYS-- let's move on to some artwork :P

JUST IN CASE YA'LL DIDN'T KNOW-- you can get a sketch card like these every month via the $25 tier on my Patreon!

Here are some sketch cards I did this month for our local art gallery store (I don't know what else to call it).
Color Market is a fun little shop in Bettendorf, Iowa that has TONS of super awesome merch from a variety of different artists from around the country- maybe even the world? The owner of the shop is none other than BRIGHTBAT, and she is absolutely awesome. They've started up a few lil events every month, including an art jam night - which Ash n I hope to attend very soon! They've also got this radical display box in the shop that holds sketch cards done by other people, that are for sale of course- and all the proceeds go to a different local charity every month!

OH AND here's a new sketch page I managed to squeeze out. I'll be posting the timelapse video in a separate post available only to paying patrons xoxo.

I've got a zine fest coming up in March at DePaul University, it'll be my first time there and I'm super excited. I always look forward to new shows, specially zine centric shows- so much cool raw material at these shows it's hard not to be immediately inspired. So if you're in the Chicagoland area, SWING BY!

That's all for now- hope ya'll are managing to get some stuff done with all the crazy crap going on all over the country! I'd love to hear what you've got going on!

trying to keep my guts in.

getting gutted by work, deadlines and game bans.

GABO

Jan 19, 2025

Here comes a bunch of talking, but I promise there is art at the bottom lol.

I woke up this morning to see that my fav mobile game, Marvel Snap had been banned in the US as part of the whole Tik Tok ban. Apparently, Snap is owned by a subsidiary of ByteDance, so people in the US can’t access it. This ban situation is all sorts of stupid, and I fear it’s just the tipping point. I can’t imagine how stressful this must be for all those people who rely on Tik Tok to market their products, I hope this nonsense blows over quickly.

I tried to jump on Tik Tok when it started blowing up, but between IG and Twitter I had zero energy bars left to try juggling another social media account with its own set of algorithmic rules. I’m feeling like maybe I dodged a bullet? Who knows. It looks like meta is having it’s own issues and it wont be long before there’s a mass exodus on Facebook and IG as well.

At least we have BlueSky, right? I’m trying to post there more often, but the thought of going back to posting daily or even weekly makes my stomach churn. I’ve been off the “daily sketch/daily post” drug for almost two years now and I never want to go back.

Speaking of sketches, here are some doodles I did at PocketCon last December. It was a tiny library convention with a small turnout, but the people there were super nice. My only real gripe about the event was the super loud DJ/rock band they had playing. It made it extremely difficult to interact with customers. I get the idea of having cool stuff at a show and wanting to promote other types of artists- but if you’re going to have a musical act, maybe put them in another room or just have it happen AFTER the marketplace closes.

Earlier this month I was trying to put away convention materials (since I probably won’t be going to a convention until April) and I stumbled upon a bunch of originals I hadn’t seen in a while. The discovery led me to refresh my originals page, if you see anything you like be sure to snag it asap before someone else steals it!

Here’s a few of those pieces…

Last weekend, Ashley n I hit a few antique/thrift shops looking for a nice shelf that would fit our bathroom motif. While we dug around old junk, we spotted some real treasures that I regret not picking up. I’m trying super hard this year to abstain from buying junk I don’t absolutely need or love. The only thing I ended up snagging was this super Bassett trim trio pocket knife for 80 cents. It’s roughly 2.25x.5” inches when folded and 5mm thick, so it fits super nicely in that lil coin pocket in my pants.

Here’s some other random junk we saw …

Oh man, I found this artist I’ve never seen before while looking for a game I used to love on the NES- THE GUARDIAN LEGEND.
The Japanese cover art to old school games is typically way cooler than the watered down art we got in the US. In the rare case of Gurdian Legend, both were pretty radical…the EU version on the other hand— was pretty bleh.

A better look at the JP version… illustrated by Kato Naoyuki, check out this review of one of his art books… super awesome.

I really want to pick up the art book this piece is in, there’s so much more cool robot stuff in it- but I have to stop buying art books until I get rid of old ones I don’t look at anymore- expect a sale of those soon!

The homie Alejandro Bruzzese inspired me to make a digital sketchbook template! He’s always got these really fun sketches on top of even cooler sketch templates. You can watch the process vid of this page on my Patreon btw- as well as get a sticker of this dude later this month!

That’s all for now! Hope ya’ll are keeping warm or keeping cool I guess depending on which side of the country you're in :o

xoxo

My brain is mush.

Adios 2024.

GABO

Jan 03, 2025

On new years day I fixed my toilet.
The fill valve was on the fritz and I was super reluctant to fix it, (I feared breaking the entire toilet) but I watched some youtube vids and I fixed the potty like a champ.

So far 2025 has begun with a win.

But anyways...I started writing this post on Christmas Eve, and what initially began as a short "I'm still alive" post, quickly turned into a reflection on 2024 that I didn't know I needed.

I've written a handful of versions of this but they're all too winded and stupid so I'm just gonna say this..

I'M STARTING A WEBCOMIC.

I'm taking the first story from last year's failed monthly zine experiment - THE LAST KARTOT - and continuing the adventure in full color. I'm also adding some extra pages to the beginning and tweaking some of the old pages, so if you've already read it, you might want to take a second look!
I'll release pages later this month on Tapas and Substack,
but I'll publish behind-the-scenes content and other goodies here on Patreon.

And for those who still like snail mail goodies, I'll be sending out random goodies to those on the $3 BOT BUD tier (or higher tiers). Usually, it'll be some stickers or mini zines of random dumb stuff I managed to dump out that month!

I've got a whole ton of other stuff I wanted to talk about but maybe that's better left for another update-- for now here's a breakdown of the few things I managed to do this year. Not my most productive year to date, but let's face it- it was a really weird and stressful year.

For now though- I’m going to do a quick break down of the stuff I worked on in 2024…

I'm going to start off with one of the most stressful projects of the year.
These issues I colored were pretty long (34 pages each) and while the page size was shorter than others, it still took a while to actually finish. The deadlines were really short as well, and working 40 hours job didn't help. All in all though I learned a lot about coloring in a different style than I'm used to and it's certainly helped me level up a bit!

▶ I colored 3 issues of THE MANDRAKE PROJECT for Bruce Dickinson (lead singer for Iron Maiden) for Z2 Comics - more info on that here.

▶ I Kickstarted my very first TRPG - ORBITAL HUNT. Most of the work for this was done during the fall and winter of 2023, but running a Kickstarter is a whole other beast of its own lol. If you haven't had a chance to pick up a copy, you can get one here.

▶ I tried my best to start a monthly mini-zine publication called PARSEC GAZETTE- that lasted two months hahaha. OH BOY did I bite off more than I could chew on that one 😵‍💫. A zine with 16 pages of comic story, a game, and a monthly fortune? What was I thinking hahah. Regardless it was still a lot of fun and I managed to develop some story ideas I can mess with in the future- not to mention THE LAST KARTOT has blossomed into something more than just a mini story....

▶ I started drawing a new comic, well rather a continuation of THE LAST KARTOT. I've been picking away at it whenever I get a spare moment to myself, usually in the last few minutes of the night before I pass out or if I'm somewhere I can't work on commissions/actual comic work. I've inked over 20 new pages so far, bringing the total count to around 38 I think? Maybe 40 at this point. I've got a story loosely planned out and hope to release the pages starting in January.