What a great night of music! I really feel like a lot of the bands got to play in front of entirely new audiences that were unfamiliar with them.

A quick rundown:

The Roundups: Several comments from people that I got were how they had found there "new" favorite band. I find this ironic because The Roundups have probably been around twice as long as any other band on the bill.

Jessica Benge: Everyone was asking about buying her CD. She really pulled out the stops. I had gotten an email in the weeks before the show from a fan of another prominent (and also very talented female singer) complaining that I should have chosen the other singer for "best pipes." After trading several emails back and forth, she admitted that she had never actually heard Jessica. I challenged her to come out and see the show and if she was dissappointed in my choice after hearing her that I'd buy her a drink. She said she would show, but if she did she never introduced herself. My guess was that after Jessica's performance, she would have had a lot of humble pie to eat. Jessica and her band kicked ass.

Original State of Mind: The first impression I had when I saw them six months ago was that they had the ability to get people out of their seats and up to the stage to shake there ass a bit. This so rarely happens at Birdy's and I was glad to see the same thing happen again when they took the stage. They did well and were real troopers for continuing on, considering they lost there lead guitarist three weeks ago.

Stereo Deluxe: I've said so much about these guys I don't even know what else I can add. Someone please mail me a thesaurus so I can find new words to use in place of " awesome," " terrific," "catchy," "polished," and "Un-fucking-believable."

Emerson Rose: They had what is usually considered the death slot on the bill, going on at almost 1 AM. No fear though--they brought everyone out of their seats and rocked out an extra-long set keeping the crowd there until Mike had to pull the plug. If you don't have their new CD yet, I suggest buying it and getting in a muscle car and jamming while you tool around the backroads. It's scary good.

I'm attaching a link to a slide show of the evening's pics. The music you hear is brought to you by the thesaurus-busting Stereo Deluxe.

I get asked a lot of questions about the mechanics of drawing my strip. I do a lot of them in different ways to keep from getting bored--changing up between pencils, inks, ink washes, brushes, rapidiograph technical pens and brush greyscale markers. But the most common method is plain ol' pen and ink, usually a combo of brush inks and rapidograph tech pens.

I prefer working in ink. I love the stark contrast of black and white, but I have a tendency to over cross hatch. Back when I was seriously trying to get into comics, I heard that criticism soooo often and I still struggle to stop myself from overshading and cross hatching people to death. One of the reasons I started inking so much with the brush the past year was to break that habit. But for this example we're using rapidiograph pens.

The first step in my strip is the best part. Go drink beer and see a band. Man, I love this job! In the instance, the band in question is a new punk/garage/ska band from Bloomington named Coinslot. They're fronted by a very energetic and charismatic grrl, and seem poised to make a big splash on the Indy scene.

At the show I take pics and do some light sketches. The sketches for the most part just set the mood. The main bulk of the strip is drawn from photo reference. I upload them into CorelDraw and then assemble a sheet of the best poses/shots of the band members.

After printing the sheet out, I head to my trusty basement studio.

The original art is 7.5 inches by 12 inches on Bristol board. I prefer working in ink, so my pencil drawings are really rough and sketchy at best. Usually the faces are in detail and the rest is just a "pose" before I apply the ink.

Inking is where the drawings really come to life. I go back and add the details with a brush (or in this case, a rapidiograph, size zero or one). If you look in the background, you can see I'm inking the girls' face in panel one and the 'un-inked' pencils for the guy in panel 2 are visible above my hand.

After the inks are done, I go back and do the heavy blacks and panel borders with a #3 Windsor Newton brush. In the case of this band, I did intentionally sloppy borders because it went with their raw and energetic style. I also like that it gives a bit of a 'zine quality to my little corner of NUVO.

Normally I pencil in the dialogue in the spaces I have left myself, but in this case I did the dialogue in CorelDraw with Courier font and cut and pasted it in strips. I thought this added to the DIY, punk-zine look I was going for.

I will link to the finished strip when NUVO comes out this Wednesday.