Good morning. Thank you for coming to visit the Monsters, and a special welcome to those of you who just found out about this site from the L.A. Weekly. The Weekly is very kindly featuring one of the Daily Monsters on its cover this week, advertising an article on Making Fiends creator Amy Winfrey, and one on... ahem... well, they have one on me, too. Great thanks to La Vida writer Gendy Alimurung for giving a massive shout-out to our little Monster community, and to Joshua Bearman for making the initial introduction back in December.
I only found out that the article would be in this week's issue last Thursday night, and I've been working on this pretty much non-stop since Saturday. I handed in the cover itself on Tuesday. Since then I've been working on the "Making of" video:
If you're reading this on Amazon, please click here to watch the clip.
You may notice that the color scheme is a bit different than the final cover. I thought I'd show you the various iterations I went through before the Weekly's art director Ryan Ward stepped in and laid down the chromatic law. Click on the image for a closer look:
When I draw the Monsters for you, I have a little code of honor: I won't alter the drawing after I turn off the camera. I won't fix mistakes in Photoshop. And I won't change the colors I used on paper. In this case the Monster came through with a blue tongue and blue shoes. So I based the whole color scheme around that, which put me into a day-long orgy of miniscule adjustments that I haven't had since art school days. 5% cyan? 7% cyan? Who will help me make these momentous decisions?! Oh, the pressure!!! My thanks to Ryan for discreetly taking the reigns while I was in the fever-grip of hue-mania.
Now, to celebrate the cover, I've finally got myself in gear to give you something you've been requesting for ages: Monster T-shirts! Thanks to the good people at Zazzle, you can order the L.A. Weekly Monster on a whole line of shirts and assorted goodies. Check it out at this link here, or by clicking on the store window in the sidebar on the right. (Special thanks to Robert at Zazzle for helping me set up the store in a matter of hours.)
So there you have it. As 200,000 Daily Monsters are being delivered to newspaper dispensers all over Los Angeles, I have to get cracking on a Monster Three of Hearts, which will be my contribution to an artist-powered deck of cards in Germany. I'll post it for you here as soon as I get it done.
Also, please check back in during the week. I held a little monster casting call for the Weekly cover, and I'll post a few of the audition tapes in the coming days.
For now, I hope you'll have a lovely, mellow rest of the week.
I do hope you realize that 344 LOVES YOU
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Postscript: Here are a few photos of the actual paper!
Exciting stuff! (Oh come on! Be with me here!)
