other projects

Fans, if you FEAR going into parking garages to park, then you’ll FEAR this one even more!  Chris Wisnia has just completed a Kirby-style GIANT MONSTER MURAL for the F Street Parking Garage in Davis CA, depicting the TERRORS of commuting over the Davis overpass!

Here’s the concept sketch:

Friday night, we projected the image and traced it with chalk.  Saturday morning we were ready to begin:

The wall was a lot wider than the composition, so we chose moved the text around to better use all the space.

By the end of Saturday, we had completed the borders and text, and only needed to draw in the monster and bridge:

 

 

Sunday, we knocked it out:

Extra-special thanks to my best friends, John Natsoulas for asking me to do it, Kerry Rowland-Avrech for spending two solid days painting it with me, and Gerry Chow!

I was pleasantly surprised when John Natsoulas – director of the John Natsoulas Center For The Arts, and the local art maven responsible (I believe) for filling the streets of Davis with so many fantastic murals and sculptures – contacted me to see if I could help him with his most recent public art project.

He said he’s painting the inside of the F Street Garage to  represent a history of our town, with things like cows and bicycles and double decker buses and all the cool professors and artists who have been here.  The garage is multiple levels, and he wanted a vortex at the bottom of the stairs to take us through time, through this history, and a visual portrayal of time travel going up or down the stairwells.  That was what he asked me to do: the time travel stairwell.

So I immediately thought of cosmic ol’ Kirby, flipped through some Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, and 2001 Space Odyssey comics, and then made these sketches for him:

 

I park in the stairwell every day, and one night after work, around 8:30 pm, there were John and his crew projecting my images onto the walls of the stairwell and drawing them into place:

 

John posted these photos on his Facebook page:

 

And here’s how the stairwell looks now:

Pretty awesome!  Pretty cosmic!  Thanks so much, John, for including me in this project.  It turned out great!

Everybody, come check out the cool parking garage here in Davis!  Fly out and make a weekend visit, rent a car so you can park in the garage at F St at 1st, next to the theater! There’s a lot of really fun art and history represented!

It’s that time of year again! I’ve completed two Jack Kirby style portraits!  They were rewards for two kind supporters of Charles D. Moisant’s “Zombie Annihilation Issue #2” Kickstarter campaign (now over – but soon, you can pick up the Haunted House Attraction’s comic book souvenir that I drew a third of)!

Here is the Feldstein-style cover I drew for the upcoming Jr. Skeptic Magazine #47 “Alien Invasions” issue, beautifully colored by Daniel Loxton.

To give you an idea what a phenomenal job Daniel did, here’s the original inks:

For Halloween, Charles D. Moisant’s “Silver Phoenix Entertainment” hired me to draw a 12-page Kirby-style zombie comic.  To help fund the publication, he ran a Kickstarter campaign, in which one prize was “Chris Wisnia will draw you in Kirby style.”  Below are the three commissions:

Martina asked to be drawn in a horror style, related in any way to science, the undead, or possibly lightning, and with a  small companion animal/robot/alien (or giant monster).

Kenneth asked to be drawn as a mystical supernatural type of super hero,  with a celestial or cosmic background.

Lester asked to be drawn as a sinister Corporate American Executive “in a drive to increase corporate profits at the expense of the common man…”

Yeah, maybe this isn’t all comics-related, but it’s been nine years! I’m reminiscing …

This is my parents. And here are Elizabeth’s parents. Look at everyone’s great costumes, sitting in the seats.

Here we are on stage for the ceremony. You can kind of see the “set” I built in the background, of towering black sky scrapers. There’s also a street sign at the cross-streets of Lover’s Lane and Desire Drive. Elizabeth’s uncle loaned us a parking meter.

This is the lobby of the Crest theatre. We brought out the grand piano so that Elizabeth’s friend’s blind Uncle Jimmy could play some jazz during the reception.

Well, I published my first comic in 2004, but I was married nine years ago today, at the Crest Theatre in Sacramento.

Comics fans will be pleased to hear I proposed at Comic-Con in San Diego 2001, the first year I’d gone (What a nerd!). Elizabeth went with me, and I proposed our first night there, so that she could feel the trip was a little bit for her, and not just for me (What a nerd!).

We decided to have a film noir-themed wedding. The Crest is a 1950’s art-deco theatre. They put our name on the marquis. They got into the idea, and put old film noir movie posters in their windows. “Touch of Evil” and such.

We asked all our guests (200 plus) to dress in film noir costumes. As they arrived, they could pick up their programs, popcorn, and a book of noir slang at the snack bar, and get their mug shots taken. We played ’40’s big band music. In the bathrooms, we had a CD player playing exciting audio film-noir action scenes. I walked down the aisle to the Peter Gunn theme. My wife’s maids of honor entered to the Perry Mason theme (I know, these aren’t really noir, so we took some liberties, but you should have seen everyone coming out in their costumes in an old theatre to this music). After we were pronounced man and wife, we played a film noir on the big screen behind us.

Elizabeth had this dress made, after the one Kim Bassinger wore in “L.A. Confidential.” She had her hair and make-up done after Veronica Lake. She was hiding behind that curtain. The music cued, the spotlight hit it, and she burst out to strut around the theatre before walking down the aisle to the stage.

I wore a vintage 1940’s tuxedo.

We were featured on the local news, and Sacramento magazine posted an article that featured our wedding:

http://www.sacmag.com/media/Sacramento-Magazine/January-2004/Weddings-With-Personality/

This pin-up was for Mike Hampton’s “Hot Zombie Chicks” comic (Halo Productions). I really enjoyed working on it, and was pleased with how it turned out. I was pleased with the line-work.

 So here is a funny story about the previous zombie portrait – which is of a zombie version of my friend, Anthony Leano (writer and publisher of the comic, “Brains”).

Anthony went on a trip, and when he got back, he emailed me with the heading, “Your pin-up saved me from going to jail!” In his own words (edited and pieced together from Facebook posts to suit my chronological and storytelling designs):

“Had an awesome time in Seattle this weekend @ Emerald City Comicon … ran into a string of good luck the whole trip. Until I got pulled over for driving 5-10 above the speed limit …

“…We were on the side of the highway in a town of 4000 people, for about an hour…

“…Got tossed into the back of the police car for not having my I.D., almost went to jail…

“…The cop took pictures of Shawna, Paul Allen and me. Pictures of my tattoos and he fingerprinted me … He was using a camera that was broken with dead batteries he had to swap out and tape together…

[Anthony didn’t have his identification with him] “… after an hour of us trying to prove who I was … I [finally convinced the police officer] by showing him a drawing of me as a zombie that Chris Wisnia drew. It was a pin up for my comic book BrAiNs issue number two. ”

Pretty great. I feel like I’ve really done my part to help a friend in need. Here’s my pin-up of Paul Allen, artist for the above-mentioned “Brains #2” issue (hope it can help equally well, Paul):