beckyandfrank

I started the day by going outside and taking five minutes. I'm trying to lower my "arousal" level (sounds dirty, but it isn't) and eliminate the negative in-head chatter that can occupy a lot of my day. This is part of a new regime of stress management for me. Despite having a dream job, the strains of running a two-person business can be fairly extreme. Finances and I certainly do not get along.

Some would call it meditation, but the British heritage in me would call it a "cup of tea". I just stared out at the trees in my bath-robe and took in nothing. It was a revelation for me.

Becky and I grabbed some sushi then went down to the cafe we often work in, The Library. We ran into a friend along the way and talked about music and art, which was a lot of fun. The work flowed in a relatively free fashion while I was there and I knocked out another draft of the Tigerbuttah Golden Book. Becky is already painting it, but I keep coming back to dialogue.

After we got done with work, I loaded up my new wide angle lens 35mm camera with some expired film I found and we went for a walk down to the bay. I snapped off some fairly ridiculous still life photos as I tried to get a feel for photography again. It is one hobby that I never want to be professional at, which removes all the stress. My other hobbies take over my life, so I'm glad to have one that won't.

Since I got home I've had some great wine, messed around a bit on the Internet, but have done nothing really of substance. I feel good though.

We are still very much in the Christmas festive mood here at Small Cat HQ. Many things have happened, most of them rather positive. I thought I'd give a quick rundown of our latest festivities.

Today is was my mum's birthday, so we went out to the fancy Gold Class movie theatre to see the new Sherlock Holmes, which wasn't entirely terrible. I quite like Jude Law's take on Watson in particular.

Last Friday we went to a tiki themed cocktail party in honor of our friend Tocky, who is heading off to Germany, Switzerland and Japan as a result of his great works in industrial design. I got to bust out my Disneyland Adventure Land Hawaiian shirt. Too many rum cocktails left me feeling like I am going to limit my drinking in the new year. I am not an invincible kid anymore. I am 25 and it is the year of coming to terms with that.

This Friday we're heading to the Big Day Out music festival, which always makes me feel old, as I am surrounded by an all ages crowd. I'm looking forward to seeing The Horrors. I am bummed out that Miami Horror and Midnight Juggernauts are only playing the Australian dates, and that Phoenix reportedly pulled out before the line-up was announced.

However, the next weekend we are camping in New Zealand's worst named town, Bulls, on the grounds of an abandoned school. There we will be seeing Daedelus and The Dodos! My band Ice Cream Soldiers was due to play, but due to various absences (people in Australia and Japan), a lack of preparation and a bunch of other factors, it ain't happening. I'm still wondering if I can be bothered bringing my guitar down for an impromptu solo set.

Also I am sure at this festival my newfound sobriety will be flying out the window.

This month is also the month of deadlines. We finish the Tigerbuttah book! At the moment our Kickstarter is over 8000, so it has exceeded our wildest expectations. It is still the cheapest way to get the book, if any of you are keen.

Also our impending trip to the state looms and delights simultaneously. I am really looking forward to getting back to the US.

Hey everyone! In a few day in North Carolina there will be my first solo gallery show. It is made up of six pieces that tell the story of a little donkey named Buttermilk and his little cowboy friend.

There will also be three small separate pieces that are of mythological animals eating food.

Here is the first Buttermilk piece


I'm going to post all of the small ones starting tomorrow.

Here are all of the details about the show, I will not be there because it would cost way too much to get there from NZ. But I'd very much appreciate if anyone could stop by.

Here are the details:
Hart Beat Gallery
Saturday December 12th 7pm
148 Lugnut Lane Unit 101
Mooresville, NC 28117

Thank you,
~Becky

P.S: All of Buttermilk (with the text) will be posted as a free PDF for those who pre-order the Tigerbuttah Golden Book through Kickstarter.

Becky and I had a really balanced day. We started it off by going to a cafe (I had porridge and chorizo, she had creamy mushroom pesto on toast), where she started penciling out next week's Tiny Kitten Teeth scripts and I wrote out a whole bunch of stuff. I'm really productive when I get away from the Internet.

It's not so much that the Internet allows me to slack off, it is just that there is so much work to do on it that I could do it all night and all day with little problems. Tonnes of e-mail to respond to, gallery shows to organise, promotion, orders to process, commissions to schedule.

I took the laptop with me, but as the cafe didn't know it's own WiFi password (good job!), I actually wrote more than I have in weeks in about 3 hours. I wrote about eight I <3 Tapes scripts, blocked out our Owlchemist story for Top Shelf 2.0 (finally!), wrote out a fairly detailed run-down of the Tigerbuttah Golden Book (I have to cull a lot and work out how to compress scenes that I can't cut) and blocked out two weeks of Tiny Kitten Teeth (I'm already ahead about a week on the script).

After that my mind was completely shot, so we watched the rest of the Star Trek movie, which was a whole lot of fun. I'm about to go and do some WiiFit and music while Becky works on the poster changes for Campus A Low Hum.

Also we popped into Real Groovy yesterday to get rid of the garbage CDs that Sony gave me when I was on MTV Made. I got about 200 bucks. Still gotta get rid of the signed Good Charlotte CD. I feel dirty having that damn thing in my house.

Hey! Sorry for not posting in ages, I've actually started on about five posts but never finished them. I just finished my first gallery show and posted it on my new Flickr account. We're going to have a PDF file with words underneath available on our Kickstarter at some point.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beckydreistadt/sets/72157622779312313/

I'm also getting another gallery show at an indie club that looks like a closet goth club. I think I want to just paint people in cool costumes with animals.

Also this is just one piece I did for a group gallery show at High Seas in Auckland New Zealand. They are doing this thing where they are selling paintings for 100 each around Christmas.

Speaking of crests I've been working on an off one for a New Zealand music festival, and as I was looking up crests for reference I came across some really terrible ones. Any crest with a beaver on it can not be good.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beckydreistadt/sets/72157622922765066/

Here are some recent commissions!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/beckydreistadt/sets/72157622807174989/

Today Frank and I celebrated Dutch Christmas, neither of us are Dutch and I think this is the wrong day. But in elementary school, pre-Rawls Byrd we would make paper shoes and leave the class room and then when we got back we'd have candy and stuff in them. So Frank put some little things in my shoes this morning such as a pencil sharpener that looks like a carasol, a ceramic owl from a Chinese medicine store, a notebook with a wooden cover, owl earrings and hairclips. We also got art supplies and had pizza and watched movies.

One of the movies is a Scooby Doo one where they go to Japan, it is amazingly terrible, and contains horrible inadvertent racism. We're going to make a video of all the best clips, I can't really find the words to describe it.

We tried to watch Space Chimps but it made no sense and was just too ugly and the writing made us both want to die. For example the main monkey is a circus monkey he hates it and wants to go to space like his father. A woman comes to get him to being him to space, now going to space is lame, he likes being in the circus. Also you want to know why a lady comes to get him? The leader of NASA decides that all of the monkeys they have are nerds so he sees a poster of the main monkeys dad and says he wants that one, only his dad is dead so they go to the circus to get the other monkey.

Why the scientist sold the son of their celebrity space monkey to the circus I have no idea. I think the writers just REALLY wanted to do a movie that took place at the circus. Meanwhile on an alien planet a USA space ship lands and shows some video to an alien, he somehow finds out how to control the space ship that was meant to capture him so now he is dipping other aliens into liquid nitrogen cement. We stopped watching once the monkey love interest (a sassy individual but really isn't complete until she has a boyfriend) shows up. We should have rented Santa Buddies instead.

Now time to watch one of the good movies we rented!

P.S: This is our first proper day off in months!

Becky and I got up at the crack of noon to go and do our radio show. We got the theme wrong (woops), so I spent most of the time eating a delicious sandwich (imported salami, brie on fresh-baked bread) and sipping a Kingfisher (lovely summer beer). Becky spent the show sketching vikings for something our friend Zach is working on.

The NZ weather was very kind to us, we went for a wander through Kingsland, bought some Christmas presents for friends and had a jug or two of Sassy Red at the new Mac's Bar in Kingsland. We then retreated to a sunny garden, threw some dice around and generally did nothing other than have enjoyable conversation for the afternoon.

I got a bit sun burnt so when we got home I took a quick nap and we played some Scribblenauts (really fun game). Afterwards we dabbled in Wiifit, while Becky worked on a piece for her North Carolina gallery show.

I pretty much did no work today and had a wonderful time. I feel like even writing about it is bragging. I feel a little guilty for not writing, but this is as close to a proper day off as I've had in god knows how long.

We just made a Kickstarter so we can raise money to print a brand new Tigerbuttah book in the Golden Book style! You can donate different amounts to get different rewards such as a 10 page mini comic, the book itself when its completed, paintings, exclusive screen prints etc. It's all listed on the side of the website!

We're already 1/10th of the way there!

We went to Benediction for lunch with Tamzen and Tocky. Feel free to read my positive and snooty review of it.

I haven't seen Tocky since he went to Switzerland to work on an insane project creating synthetic muscles. It was great to see him. I hadn't prepared for my radio show at all, so I let Carl take it on auto-pilot. Afterwards we had a barbeque amongst some Oranjeboom. I spent way too much money on fine sausages and honey soy chicken kebabs at Ross's Super Meat store (he really enjoys his apostrophe).

Becky and I tied a few drinks on and we took our first trip from the not-so-new train station with Tocky, who was nice enough to drop us home. We had horrible dealings with Becky's student loan that night and we are stuck with a less than generous interest rate due to their trickery, it seems. We're still working on fixing that.

I woke up in an enormous funk, which has turned around 180.

Today we went for a merry jaunt around the streets, then I practiced drums for awhile. Work has not been forthcoming. Becky got to work on some fun paintings today, not prescribed work, which was nice. I figure tomorrow will be more productive.

We also managed to land another gallery show for Becky in 2010, so more information on that soon.

I spent a lot of yesterday, despite a trip to the park to see the chickens, baby turkeys and lambs, in an awful funk, compounded by being up late to finish the comic.

When I woke up today, I still felt a bit down, but increased productivity has left me in a really cheerful position. We finally submitted Becky's immigration forms, after countless medical tests (all proving that she is totally fine), afterwards we celebrated with some sushi at our radio show. The show was all covers this week, which was a lot of fun. I contributed very little, but while sitting there we came up with a whole bunch of other songs, so perhaps next week will be the sequel.

I scrawled a few notes about the next Tiny Kitten Teeth comics, which hopefully I will finish later tonight.

Some good, strong coffee partnered with a couple Steinlager Pures left the radio show particularly radiant. Following this with an interlude at the post office and a trip to Galbraith's, the fine English-style pub across the way, I was left completely chipper. We came home and I began fixing my music setup, getting my old Wii Rock Band drums set up as a MIDI controller for the PC laptop and having a wee jam.

Afterwards I quickly completed a lingering Tiny Kitten Teeth strip, wrote 75% of a script for my friend Zach, fine-tuned my Dr. McNinja guest strip script and wrote some Tiny Kitten Teeth notes. I also filled out some forms and sorted out a few convention tables for 2009.

Following all this, my father arrived home with a bunch of deserts from the bar where he was playing a gig tonight. The feast included some kind of meringue cake with a brandy, passionfruit and pineapple sauce, a coffee-rum chocolate mousse cake and some donuts with a berry compote for dipping. Alongside a rum cocktail of my own creation, I am just blissfully flying through today.

The rest of the night will include punching up the McNinja strip, finishing Zach's script and hopefully getting to these Tiny Kitten Teeth scripts I have made notes about throughout the day.

I hope I remember how happy work makes me tomorrow, when I will no doubt be terribly lethargic. But I must be up early to buy Pavement tickets.

Becky and I had a day off! I don't actually remember the last day off that wasn't due to illness of some sort. We both still dabbled in our work, but despite our best intentions we had an http://www.livejournal.com/update.bmlabsolutely wonderful time.

We did a quick interview for 95bFM this morning, had a fun coffee with Jerome, then went down to Torchon (the Creperie on Elliot St), before going off to get Becky some hair-clips. We found a fantastic Moomin knock-off from Korea.

After getting back to the house, Becky knocked round a commission, then we ended up watching Mary Poppins. As close to a perfect day as there could be.

So this house is the plague house. First my father was sick, then Becky was sick, then I was sick, then my mum was sick. I'm still a little sick. Yesterday was our first outing in a couple weeks, as Becky was ill right before I was. We went to the art supply shop and picked up some Japanese food, on which we gorged ourselves. Takoyaki, Tempura Prawns & Crab, Teriyaki Chicken, Sushi (including some crazy Miso Katsu Pork sushi). That hour-long outing that involved me mostly sitting was enough to make me take a nap for almost 2 hours at 8pm, which meant I had to miss a friends birthday party.

On Sunday I took it easy, but we had to take advantage of a furniture sale to get Becky a better drawing chair. We then went to see the fine film G-Force. If you would like to play the G-Force drinking game, you can find it on Twitter. All in all I am not surprised that it was partially responsible for the guy at the front of Disney feature being fired.

We went to the Cock and Bull, a chain English style pub in New Zealand and the beer was pretty decent. Wheat beer, lager and the draught ale were all pretty good.

We then had an exciting carwash in our friend Tamzen's truck.

We're pretty exhausted, it is about 10:50pm, which is ridiculously early for us. We're trying to get back into our productive and healthy schedule now that I'm not entirely sick. At this point I have just been sick at home so long I am pretending that I am ok. Also I was just admiring a corduroy sports coat, but it was way too expensive. The end! No moral!

I don't have much news to post today. Frank is sick with what I had and the pharmacy won't give him the flu medicine that actually works because its a controlled substance now. They just didn't seem to trust him this time for some reason?

We did two more guest comics, I still need to do two more this week! This on was for the comic Shortpacked:



And this was for the FMyLife.com blog:



Here are some of my latest commissions. I got a few more recently but still need to complete some more from a few months ago. Go behind the cut to see them!

( Read more... )

We were told today that they do not think surgery should be required. Now we have to find out what this is and get onto treatment (probably pills for 2-6 months).

Tonight we gorged ourselves on Japanese food and just had a wonderful old time.

We've worked out a legitimate way for Becky to get an immigration VISA in New Zealand that will tide us over till our next trip to the US (regardless of what happens with regards to her medical), which is nice. We're still waiting to hear back with regards to the possibility of a biopsy on the two things in her lungs. We were meant to hear back today, but the professor (!) who is looking after us right now was busy at the hospital. We've also got to look into testing for whatever could have caused it, possibly a respiratory infection of some kind.

On the flipside, we might end up spending 8 months in the US next year, which would make me very happy. I'm tired of New Zealand right now and all the problems I perhaps unjustly associate with it. Absence will make the heart grow fonder.

Tomorrow we're having a bit of fun, going to go see Up again and taking our friend Tamzen out for some Japanese food. We put in a cathartic order on Amazon for the new Achewood book, as well as Scott Pilgrim 5 and some golden books. Who has my copy of Scott Pilgrim 4? Own up right now. I need it back, I forgot what happened in it!

Hopefully this medical situation can be sorted out in the next three weeks, as we may be able to get a quick trip to Australia in during October.

Topping it off, Becky is just getting over a cold and it seems I have it now. I need to get some of that Dimetapp stuff going on again, I'll be fluttering around like there ain't a problem. Had a bit of writers block lately, but that is BS, I am just lazy. Gotta get on top of that.

Coraline was just released in New Zealand and last week we were lucky enough to see it in 3D with our friend Tamzen. It was absolutely awesome, I want to do some fan art soon.

I've been working on a bunch of commissions, there's been lots of catching up from our two months away. I'm pretty behind on Tiny Kitten Teeth, but I have Monday's (formerly known as last Wednesday's) comic done. I've been doing John K's Cartoon College as well as starting to do two test pages for a graphic novel pitch.

Frank has been writing a mini-comic that will be released later this year. I'm doing it in brush pen. The physical copies will be released at my New Zealand gallery show in January, then available at conventions through 2010. But that is so far away! We are both planning way too far in advance!

On Friday I went along to the doctor. I've been trying to get a new Work VISA for New Zealand, as mine expired when we got back from America. I was told that I didn't need to get any medical certificates, as I'm from the USA and I'm under 30, but they decided I needed them anyway. I had to get an x-ray, a physical and blood tests.

As it turns out, everytime I have taken a blood test, I've passed out! This was no exception. I don't know what it is about it, but I do every time!

So, hopefully if everything goes smoothly, I'll be able to come and go from NZ as I please till 2011. I think in 2011 we might be heading back to the USA to live if everything goes accordingly!

We woke up incredibly late today, as we were up till 7:30am last night working on comics. We had the guest comic for Girls With Slingshots due as well as a Tigerbuttah and Becky had a few other things due as well. I woke up a little earlier than Becky around 3:30pm and began haphazardly making notes for the talk I was to do at 6pm. We hurriedly ate dinner and arrived a little late to the talk, but it wasn't so much a big deal. It was a nice crowd and I had an enjoyable time talking about the commerce of webcomics as well as explaining some of the technical stuff with regards to getting a comic started.

Talk went well, I labored on cash a bit, but I feel like the business end is really important across all creative fields, especially comics. No one seemed to mind too much though.

Afterwards we went to Renkon for some Japanese and Tamzen was a gem, buying us a delicious feast. Now we're going to be up till 7am again, making sure this page gets up for Friday's update.

Also Katie Rice did a sketch of Becky, which is awesome. She also did ones of our friends Emmy and Tara, which is ALSO super cool!

It has been way too long! There is something resembling a travel journal around here, but every year it falls by the wayside. I constantly feel bad about it. There will still be a Comic Con report though!

Since we got back to New Zealand, we've been rather busy. We've been back at our radio show and Becky has been madly painting, we've had so many crazy opportunities to follow up from being back from San Diego. I think I need a vacation from my vacation (which I think is something Garfield would say).

We're going to a James Jean/Misery art opening on Thursday in Auckland, which should prove pretty exciting.

Also we launched a store, with plush toys and metal tigerbuttah pins. But I've harped on about that pretty much everywhere already!

The floors in the elevator has weird liquid in it so it moves. The music in the elevator is terrifying. There was an 80s metal cover band setting up on a roof-top when we arrived. We went to Wild Wings, which was REALLY good, surprisingly. We went to a couple of terrible bars afterwards.

We overheard the worst conversation in history.

Best get ready for the convention now! Wooooo.

Looking forward to HeroesCon tomorrow. SP-238 is our table, come see usssss!