Dream Sediment

NEW SITE/BLOG: HERE

News 8/30/11: The Furlqump book is finished!  The book will come in softcover, hardcover and deluxe editions. I'll let you know when it's available to purchase.  Here are some shots-

News 7/25/11: More of the new story I mentioned last post here.



News 7/21/11:  Wow it's been ages since an update.  Summer seems to be a time of daydreaming, taking in the chaotic whirl of experience and letting new ideas stew around.  I've been working a lot lately too.  Furlqump will be out some time in August by the awesome folks over at Chance Press.  These people really have a passion for making books.
Here's a recent mock up-



Copies will be available here and on the Chance press site.  I'll also include free sketches and stuff.  The book will make its debut at the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco this fall.  I plan on going if I can somehow rake up the money.

A couple of months ago I bought a giant animation how-to manual and I've been trying to practice it a little bit each day.  Animation is extremely hard, I'll leave it at that.  It also reprograms your brain in a way.  Going about my daily business I find myself constantly wondering how I would animate the countless forms I see.  Subtle nuances like the way a squirrel scampers across a lawn or the number of times a person blinks during conversation I'm now distractingly cognizant of.  I guess my goal has always been to turn my stories into animations.

I've started a new story, which is untitled at the moment.  This one will probably be more experimental than anything I've done thus far.  I'm playing around with negative space and minimalism again in this one.  My main formal inspiration for this story is children's books.  I like the idea of taking the basic children's book format and blending it with a scrolling canvas; creating a story that's not really intended for children.  We'll see how it turns out.  I've been drawing a lot lately but most of it has been ideas for the story.  Here's some random sketch nonsense though-





And also, I'd like to thank Scott McCloud for doing a blog post about Growth a little while ago- it was a big step.  I'd also like to thank the people who gave Growth a huge response on Reddit, I enjoyed reading all the feedback. Updates will continue.  Peace!


News 5/17/11: Growth is finished! (Warning- contains nudity. Heh.)  I'll be doing a little editing this week so some minor stuff might change a bit.  Thanks to everyone who's been following it for the past couple of months. I'm interested in some feedback so if the story made you happy, depressed, disturbed, euphoric, outraged, numb or had any sort of impact whatsoever let me know at hardeb@sage.edu.  Now for something completely different. 


News 5/16/11:  More Growth.  Last night I woke up in a discombobulated panic on the cold hard floor of my living room, both of my legs completely numb.  I flopped around screaming, wondering what the hell happened and why my legs had been turned into lifeless slabs of meat. After a few terrifying minutes a steady, pin-pricked trickle of feeling began to run back into them.  When I finally had the strength to get up and turn on the light I noticed streaks of blood on the floor and gashes on my knees.  The streaks led me to the wall directly outside my room, which had been decorated with two circular blood stains and bits of skin.  I must have run full speed into the wall and knocked my legs out cold.  I don't remember what the dream was about.  It's that time of year again when I have to pay my website hosting service, so any donations would be appreciated. If you donate let me know and I'll send you a signed drawing!-

News 4/13/11:  Ahem.  One page of Growth! Yeah, it's been busy round these parts.  Here's the title page for Furlqump and some random detritus-







Surprisingly, I haven't changed very much.  I'm still a chaotic ball of hyperactivity that needs to be reminded to finish tasks, pay attention and stop jumping around.  No longer sport the turtle necks though... Seriously, I don't understand why people would willingly wear these abominations. Necks need air.

News 3/31/11: New

stuff.  It's fun experimenting with this story, I want to do more.  Here are some more random pages from my unfinished graphic novel "Fabricator"- 




News 3/27/11:  Just one page of

today.  A little over a year ago I started a graphic novel called "Fabricator". It was 120-ish pages and about 8 months of solid work.  I never completed it because it became boring to work on, I was slightly embarrassed by it, and the drawings were horribly uneven- when I started out I sucked and when I was done I sucked slightly less.  Despite all this, I learned a lot while making this thing and there are some parts that aren't completely worthless. I'll be posting up some bits I like in the next couple days.  Here are two dream sequences in the story, the first one was done at the beginning and the last one was done near the end.  Notice the improvement...



























News 3/25/11: Some

News 3/23/11: I re-drew the pages I posted yesterday because they were a half-assed job.  I like the new ones a lot better.  I also did a little editing, polished some parts and removed some fringes. 

News 3/22/11: A tad more Growth...

News 3/20/11: On Friday I took a spill and my arm folded violently under the weight of my body.  Now I have a fractured wing that's wrapped up like a burrito.  The bad news is that it's my left (drawing) arm and the good news is that I'm still able to draw and write with it, although it's a slow and intensive process.  Putting on pants and shirts is a chore, but not as much as rock climbing, monkey bars, hand to hand combat, pushups, pull-ups, handstands, and doing that YMCA thing.  It should heal quickly though.  I added about an inch of Growth.  Furlqump is finally shipped off to the publisher, I've gotten word that a few special edition "triple hardcover" versions of Furlqump are going to be printed along with the normal print run.  Here's a mock up for the cover- 



News 3/8/11: Finally some more

pages to post, soon though.  The other day someone online remarked that Furlqump seemed to be inspired by something called the Codex Seraphinianus.  I'd never heard of this before so I looked it up.  What I found completely took me by surprise.  The Codex Seraphinianus (I can't even pronounce it yet) is a 360-something page encyclopedia of a detailed and comprehensive imaginary world, complete with sophisticated and incredibly surreal artwork, and written in an imaginary/unintelligible script-




The entire thing was made by Italian architect and designer Luigi Serafini over a period of two years when he was 26/27 years old.  Serafini possesses one of the most intense and hypnotic visual imaginations I've ever seen.  I'll let the work speak for

"Many of the pictures are grotesque and disturbing, but others are extremely beautiful and visionary. The inventiveness that it took to come up with all these conceptions of a hypothetical land is staggering.

Some people with whom I have shared this book find it frightening or disturbing in some way. It seems to them to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility. There is very little to fasten onto; everything shifts, shimmers, slips. Yet the book has a kind of unearthly beauty and logic to it, qualities pleasing to a different class of people: people who are more at ease with free-wheeling fantasy and, in some sense, craziness. I see some parallels between musical composition and this kind of invention. Both are abstract, both create a mood, both rely largely on style to convey content."

News 2/3/11: More Growth


News 2/1/11: New pages of growth


News 1/30/11: Here's the finished version of my New Yorker contest entry-


And here's the first installment of my short story Growth, which I'm messing around with while I totally rework chapter two of the untitled story.

I had a dream last night where I got a brand new sketchbook and woke up the next morning to find every page filled with really really bad drawings.  When I actually woke up I was extremely pissed off and I don't know why. 


News 1/21/11:  Taking a little break from the untitled story to work on some smaller projects, it will be back soon though.  There's so much stuff I want to do, and on top of all this there's school.  I need a production team.  In the meantime, I apologize for this latest installment of quickly drawn/forgotten sketchbook nonsense-





haha there's a hair on the last one

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