Grading on the Condom Scale

Campus Progress has a piece grading some of Obama's budget initiatives on a condom scale drawn by yours truly.

Busy Painting Billie, or Mikhaela and Masheka Mural Madness, Pt. 2

Click to enlarge

Here's another peak at our little collaboration piece (again, full details to be revealed later). I'm terrified of heights and working on a scaffold caused me to cry in terror a few times. But getting to paint Billie Holiday with a big flower in her hair made up for it, sort of.

You might wonder whose drawing/cartoon style that is--it's both. I did some of the caricature sketches and Masheka did some (well, most) but then we both played with inking them so it was one consistent Mashekaela style.

Masheka and Mikhaela Mural madness, pt. 1

Click to enlarge

I can't show you the whole mural or explain what it's for yet, but here's Masheka painting Will Rogers...

Cover Girl: The Wedding (Equality) Party

Here's a year-end cover illustration I did for Bay Windows. The cover celebrates the people who furthered LGBT rights in Massachusetts in 2007, such as new governor Deval Patrick. Massachusetts is so much awesomer without Mitt Romney around--lets hope he totally fails in his presidential ambitions, too!

And here was my initial rough sketch:

Testing new blog look/title--thoughts?

I'm trying to do a redesign of this whole site in preparation for my book launch (which will probably happen sometime in June...) so I'm testing a new look and name for the blog. It used to be "Mikhaela's News Blog", then it became "Boiling Over", but that didn't make much sense unless you knew my comic strip was called "The Boiling Point." So I may just give it the same name as the strip. Thoughts?

My current annoyance is that the image now up top of this blog is awfully large, file-size-wise, and takes time to load. I'm going to work on slicing it up or reducing it somehow.

Also, I'm pondering a switch from Blogger to WordPress. I briefly tried to do the Expression Engine thing a while ago, but I don't have time to code from scratch and there really aren't nearly as many templates and plugins for EE as there are for WordPress, plus WordPress is free.

Masheka's book cover: Deep Doodle

Shhhhh, I'm on Masheka's computer so I can give you a sneak preview of his book cover! Click to enlarge and see if you can find the tiny Masheka, Mikhaela and Riley (our cat) doodles.

Book covers, nearly done now!

Sorry I haven't posted my new cartoons lately, but putting together a collection of cartoons like this in less than a week is no joke. When it's all done I'm going to sleep for about two days then post all my cartoons for your viewing pleasure. Meantime, here are the front and back cover + spine of my soon-to-be-released book (click to enlarge, of course).

Quasi-final book cover design...

This is my last post for the night. I need some sleep! (See previous posts for sketch and earlier version of the drawing).

Book cover sketch in progress

So after years of selling little black & white mini-comics xeroxed booklets of my cartoons, I'm finally graduating to a Real (albeit self=published) Book Collection. It'll have a full-cover cover, perfect binding and nice interior grayscale printing. Content-wise, it will feature over 100 of my best cartoons, plus extra bonus cartoons, drawings and historical Mikhaela material never reproduced on this website or in my previous booklets. And an introduction by Ted Rall!

I decided to stick with the Attack of the 50-Foot Mikhaela concept I've been using for my website, but completely redrawing and retooling the image (still using the pretty hilarious photos my friend Stephanie took where I pretended a Beanie Babie alligator was a tiny George W.)

New Illustration: Bringing Down Rumsfeld

Here's an illustration I did recently for the cover of the Metro Times (Detroit) last month, for a story called "Bringing Down Rumsfeld": You can't really see this small (click to enlarge) but those textures in the sky are from a shiny piece of dress fabric I scanned, and the ground texture is from a tweed wool skirt I sewed a while back (I scanned it, didn't actually cut it up since I still wear it). And here's how it looked with the logo: