IAN JAY ART TUMBLR

A new page of Epiphany is live and waiting for your eyeballs on http://ianjay.net! Eli and Oscar’s charity crash course/deity rehab still isn’t going so hot.

POWER ANIMAL PROJECT UPDATE! We’ve got two weeks until the project deadline (June 4th). To all the people who have sent me finished submissions or works in progress so far, thank you! If you’ve finished your piece but don’t know where to send it, mail it to me here. If you haven’t finished your piece and you don’t think you’re going to make it (it’s cool, it’s a busy time for a lot of artists right now!), drop me a note or an e-mail and I’ll find someone else to fill in for you. 

ALSO: A friend of mine had an awesome idea for how artists participating in this zine can make money off of it: While the publically available digital version of the zine will be web-resolution, I could send print-resolution copies to the participating artists. That way, if you guys want to print and sell copies at any conventions you go to, you can keep whatever you make. Artists, would this work? Feedback is appreciated.

This zine is really coming together! I’ve got a video for it that should be on the way real soon— expect it sometime next week-ish, along with a couple other “announcement” videos and about fifty million “me and Adri goofing off in Savannah/Orlando” videos. Again, to everyone participating, thanks for taking this project from “something goofy” to “something goofy that looks really, really cool”. Keep your third eyes peeled for more updates!

Commission for my main man Dick “Pepperoni Deluxe” Jarvis. This is Melitta and Chompy, the two main characters of his new webcomic Drunkards of the Cosmos. READ IT, IT ONLY HAS ONE PAGE UP RIGHT NOW BUT IT’S GOING TO BE AMAZING.

Book pre-order commission for my friend Berni, of him and me as Ghostbusters vs. the late “Macho Man” Randy Savage and his haunted Slim Jims. Good commission suggestion.

A little treat for all your earlybirds/nightowls: new Epiphany page up on ianjay.net! Good stuff.

A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FOR EVERYONE PARTICIPATING IN, OR INTERESTED IN READING, THE “FINDING YOUR POWER ANIMAL” ZINE:

I started this project for a number of different reasons:

• To experiment with organizing a collaborative artistic publication.
• To show off my friends’ awesome drawing skills, and my drivel-writing skills.
• To have a really neat printed thing to pass around at the conventions I’m attending this summer.
• To recoup some of the money I lost on ECCC.

This last one, while not at the top of my brain, is still pretty important. Emerald City left me pretty dry, and I want to be able to save up enough to pay for food, gas and lodging at Anthrocon, Heroescon and Otakon. Originally my plan was to release the”Finding Your Power Animal” zine as a limited-run printed item, sell as many as I could at the summer conventions, and put the rest for sale up on my website. I’ve been crunching some numbers recently, though, and to be honest I don’t think I can afford to print and ship out a fifty-two page zine right now. 

So let’s get digital. 

Here’s my new plan: The “Finding Your Power Animal” zine will be published online, with a pay-what-you-want pricing system. 

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR ARTISTS: I’ve seen a whole lot of you create incredible color stuff for the zine, and it seemed a shame that it would have to be grayscaled for print. Now that we’re going live online, you can ignore that criteria. If you want to use color, GO NUTS! If you’re sticking to black and white, though, THAT’S AWESOME TOO. Just do whatever you’re comfortable with (and please keep your image files at 300dpi).

I can’t really give you guys physical copies of the zine to pay you, but I WILL be mailing you all digital copies (with all the bonus junk— more on that later). I might be printing a very, very small run of them (like ten) to show off at cons, so if you really, really want a real-life copy, send me an e-mail and we’ll work something out. (ALSO HEY ARTISTS: if you haven’t e-mailed me yet, please e-mail me! Only like ten of you have told me how you want me to credit you in this thing so far. I’m going to try to embed active links to your websites in the pages, so if anything this is even more relevant.)

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR READERS: Not only does putting the zine online solve a lot of printing and shipping cost issues, it also makes the zine a lot easier to advertise and distribute. Considering how weird and experimental the nature of the project is, I was honestly really surprised by the absolutely massive wave of enthusiasm I received for it. Limiting its sales to hard copies at conventions and the occasional shipping order would, I feel, make it a lot harder for the majority of you to enjoy it. I also didn’t feel entirely comfortable with straight-up profiting off the hard work of other artists, to be honest; it makes me feel like the sort of skeezoid we were warned not to socialize with in art school.

With the pay-what-you-want model, this problem is sidestepped. Similar to a tip jar, the minimum price for the zine will start at zero dollars, so if you don’t want to pay a red cent to read “Finding Your Power Animal”, you can do that. If you do want to pay something, though, I’ll make it worth your while:

• Anyone who pays five dollars or more gets a little BONUS supplementary zine filled with more articles, more art, and a SECRET VIDEO (if I can figure out how to embed videos into Adobe documents. If not, I’ll just link to it). 
• Anyone who pays ten dollars or more gets the bonus zine plus a sketch, by me, of themselves with their power animal of choice… or as their power animal of choice. (Or you can ask me to pick which power animal you get. You know what my sense of humor is like, though.)
• Anyone who pays fifty dollars or more gets all that other stuff, plus “VIRTUAL DRUGS”. I’m not really sure what those are, but once I find out, I’ll figure out a way to send ‘em to you. If anyone asks, they’re for medicinal purposes.

So that about sums it up. I still get to publish the zine, you guys get to read it for free, the participating artists get a lot more advertising, etc. etc. etc. If it works, then I’ll make this sort of thing a series, maybe branch out into other subjects (power crystals, astral projection, lost continents). If it doesn’t work, then the only thing I’ve wasted is time. Whatever happens, let’s make this experiment an experience! An experimence. 

ALSO HEY: If you have any questions, comments or concerns, don’t hesitate to tell me! This is a conversation, not just one guy shouting at the computer. 

WIP pre-order commission for my friend Kit. dang i’m tired.

surfdog2000:

New Epiphany page up on http://ianjay.net! It’s two animal people talking in a shopping mall parking lot. IF THAT DOESN’T EXCITE YOU I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT WILL.

I meant to post this to my art blog first! Whoops!

surfdog2000:

puppytube:

The color version of my contribution to Ian Jay’s animal anthology. The version in the zine will be black and white. My theme was snakes, obviiii.

Hope y’all dig it ~

getting artwork from Audrey for this project means a heck of a lot to me, considering how active she is with the zine scene! the fact that she somehow reached into my subconscious and pulled out literally exactly the kind of thing i wanted for Snake’s illustration is just icing on the coolness cake.