springtime news!
this month has been a lot of preparing for the months to come, for me. thumbnail sketches for new comic projects, reading books as research for other new comic projects, figuring out what i need to pack for my trip to the alaska robotics comic camp in may, finalizing my new website design, troubleshooting said website when it messes up.
not the most interesting stuff for a newsletter, so here's the stuff that is interesting!
• patreon! •
i'm continuing my resolution to be adventurous with patreon rewards and try out things i don't normally get to do, and make them sort of interactive when i can. last month i made a build-your-own-haunted-house sticker sheet/print combo, and this month i've got a fun little three-dimensional haunted room!
my brain doesn't work well with conceptualizing 3d stuff — why i always dreaded required sculpture classes in art school — so i had to make an embarrassing amount of post-it note models of this to be sure it would work the way i wanted. it does, though! the opposite side of the page is printed with the outside of the house, to make it interesting no matter which way you're looking at it.
i think it's pretty neat. if you do, too, there's one (1!) spot left in my ouija board mail tier this month, and if you join before march 31st you'll get one of these in the mail.
(if that spot's already been taken or you don't open this email till april, i'll be posting the printable images on their own as well for all $5+ patrons! $5+ patrons also get access to behind-the-scenes looks at my art process, previews of art before it's posted on social media, and more!)
• the witch's wings & other terrifying tales! •
are you afraid of the dark: the witch's wings and other terrifying tales has a cover now! and a release date — october 3rd 2023! and preorders available — in hardcover and paperback!
the preorder links above are to bookshop.org, which means you can select your local independent bookstore to give them some support when you preorder! (it's available to preorder from barnes and noble/amazon/etc as well, but i'm not linking you to those. go support your local booksellers!)
i'm so excited for this book to get into peoples' hands. i'm super proud of the work i did on it, and junyi wu & justin and alexis hernandez's stories are also incredible. if you need more incentive to preorder, here's the summary:
Based on Nickelodeon's hit horror franchise Are You Afraid of the Dark?, an original horror graphic novel series with three all-new stories based on Hispanic urban legends and cultural lore.
In this all-new graphic novel series, a new Midnight Society gathers around the campfire to share urban legends, folklores, and all manner of spooky stories. These three terrifying tales feature haunted buses, monstrous creatures, and spine-chilling mysteries guaranteed to have you reaching for the light switch! In "The Tale of the Witch's Wings," a young boy with a habit of bullying meets his match when an ancient witch sets her eyes on him. In "The Tale of the Haunting of Bus #13," a young girl finds herself potentially trapped on a bus haunted by more than just ghosts! And in "The Tale of the Stray Comet," two siblings bring home a stray dog that is much more monstrous than they could ever imagine! These three stories will be beautifully and hauntingly brought to life by artists Junyi Wu, Justin and Alexis Hernandez, and Kaylee Rowena.
• art! •
not a ton of art to share this time, but here's some hauntings.
• new website! •
in lieu of other art/projects i can share here, i wanna tell y'all about my new website! i've been working on coding it off-and-on since january, and i finally sat down and polished it up and launched it last week.
it's been about a year since i decided i was sick of being limited by squarespace/weebly/etc and that i wanted to code my own site from scratch. i've been coding in various ways since i was a kid (neopets petpages, tumblr themes, etc etc etc) but i'd never made anything as complicated as a whole portfolio website before. in the year since, i've learned a ton about coding, and figured it was time for a revamp!
things i'm especially proud of on version 2.0 of my site are:
actually functional filtering on the illustration page, so if you only want to see haunted houses or client work, you can do that!
a bunch of fun little details - if you hover over the image on the 'about' page, it changes from black-and-white to color, for example!
a links page for links to other artists/creators/websites i like! i like the idea of an internet where you can find new artists' work to follow just by going down a rabbit hole of other artists' websites, rather than being beholden to social media algorithms to find new stuff. a big goal of this version of my portfolio is to make it (in conjunction with this newsletter) a viable way for me to exist online without being constantly active on social media.
i feel pretty strongly that there should be spaces on the web outside of the Big Few Social Media Sites (twitter/instagram/facebook/tumblr/tiktok) that have taken over most of online life. there's a whole lotta people doing cool stuff on neocities.org with building their own websites, and it's super worth exploring! (i wrote a whole blog entry on this on my website, so if you want more rambling and some resources on building your own site, here's that!)
anyways, go poke through the new site. i think it's neat.
• recommendations! •
music:
florence + the machine's "just a girl" cover for the new season of yellowjackets
also, of course, the new hozier ep, "eat your young"
comics:
emily carroll put two new comics on her site this month — "writhe" & "a pretty place" — and i've been obsessed with them.
books:
she is a haunting by trang thanh tran! i mentioned this one last newsletter since my illustration is the endpaper art for the barnes & noble edition, but i finished reading it in the time between then and now, and i can confirm it's totally gorgeous. if a bisexual vietnamese-american coming of age entangled with a parasitic house and its creepy-crawly ghosts sounds good to you, go buy this book (or borrow it from your library) immediately.
tv:
the new season of yellowjackets started last week, and it's real fun. do you like horror? stories where it isn't clear how much is tragedy wreaking havoc on the mind and how much is genuine supernatural occurrences? cannibalism? a forest that hates you? christina ricci being absolutely unhinged in the best way? watch yellowjackets.
i think that's all i've got this time! talk to y'all next month! stay safe + stay haunted!
💖,
kaylee