fun facts about me

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los angeles, ca, United States
My name is Dave Davenport, but I am sometimes known as "Dogspunk", and sign my artwork "DDOG". I've been tattooing since 1996 and making comic books since 2004. In a past life I animated video games. To view galleries of my work, visit my website dogspunk.com and click on the teeth menu on the left...

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Ink Bastards: STERB WERBS!

The following post is the inaugural entry on INK BASTARDSa tattoo review blog focusing on Spike TV's Ink Masters. Daniel and I are big fans of the show, and were sad that there was no regular review blog. 

So now there is.


STERB WERBS!


Clone Knuckle?

Oh dear. Climb on in the Holodeck and jump to warp, tatt bros, because we're taking off to Deep Space 9! Daniel wrote that to bother Dave because this episode is all about Star WARS...not Star Trek.




     In this episode the tatt bros were tasked with all sorts of tie-in bullshit, all of which tied in to the biggest poop deck of a sci-fi series known to man, Star Wars. When we turned on the TV to watch and saw the short on-screen description of the episode Daniel said that Sarah was going to get a clit hard-on about this being a dork challenge...and we both busted up laughing when she did, in fact, juice herself on screen the second she saw the Sterm Troopers walking up for the Flash Challenge.

Mah Fervrit Churnge!

     After being treated to a screen-filling codpiece, viewers got to watch the contestants stumble all over themselves to prove that they understand what the word "contrast" means. Odd how few of them had any idea. 

Tatu Baby's trooper paint job.

Clint paints an angry grey eyeball on his.

Listening to Sarah's geek heart breaking.

        Dave loved Tatu Baby's Vato Trooper artwork, but in the end it was 'Hawke Cub who took the "prize" and won the advantage in the Elimination Challenge of being able to assign the  human canvases guinea pigs to the remaining contestants.

Clint clucks around the coop.

Steve lols in ridicule.

     'Hawke Cub did some silly speech to try to make himself feel like a man, but in the end he just sounded silly and dumb and retarded and sad and ugly and so 10-minutes-ago, y'all. There was some phony editing drama with Sarah being all bummed about having to do a Storm Trooper (It's about contrast and those things are just white!) and then Jessie started saying how his client  idiot could only have R2-D2 or C-3P0, but not both. Dave didn't get the problem here but Daniel just shrugged and continued to mack on his ice cream. Dave also predicted two things: 1) that Tatu Baby would win this challenge because of the edit she received and 2) that at around this point in the show she would emerge as a contestant to beat. He was right on both accounts.

Tatu Baby endures jealous barbs back at the loft.

     SO! Tatu Baby won her first Elimination Challenge. Congrats Mrs. Baby. Her "little green guy" tattoo (We don't think she ever used the name Yoda, much to Daniel's delight) was the clear winner this episode, and for good reason we thought, although Jaime's Chewbacca tattoo was another one Dave might have put up for the win. It gave the judges the contrast they demanded, made her client fool happy and was indeed quite nice. Dave noted that it was very painterly and beautiful.

"Won this challenge, you have."

"Won this challenge, you have."

"For real?"

"For real."

"Sweet."

Sanity... fleeing... midichlorians... dying!

     And it's a "OH THANK FUCKING GOD" goodbye to this season's Al Fliction, Kay Kutta. This muckraker should never have been on this show to begin with, then should have been eliminated long before now, and eventually proved himself to be the guy they kept on because he was such a jackass.

Kay gets sassy with the judges.

     His tattoo was terrible. A flat, round mess that Daniel thought looked like a moon pie. The judges put it best when they said that it looked like his Sith Guard (per Dave, of course) was made out of lunch meat. We feel like that's a good summation of his entire career, really: BOLOGNA!

Mayo or mustard on that?

      Yay! Kaye is gone. He actually said, after his elimination, "I'm damn near a born loser but I keep winning." This was either a really cruel  edit or, more likely the case, the way he deals with life. "I just keep winning" he boasts as he's being tossed. We say good riddance. It will be fun to see in seasons going forward who is going to play this role.

A long overdue shot of Kay packing his things and leaving!

     What we didn't get was the way the judges were falling all over themselves as they dismissed him to make sure that he knew they thought he was really great and talented and wonderful and on and on and on. Either they were intimidated by him for some reason or he's someone who is actually kind-of bi-polar and they chose to only show his, um, downswing moments. THE FUCK OUT OF HERE with all that ass kissing bullshit...THROW THE HACK OFF.

Seriously, tho, we'll miss this mug.

     Auntie Navarro was her usual self except on this episode she delivered some really dorky dialogue like, "Will you use the force to create a cool tatt or will you join the dark side and become eliminated?" or some stupid shit like that. Ugh. Auntie Navarro still doesn't seem quite comfortable on camera two seasons in, although at least she's received some decent tattoo work to cover up all of that awful work she was sporting throughout the first season.

     So, here were the tattoos with a brief "yea", "nay" or "GAY!":

Yea. Sarah's tattoo: Gerl expected the win with this. It's a perfect tattoo. It was worth the snub though just to see her snap.

Yea. Jaime's tattoo: Beautiful black and grey piece. Sarah and Tatu Baby's color pieces only beat it because of their  deeper complexity.

Yea. Jesse's tattoo: There's a lot to like about this, but one wonders why no one thought they could do both robots. It would have been nice to see him do a new school take on them.

Nay. Clint's tattoo: Originally I gave this a Yea, but the more you look at it, the more there is to dislike. What is up with that background, hawk-cub?

Nay. Sebastian's tattoo: Who puts an asymmetrical design in the middle of the back?  Better layout and  background design and this would rock.

Nay. Mark's tattoo: Probably his best so far, but poorly composed and suffers from some really bad color choices.


GAY! Steve, Steve, Steve. We just would not have expected this  from you. But everyone has an off-day, n'est pas?


Saturday, August 11, 2012

Original Art Pages for $ale

    Hey there, I am going to offer original line drawings for my comics on sale here.

 The first batch is the FERAL story, "Bonin' in the Boneyard", which was the first story to feature Feral and the Ghost Skater. It was published in 2006 in "Hard to Swallow comics" #1, as well as a couple other shorts stories of mine which were completely digital art. The line drawing of the cover of the book was sold at San Diego Comic-con in 2011. Each page is 11" by 14" (with the art taking up 9" by 13") on smooth bristol. I believe this was the first piece I used a Copic marker on. The pages range from $40 to $60 each, and I'll handle the postage unless you are out of the continental U.S.. 

Page 1: $60

Page 2: $60

Page 3: $50

Page 4: $40 (has very slight water damage)

Page 5: $60

Page 6: $50

Page 7: $50

Interested? Write me directly at dave@dogspunk.com I will consider discounts for multiple items. 
Support your friendly neighborhood comicbook pornographer today!

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

call to artists Bent-Con 2012


As you may of may not know, I am the curator of the pop-up art gallery at the 3rd annual Bent-Con, an LGBT (and their friends) oriented comic-book, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, gaming (et.al.) convention, taking place this year Nov. 30th thru Dec. 2nd in Burbank, California. 
Are you an artist? Know one who might want to enter? 

  Check out the details HERE, Droogies!


Tribal #1,523

A few hours of tribal work on a new client. Tried to fit with existing work and add some flow and recognition of the musculature beneath, 2 things I don't feel the existing work was doing.




Sunday, August 5, 2012

Why I went to San Diego for Comic-con this year...

This year I was going to skip San Diego Comic-con.


I had no new books to sell, and was generally burnt on tabling at this mind-numbingly huge convention. Then I realized that this is Judge Dredd's 35th anniversary, and the new film is only months away.

It's a good year to go as a fan. 


Then 2000ad and Lionsgate held a "WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO WIN TICKETS TO SEE DREDD" contest for tickets to an advance screening of the Pete Travis directed "Dredd". I entered, professing that I would eat munce for a month. I won a pair of tickets, and my fate for July 10th was written in stone (fortunately I haven't been asked to keep my vow of eating only munce for a month).
Come the night of the showing, I asked my good friend and fellow artist Justin Hall to take my +1 seat, which he did. Justin is a life-long fan of all types of comic-books, but has never read any Judge Dredd, so I was very happy to get a non-biased opinion from a good critic. As it turns out, we ended up sitting next to Brandon, then film critic from Bleeding Cool (I am not going to read his review until I am done with my own). I was already trying my hardest not to get my hopes up about DREDD --- since this usually leads to utter disappointment with any film--- but Brandon said a few things that set the context of this film up for me, and added to some things read on blogs and heard in podcasts put me in just the right place to see the movie.

I'll list these things first.


1, The costumes are very much like Carlos Ezquerra's original design. 2, Ron Smith's Mega-City 1 was blocky and inorganic.  3, The budget was low on this film ($45mil) and therefore the final product is practically an art-house film. 4, John Wagner approves of it, his most noted gripe being with the vehicles; he felt they looked too present-day.

The film itself:

It's not an epic film, but it doesn't need to be. There's one simple story that intoduces us to Dredd, Anderson, the Justice System, and Mega-City 1.

Very quickly the film settles onto the setting of Peach Trees block, and stays there for the rest of the film. As you (fans) all probably know by now, Dredd is giving Cadet Anderson her full-eagle assessment. They are tracking Madeline "Ma Ma" Madrigal and her Slo-Mo drug ring to it's source. The two Judges wind up with a prisoner who knows too much about Mardrigal's operation for her to allow him to be taken alive and be interrogated. Her people assume control of the block defenses and are able to trap Dredd, Anderson, and their prisoner inside.

The rest of the film is a simple game of survival, and in this game the movie viewer gets a perfect introduction to Dredd's world. 

Here we see the harsh violence of the world, garish and brutal, juxtaposed with incredible beauty, even amidst gratuitous carnage and dismemberment. People fall from the block's heights in ways that are scary and inviting at the same time, rendered hypnotic and dazzling due to the effects of the Slo-Mo drug, and the artistry of the cinematography and 3D effects.

We see Dredd as a law machine, dispencing Justice, but never grand-standing. I am not giving away much by saying one of the best scenes in the film shows Dredd emerging from the cloud of dust, having just survived an attack that blew bullets from the inner courtyard of the block through to the outer blast armor, destroying a good many apartments and people. He emerges carrying Madrigal's second in command, tosses him off of the balcony, and before "Ma Ma" has returned her gaze to Dredd, he has already walked matter-of-factly back into the dust cloud. No one-liners, no threats. His disdain for Madrigal apparent from his lack of concern for her reaction.

We see Anderson, too unconventional to be a regular street Judge, prove her worth to a man who had 
already dismissed her as a failure. Anderson is a Psi Judges, and in this era (set before the beginning of the comic series) the Justice Department's Psychic Division is undeveloped... they are at this time seen only as mutants and have significant stigma to overcome...but you can guess that they prove their worth as tools of the system.


I asked Justin Hall to give his scholarly opinion as a casual viewer :

 As a comic book geek of many years, I’m certainly aware of the world of Judge Dredd; many of the creators I most admire cut their teeth with that property. However, I’m certainly no expert, and am, like most Americans, not emotionally invested in the Judge Dredd mythos. So I came to the movie with a fairly blank, though positive, state of mind. 

 And I was quite pleased with what I saw! The two main characters Judge Dredd and Judge Andersen were well portrayed, the direction and filming were good, and the concepts were compelling. It was a simple story, and left me hoping for a bit more complexity in terms of character development and thematic arcs, but overall it was a very solid movie. 

 The real star of the film was the setting; Mega City 1 was well conceived, as was the Peach Trees housing complex where the action takes place, and the washed out colors and claustrophobic filming really brought home the sense of the Judge Dredd dystopian future. This bleakness was afforded moments of unexpected relief by the segments dealing with the narcotic that the plot revolved around; the gorgeous, slow motion photography gave the film moments of surreal beauty. 

And now again from myself as a fan of the source material: 


I saw the 1995 film when it came out. I wanted to like it. I own the dvd, and watch it from time to time. Depending on my mood, I may say it was okay, or not. There was so much wrong with it. I watched it again last night, and you know what? Stallone isn't even the worst thing about that film.

You need to forgive more than half of that movie to even enjoy it.

This film?

You don't have to forgive ANYTHING.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Celtic Dog-Pile!



I did this yesterday on a burly client from Palm Springs, and as such it took about twice as long as I was imagining it would when I was not remembering what burly clients I have.
I love doing Celtic Critters, and took the amount of detail in this one as a challenge.
Each of the 3 dogs has a different pattern on the inside.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

new work on a 6 years old sleeve

Yesterday a client I hadn't seen in almost 6 years came in and got some more work started. I snapped a few pics of the existing work to show off what my tribal freehand looked like back in 2006.


Here's what he got yesterday, a cover up of this:

Covered with this: