Spectrum 27 will be arriving at your favorite book and comic stores on November 10th!
With the absence of shows this year Kathy and I channeled all of our energy into editing and designing the best Spectrum that we could possibly make. This is a book that we are exceptionally proud of. We can’t wait for you to get your copies and to hear what you think.
Thanks again to all of the artists who submitted to Spectrum 27 and for making this such a wonderful collection. We’re honored that we could have played a role in Spectrum during these last 7 years.
Kathy and I almost forgot what one another looked like. We took off our masks for all of 30 seconds to take some pictures of us with Spectrum 27. We’ve had masks on each day at the office since the pandemic started. We look forward to being able to see you all again once the shows can safely resume again.
Tran Nguyen is an award-winning illustrator & fine artist. Born in Can Tho, Vietnam, she currently resides in the peachy state of Georgia. Nguyen’s paintings are created with a soft, delicate quality using colored pencil and acrylic on paper. She’s most known for her paintings of whimsical women and their melancholic landscapes, which often possess an air of fantasy and surrealism. She creates illustrations for published media such as magazines, books, wine & beer packaging, animation, advertising, and mural work. Her clients include VH1, Tiger Beer, World Wildlife Fund, and she has showcased with galleries across the world.
FLESK: What experience do you hope viewers have while looking at your art?
NGUYEN: I’d like viewers to feel some form of re-assurance that everything will be okay no matter what they’re going through in life. Or simply getting a tinge of creative inspiration from it would make the illustration a success.
FLESK: Much of your art features an array of more-than-human imagery. What is it about human reality combined with metaphysical elements that speaks to you?
NGUYEN: There are layers beneath human reality that isn’t visually apparent, but exists, so I like to give these layers physical form and showcase the two together in the same image plane to create a sense of surrealism. Reality is so much more extraordinary than it appears.
You Must Not Miss by Tran Nguyen
FLESK: What emotion tends to guide your creativity the most?
NGUYEN: Most probably melancholy and its near opposite, contentment.
FLESK: What is your favorite fantasy subject to illustrate?
NGUYEN: My favorites are fluffy, feline beasts such as massive tigers or shield maiden-esque characters with an Asian twist.
FLESK: How has your artistic style changed over the years and where do you see it heading?
NGUYEN: My artistic style started out far more bizarre and surreal, but these days, it’s toned itself down. As my personal narrative has become grounded, my execution of the subject has gotten more realistic. In the near future, I plan on revisiting those weird and whimsical subject matters as well as scaling back the tightly rendered forms.
FLESK: Do you have any upcoming projects you would like to share some information about?
NGUYEN: I have a ton of personal projects that’s been on back burner for years and one of it is creating a luxe silk scarf featuring one of my illustrations. I finally have the time to bring it to life and I’m excited launch the project on Kickstarter in early October 2020.
Ambedo by Tran Nguyen. Art book retrospective published by Flesk.
We’ve been incredibly busy here since the campaign ended last month. I’d like to give you an update on each of the four books.
1. The Al Williamson and Mark Schultz Astounding Sketchbook
This bonus item is done and at the printer! We filled up this 16 page
sketchbook with never before published sketches and preliminaries by Al
and Mark. It sure was a lot of fun to dig through material to use for
this.
This book is done and at the printer! I worked closely with Mark over
the last few months to select art for this collection. As always, Mark
is a joy to work with and we are very proud with how this new collection
came out. Mark decided at the last minute to draw a few new pieces that
will be revealed once the book is shipped to you.
This book is done and at the printer. We’re very excited to bring the classic Xenozoic Tales collection back in print in this new format. We poured over every detail and are happy to have this coming out soon.
The artwork selection, the writing, and the preliminary designs are
all done. At this time, I am focused full time on tightening up the
designs, then will focus on the finished designs, followed by the final
proofing. We were able to pull together a beautiful selection of Al’s
artwork that spans his entire career. I expect to have it done in the
next couple of weeks. I ended up doing far more writing for the book
than I initially intended, which added a few weeks to the production
time, but I feel it was well worth the effort.
I’ll let you all know right when the Al Williamson book is done!
Thank you so much for your support to make these books a reality.
It has been far too long since we last published a book on William Stout. We have a new collection in the works that will bring his comics work together. We’ll share the full details once the book is closer to completion.
Prehistoric Life Murals remains one of our favorite books. It contains all of Stout’s stunning murals for The Houston Museum of Natural Science, Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom, and the San Diego Natural History Museum. We still have some signed copies available.
Kathy and I spent a few hours going over all of the Flesk books we are working on over the next year. Thanks to Vicky and Lauren helping us now we are in a position were we can take on another book by an artist who we have not worked with before.
It didn’t take us very long to
come up with a list of 15 names. Now, we will take our time to narrow
down the list to one name before reaching out to the artist to see if he
or she is interested.
There are two that stand out the most to me, but my goal is to hand over more decisions to Kathy and Vicky to see who they are the most interested in contacting. I don’t want this company to reflect only my tastes.
I never expect that anyone would want to work with us. I’ve been turned down a few times, and that is perfectly OK. I never feel rejected since people may have their own plans and goals that take them in a different direction.
Working with a new artist goes far beyond what they do. It is also who they are and how they treat others. For instance, in few rare cases, there have been artists who are friendly to me, but not necessarily kind to James or Kathy. If someone talks to anyone here like they are a servant I will not work with that person. I won’t share the stories, but you’d be surprised.
But, my aim is for this to be a positive note while so much weird stuff is happening all around us. Thanks to people who supported us this year we could bring in Lauren and Vicky and we can look to the future. You have our thanks.
Two artists! Three Books! Four Prints! The Schultz and Williamson variety fun pack presented by Flesk is now live on Kickstarter!
Our latest Flesk Kickstarter campaign offers three new books! The first is the latest art book by Mark Schultz, Carbon 4. The second book, Xenozoic by Mark Schultz, is a handy to hold and affordably priced new printing of his classic Xenozoic Tales comic series. The third book focuses purely on the legendary Al Williamson, titled Strange World Adventures! Plus, we have four premium prints on offer: one by Williamson, and three by Schultz. Please read the details on our Kickstarter campaign page. Thanks so much for all of your support!
We sincerely hope that you are all doing well and that you are safe and healthy.
The Art of Frank Cho books arrived
at our Flesk warehouse! We entered phase 3 in Santa Cruz County, just in
time, making it open for tourism and for Frank to visit.
All of the Art of Frank Cho books, the prints associated with our Kickstarter campaign and all of the Kickstarter bonus items have been signed. Frank ended up doing just over 7000 signatures.
Kathy, Vicky and I have started packing. Due to Covid-19 we are still
being very cautious. We normally bring in a crew of helpers to pack
books, but we decided to limit the operations to just the three of us.
What this means is greater safety for us, but that means it will take us
a little longer to get you your goodies that normal. We hope you all
understand.
As of yesterday, 600 domestic packages of the signed deluxe edition
have been shipped. We are concentrating on mailing out all of the books
first, then we will mail the prints immediately afterward.
I’ll post weekly updates to inform you on what has shipped to date.
A big note of thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered our upcoming Bruce Timm book so far! We’ve had a tremendous response. It is very helpful when people pre-order since not only does it help us to pay our initial printer bill, but it also helps me to determine the print run. I enjoy how many books that we sell direct since we like the relationship that we have with all of you. Thank you!
The Big Teasecollects his three Teaser collections—released from 2011 to 2013 and long sold out—plus Surrender, My Sweet from 2015. In addition, Timm has created new material especially for this collection and delved into his personal archives to share pieces not shown before. These culminate in more than 75 additional pages of material not reproduced in any of his previous Naughty and Nice collections. In all, over 260 women drawn in pencil, ink or color fill these pages. Timm’s art is reproduced at an impressive size and showcased in this oversized format.
The hardcover edition is only available direct from us at Flesk. Save $10 by pre-ordering your book at this special price. This collection ships in mid-June 2020. The book is done and at the printer. All hardcover pre-orders come with 2 free bonus 8 x 10” mini-prints that feature B.T. art found within the book.
I was curious about how long we have been working on this collection. I went through my emails and found the following message that I sent to Bruce on November 5th, 2018. (This is just a small portion of the email.
“I have a little itch to work on something else in the background.
“What do you think of making a new collection of your nudes that would collect the 3 Teaser’s and Surrender My Sweet into a 9 x 12″ collection? We’d be looking at 112 pages of material.”
Bruce’s reply was, “Consider me interested.” (Also, a small portion of his response.)
Since I know how busy Bruce always is I had suggested that this book was something that we could do without him needing to produce any new work, except for a cover piece. Well, here we are 1 year and 4 months later with a 208 page book that has an additional 75 pages of material not reproduced in any of his previous Naughty and Nice collections.
Bruce is a joy to collaborate with. I always work around his schedule knowing that in time we will have a beautiful new collection. For this reason we are grateful for your patience and truly hope you will enjoy this book.
We’ve had a lot of inquiries asking if Bruce can sign the books. His schedule is too tight and busy to allow him to. However, we hope some of you can meet him in person at the San Diego Comic Con where he can sign it for you in person. That’s the one show where he makes an appearance each year.
Here’s the link to pre-order if you are interested.
With everything that is going on right now, I wanted to reach out to
you and wish you all well. I hope that you and your family and friends
are safe and healthy.
We’re all doing good here. Kathy, Vicky and I are working from our respective homes while we are sheltered in place.
What does this mean for us at Flesk Publications? We can run the business from home with the one exception of mailing packages on a daily basis. For the time being we have limited our shipping to once per week until we are given permission by the city to resume our office operations. Only essential businesses are allowed to continue to operate at the moment. Health services, grocery stores and gas stations are examples of essential businesses. Thank you for your patience as our online orders ship slower than usual until the city gives us the safety clearance.
The health of our community, our friends, and our families takes
precedence during this time. We’re doing our part by staying at home to
respect the ordinance and to refrain from inadvertently adding to the
problem.
During our shelter in place we will use this time to pour all our
energy into being creative and to working with our artist friends. It’s
our goal to use this time of sheltering to make some beautiful new
books, including Spectrum 27, a new Arthur Adams collection, and our
first big book that highlights Rachel and Terry Dodson. We look forward
to sharing these new titles with you once we get through this
unprecedented situation.
The Art of Frank Cho is at the
printer. It’s too early to tell if there will be any delays with the
book, but we will get through this incredibly challenging time and
everything will be ok.
From Kathy, Vicky, Lauren and myself here at Flesk, and from Frank,
we wish for you and your family to be safe and secure and hope that you
all come out of this situation healthy. We’re grateful to all of you for
your support over the years. You have given us this gift of being able
to publish art books. We can’t thank you enough.
