I delivered the art and layout files some time ago, but this makes it real- seeing my new book Extreme Perspective!- right across from Christopher Hart’s latest, Drawing Fantastic Furries- in a catalogue from Watson-Guptill, my publisher, which arrived in the mail yesterday. Note the publication date on your calendars: February 15, 2011.
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Joe's House. Acrylic on world globe by David Chelsea, 2008. Not for sale. Photo by Tom Lechner. tomlechner.com/

This is the largest and most elaborate spherical painting I have done to date, and the first actual commission. It was painted for Joe Erceg, and depicts the interior of his house. Joe is possibly my oldest friend, in that he knew my parents before I was born. Since the 1960s Joe has been one of Portland’s leading graphic designers, and now runs his firm Joseph Erceg Graphic Design with his son Matt. Longtime Portlanders may remember the giant butterfly painting designed by Joe which once covered the side of the Fleischner Building in Old Town.
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Double hemisphere painting by David Chelsea adapted from photographic panorama by Tom Lechner. Acrylic on paper, 2008.

I based this view of Portland’s Ira Keller Fountain on a 360º panorama by photographer Tom Lechner, which he had printed on a paper model of a rhombic triacontahedron, a thirty-sided geometric solid approximating a sphere. Originally known as the Forecourt Fountain, it was designed by the architect Lawrence Halprin and dedicated in 1970,  You can view a large image of the painting here.
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Comic Art Battle at Cosmic Monkey

The Stumptown Comics Fest is something of a yearly ritual for me, a chance to meet the reading public and reconnect with out-of-town friends I otherwise never see (Maryland cartoonist Carla Speed McNeil immediately noticed that I was walking without a cane; I had forgotten that last year I was still getting over a broken leg.).
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Spring Street Studios by David Chelsea. Panoramic photo by Tom Lechner.

This is one of my earliest spherical drawings, from 1995, my last year living in New York. It was drawn (in rapidograph on a styrofoam ball coated with papier-mâché) at Spring Street Studios, a life model drawing space in Soho.

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Detail from opening image for the Fisheye Perspective chapter in my upcoming book Extreme Perspective! Curvilinear And Beyond.

I’m still working on splash panels for the chapters in my perspective book. Here’s the latest:
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Splash panel for the chapter Wide, Wide Angle from the upcoming book Extreme Perspective! Curvilinear And Beyond.

Even though I’ve finished all the comics pages for my new book, I’m not QUITE done- I still have to draw introductory images to go with the text introductions for each chapter. Here’s one of them.

What are they saying? Don't ask me

More established cartoonists may take foreign editions in stride, but it is still a novelty for me to see my characters speaking in some language I don’t understand, as they did when both Perspective! and David Chelsea In Love came out in French editions. In my slow, deliberate campaign to cover the globe with my books the latest country to succumb is Japan, where an edition of Perspective! has recently been published. With the French books I was able to do a little second-guessing of the translations (does “parallelepipede” really have the same plain connotations in French as “box” does in English?) but given my utter ignorance of even the Japanese alphabet I will have to take it on faith that my translators know what they are doing. Evidently they are doing something right- according to my latest royalty statement, the Japanese edition is outselling the American version six to one.
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Hello, illustration fans. Happy Valentine’s Day, Presidents Day and Chinese New Year. l know it has been many months since my last blog post, but I have an excellent excuse- I was deep in work on my new book Extreme Perspective! Curvilinear And Beyond, trying to make a January deadline (which I only missed by a month) and far too distracted to write anything longer than than a Facebook status update. Well, the long slog is over- not that the book is FINISHED exactly; I still have chapter introductions to write, but the intensive part is past, and am finally able to take my first day off since Thanksgiving. Time to get around to things I’ve neglected, like folding laundry. Maybe I’ll even get a haircut this week, so I won’t look so much like Severus Snape. I promise to return to a more frequent schedule of posts soon- in the meantime here’s another preview panel from the new book: