Dec 10, 2012

2013 Calendars are available!


I should have posted this earlier! This time of year is so busy...

Available at Crompton Collective and That's Entertainment, this is my offering for the 2013. Fifteen measley bucks! Scroll down to earlier posts to see previews of the inside pages...

Nov 14, 2012

Lethal Toilet

Whipped up a poster for a private screening event for my buddies over at Mcfarland and Pecci.

Nov 6, 2012

The Rabbits

Did a quick sketch a few weeks ago and touched it up this morning. Just doodling, really.

Oct 23, 2012

Preview for 2013 calendar

Just wrapped up the last piece. Here's a teaser for next year's calendar, available in December. Leave me a comment here or on the facebook page to reserve a copy. Should be $15, as always. 

Bride finished

I think it makes a good month of April.

Oct 22, 2012

Quickie...

Quick Bride of Frankenstein sketch. I don't sketch in Photoshop as much as other artists. No real reason for it, it's as good a format as any. I might move that lightning bolt around so it spans the sky and hits that small castle silhouette.

 

EDIT: Yeah, I think I like this better. I like how feels like a crown, maybe even a crown of thorns.




Oct 16, 2012

Drew this during the debate

It's a grim reaper with monster truck tires.


Ellen Ripley

I never posted the final on this. The Alien page from last year's calendar, finalized.

Oct 5, 2012

Wild and Crazy Guy


I've always loved this album and its cover since I first heard it when I was maybe seven years old. This is the original:


Oct 1, 2012

Back story

 I wanted to write some back story on that last piece.

 Last year I won a pretty large grant, and I decided I would use a portion of it to participate in the Illustration Master Class out in Amherst, MA. This is a weeklong course, where you study either painting, digital painting, or comics with world-class illustrators, painters, editors, writers. People who work in the industry and can give real world advice on what you're doing wrong with your brush as well as your interpersonal marketing.

 There's about a hundred students. Class starts at around 9am every day and ends around ...honestly, between 2 and 3am every morning. Most of the instructors are up all night in the studio with us. There are lectures and breaks throughout the day, which are all amazing and all different kinds of guest lecturers come and speak. The instructors are each masters of their crafts, many of which are artists I've followed since I was a wee lad. And many of the students blur the line between student and instructor, they were so goddamned good. Most of them were coming from all over the world, some as far as Australia. Some students were not incredible artists, but still well-versed in the world of fantasy/sci-fi art.

 Enter: me. A kid who happens to live an hour's drive away, very self-taught, a self-professed shitty painter with minimal experience with oils. I also don't work in that same realistic style that is really at the center of much of the teaching. But I'm not about resisting, I'm about learning. I decided I'd take the painting side of the class. I threw all of my acrylics in a box and headed over.

 Well, acrylics were not taught in the painting side, there were instructors who worked with it, but they were multi-skill, so they were mostly teaching the computer-side. The instructors on paint-side were all about oil and watercolor. I went over and visited the digital side quite often. They were teaching painting in Photoshop and other raster-based apps. I work in vector, which apparently is quite unusual. Even if I switched over to digital I still would have been a little bit lost. Yes, I'm admitting that I felt lost for most of the time. I had a couple of good studio-mates, Jason and Andrew who got me through, but I was sick for the first few days and just felt like I was drowning, completely inadequate to the task of being any kind of an artist.

 During the week, each student is expected to pick a theme from a few pre-determined assignments: A spaceship landed on a snowy planet, a scene from Dune, and dragon/human figure. Almost everyone picked the dragon theme, because it was so open-ended. I decided that I wanted to do something different. What came into my head was the same old D&D covers that I remember from the 80's. They're good, but I've just never been attracted to them.

 I like cyborgs, zombies, tough women and tits. Life gets easier once you figure out what your brain likes to make. For me those things are totally juvenile, and that's aok. Do I need anyone's approval? Not usually, no. But that week I was floating through a world of people who had never made that decision.

 Cyborg dragon it is.

 Here's a few thumbnails of what I was thinking of:




 The sketches went over well with the other students and instructors, and I learned how to mount sketches to board and get going. Except that I had no basis in oil and I felt like I just floundered all week. No. I felt like I was hiding all week. I had one or two good days where I felt like I knew what I was doing, but I basically came home feeling like a failure. I'd learned a lot concept-wise, but the hands-on painting, I felt like I'd just warmed a very expensive seat for a week.

 It went into the later-base. The hell with it. The 'painting' I made is buried in the back room somewhere. As soon as I got home, I was knee deep in client work and I applied a lot of the new principles to that work. That was good, but I've had a year where I've been feeling like I fucked it up.

 Recently, I pulled out the sketches and color studies and looked at them with new eyes. Then I applied the image to my current working style. I changed the size scale of the piece to my current preference which is 1:3 vertical, or 3:1 horizontal. This piece uses much of the lighting and other concepts ideas that I learned that week, but it's still got a lot of me in it. I don't know that it's my best work, but I wanted to give it an honest go, learn the rules and see what works and what doesn't.

 Below is the fruit of that effort. I can't imagine anyone has read this far, but thanks.

Joyride

Sep 30, 2012

Joyride

#2 of the Princess collection. Hah. I give you Joyride:

Sep 28, 2012

Her face


So, the biggest thing for me with this is really pushing the light to work well. The reason I started  this concept last year was to create an image that relies less on character and form, and relies more on light. I'm not sure I am succeeding in that yet. Once the forms are set, I'll continue to work on the light.

I've been looking a lot at different photographs of fire and skin. It's an interesting combination, skin has a reflective and translucent quality that really becomes apparent when it's next to fire. Here are a few examples... one from Cabin in the Woods (great flick, btw). Note the red glow, and the yellow highlight.

And the same effect is apparent here in Adam Hughes' painting of Phoenix:


So much simpler and eloquent than what I'm trying to do.

Sep 25, 2012

Atari Tooth

Just did this yesterday for my buddy Dr. Gonzo...

Sep 23, 2012

So much dicking around

This should be so much further, but I've barely touched it in a few days...I just spent a few minutes making some choices about a few things. I didn't like the way the girl's body and legs weren't straddling the beast properly. His feet weren't very convincing, or masculine. I tried a few different female figures and beefed up the feet. Not sure I'll keep the daisy dukes. 


I'm kind of treating this one like a painting where I work and step back, work and step back. This is somewhat rare, I usually go right at it, a lot faster. Not sure what philosophy is best. Probably the other one. 

Click to enlarge.

Sep 18, 2012

Dragon Girl part...let's say ...six

Pushing forward. I tried something smoky at the top of the fire plumes, I don't think I like it. One of the toughest things when I was thinking about this was figuring out how the light and shadow look around the pipes and fire. I thought they'd be a bit more chrome, but this works better, the dark, sooty pipes make the fire look brighter, plus chrome, it's kind of an immobile thing, a static, curvy mirror. It looks good because it sits still and we can see the sky and the desert in it. Yawn. No desert sky here. This is grit.

Sep 17, 2012

More...

Blah, blah, words about pictures. We're getting there. I'm thinking about giving her sharp teeth. I dunno, we'll see.

Dragon Girl update

Quick update. Got a few minutes this morning.

Sep 7, 2012

Monstruos

I think we're there. I think I'll call it Monstruos after a Goya piece that stuck with me since I first saw it in 9th grade.

Adobe, fix the Simplify tool

More issues with Illustrator CS6. Let's start with this shoddily drawn object:

I'd like to smooth it out, using Object > Path > Simplify:

Looks pretty good, but what's going on with this point?

Oh, it's two points, one on top of the other. Great.

Issue is not unique to CS6. This used to occur in older versions of AI, just not nearly as often. Happens almost every time now. And a huge pain in the

Sep 6, 2012

New halloween piece...

I'm a bit further along, maybe close to done with this one I've been working on all week. This is what it looks like now...not sure if these are the final colors...

Sep 4, 2012

Halloweeney sketch

I thought I was going to use this for the new halloweeney piece I'm working on. It really doesn't fit. I like the characters, though.

Sep 2, 2012

On the desk right now

...small piece of the current project. Dragon girl is waiting for me to finish this...got a few more too.

Aug 31, 2012

Lovercraft

I had a funny idea. Anyone interested in this as a shirt?

Aug 25, 2012

Guns

The NRA claims that the best self-defense is a well armed populace. The logic is that if a bad guy walks into a classroom or a restaurant to commit a mass-shooting, that bad guy will be immobilized immediately by one or more armed citizens (good guys). The good guys will step up and know exactly what to do in this tense, life and death emergency situation. Most of us have never been in a shooting situation, so who are we to argue?

Well, guess what happened last week at the Empire State Building in NYC? A mass-shooting happened! That's what! A gunman shot 10 people in broad daylight! And the NYPD, well-armed and immediately on the scene immobilized [killed] the mass shooter!

Except, no.

Except now we find that almost none of that is true. NYPD Police Chief Ray Kelly (the NYPD's boss, not some liberal hippy flowertard) has come out to announce that it wasn't exactly a mass-shooting being committed by a mass-shooter. It was one guy shooting another guy that he had differences with. The NYPD officers shot the other nine people. Let me repeat that.

NYPD officers (the good guys) shot the other nine people.

The best-armed, best-trained police force in probably the world was so incompetent in the emergency situation that they shot 9 times as many innocent people as the bad guy did.

Here's a question for people who don't own guns. You probably know some people that do own guns. Ever notice that a good percentage of people who own guns are like, exactly the people who should probably never own guns? Yeah, I noticed that too. And responsible, stable gun owners have noticed the freaks as well. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's you. I'll let you in on a big secret. People aren't comfortable around you.

I don't like guns. Maybe it's because the few times I've seen them they've been pointed an inch from my face. Once by a friend goofing around, and it wasn't fucking funny. And once by a spooked campus cop who forgot he knew me.

Fuck that shit, stop arming the incompetent.

Aug 24, 2012

Dragon Girl 2

Busy week, but I stole some time to work on this...just fleshing in the background.


Aug 23, 2012

Dragon Girl

New project in the works. Actually, I'm resurrecting an old project that never came to be. You may remember the image of the girl riding the hot-rod dragon image I posted some time last year...

I never finished it, but am determined to work it through. I really don't like the scale of the image. I prefer a 1:3 scale, so I've been reconfiguring it. The original had kind of a square flow, on the newer config I want the the flow to be vertical, swaying side to side, sexy:


...and starting to figure out the colors. Also, I'll be changing the girl's outfit, the superhero thing didn't make sense to me, seems like she should be more of an Australian road bully.


...next step, pencils, and reference shots of the area where I'd like this to be taking place. Might adjust the dragon's jaw too, the original had a better underbite.

Jul 7, 2012

Scout...

Yeah, the Stranger is a pretty great newspaper. And Seattle's a pretty great town. I will fix that link once I'm not on a cell phone...

Jun 26, 2012

As promised...

As promised, here are more images from the Cthulhu game I mentioned earlier. Check out the game, available from Looney Labs. They're great people, a small, smart, family-owned company. Available August 17th, so check your local comics or gaming shop!












Jun 1, 2012

And in Cthulhu news...

Looks like I can finally blabber about this one...A few months back I illustrated the new version of Fluxx, Cthulhu Fluxx. In the process, I got a full education on the subject matter. I have to admit though, it's a challenge to draw universe-spanning, tentacled space gods in an area that's two inches square...

I'll post some more of the art soon. I'll have to dig through, I think I finished it in March, which seems like forever ago...


StART is NOT this weekend!

UPDATE! Just found out that StART is going to be postponed to next weekend, due to imminent inclement weather.
Also, here's a better pic of the new shirt...click to enlarge.



Just finished some new shirts for StART this NEXT Sunday...12-5 Green Street, in sunny beautiful Worcester, Mass.

I will be bringing lots of other pretty things as well. See you there.
.

May 7, 2012

Art... haven't shown any in a while

I haven't posted much art on here in a while... and this blog has gotten a little heavy on my local municipal adventures. Here's some art from the past few months...

I never posted a final copy of this one...those who have a copy of the calendar, this month is coming up...

Here's a version of the comic book cover from Creepshow, for the packaging for the new toys from my buddy Brian at Shrunken Head Studios:

More to come...a lot of the things I've been working on for the past few months are still under wraps. I'll show more as I can...