Pulp Red Skull Work in Progress

Still learning the PhotoShop painting techniques. Slowly getting better I guess. Here's a calendar page...

Hi

LEGO Ninjagooooooooo

Art for SDCC 2018

Didn't get to make any custom toy packages for SDCC this year, but I did get to do some large scale posters for Hasbro's booth. Here's movie Bumblebee done in the retro 80's style:

And this here's a mock-cover for The Defenders. Didn't have time to get actor likeness approvals and all that, so we had to come up with some artsy solutions:

Red Skull sketch

putting a pin in this one for later...

LEGO Solo

Thinner Space

Revisiting an older piece. Click to embiggen.

Starbucks

Black men arrested at Philadelphia Starbucks agree to meet with CEO

#Starbucks. 

1. So, waiting for your whole party to show up before ordering is pretty fucking normal. The guys weren't doing anything unusual. The fact is, ordering before your whole party arrives is just rude. 

2. Once police saw that that was all that was going on, the officer's job was to take the manager in the back room and tell him: if you call us for this shit again, you'll be the one we're escorting out.

End of story. But it doesn't end, because police decide to stick around where they're clearly not needed (which feels somehow ironic, since they never bought anything).

How do we know they weren't needed? Because white people in the room were more concerned about the police than the "trespassers". 

3. And then White Ally shows up and starts yelling. White Allies never understand that that only forces everyone into a situation where the officer now has something to prove. Whether or not they're trained for it, police hate de-escalation. Why? Because they're people, and any person who knows they will win, hates de-escalation. White Ally has no experience with this, doesn't understand that he needs to STFU.

4. And now we're protesting the chain? This didn't need to escalate to the CEO of Starbucks. He doesn't want to run a racist business, he wants dollar bills from morons of every age, gender, and race. But they protest the chain, because they've protested the police till they're hoarse and police leadership doesn't care.

(...which is cancerous to a community, but let's never mention that. Leave the police alone, it's a difficult job they were inescapably born into.)

So yeah! Bring your megaphones and your hashtags and your tv cameras to the coffee shop. It'll be just like high school. Safe and you can be as absurd as you like. Perform some slam.

5. Manager wrong. Police wrong. White friend wrong. Protesters wrong. 

6. Black dudes kept their cool, went peaceably, and stayed away from the media. They're the wisest of all involved.

It'd be ironic if it wasn't predictable.

UPDATE:
The dudes talked, but weren't disruptive. Still good on them. The cops came out and admitted to being wrong. Good on them. Respect and thank you.

Gosh.

Two attitudes I keep seeing in the news:

• If you want to come to this country, you do it the RIGHT WAY, through LEGAL channels!!

• Why so many HASSLES when a law-abiding citizen wants to buy a gun??

It's almost as if  people want it to be easier to kill an American person than become an American person.

THE GREAT LEGO CHASE

I love being able to go completely nutso on a project...and these guys really dig when I make their stuff feel like a Mad Max chase. If you get LEGO Life magazine, this'll be a two page spread in the current issue. Should be in homes this week...

< click to enlarge >

Details...

Got-damn. I love this guy.

We've all heard this song a million times, but how crazy-cool is this version?

The ending!!

Star Wars Aliens

So, when I was a kid, I misunderstood many of the characters in the original Star Wars trilogy. 

Obv, they're all aliens, even the humany ones...but some aliens are definitely aliens, like Chewbacca or the Mos Eisley band, but as a kid I thought some of those were like fairy tale metaphors.

Yoda: I thought he was basically human, but he was small and wrinkly with big ears because he was so incredibly old and wise. In my life, old people always seemed to be shrinky with big ears and shabby clothes. He was just the extreme of that, not an altogether different species. Really disappointed when the prequels came out and it turned out he was another species, an unnamed race with few other members ever (barely) shown onscreen. 

Jabba the Hutt: He was also basically a human, but he was giant because he was so incredibly greedy and gluttonous. Over time he had become his vice.

Darth Vader actually was basically human, but …you know how when you leave a shoe on too long and your foot gets all stinky and weird and pruney? His skin was a mess because he was rotting inside this suit that he depended on. Maybe it helped give him his super-powers, and he was addicted to the power and it made him all rotten on the inside. Instead, he was all burned up and he'd had three limbs cut off with one swipe, physics be damned. After all, he did not have the high ground.

Again, I was a kid, the idea of the force-magic wasn’t pre-eminent, and besides, if he’s so good with the force, why don’t you use it to pump your stupid lungs? Walking around in a bacteria-filled hospital bed…oooh it’s black leather? Yeah. You’re gross. 

Skullboard No. 2543

Am I doing too many of these?

In case I haven't posted enough about my dumb Calendar

I usually post a compilation shot of all the calendar pages. Forgot to this year, so here it is...

The Plagiarisms

I love this story. As a creative, I take the long way around and sometimes I fail. Those who take shortcuts deserve exactly what they get.

And as an aside, if there's one thing that all humans can agree on, whether you're in ISIS, or Boko Haram, or the NRA, or PETA –– you don't put a fucking LINE through Lando Calrissian's face.

2018 Calendar

Hey all, the 2018 calendar is finally ready. As a personal project, it needed to be back-burnered repeatedly as my pro work has been unbelievably busy this year. So, I set it up so that it's February-February. Suck it, almanac industrial complex.

If you're interested, hit me up, or you can order one here, I've tried to keep em as inexpensive as possible:

Click here to get one online. 

Skullboard sketch

Just a start for a new idea...

Last detail on Cthulhu...

So I generally work 90% in Adobe Illustrator...I just wanted to share the touchups that I've been doing lately in Photoshop. It's a huge difference in atmosphere, color control, mood, and just a generally more natural feel... Here's a GIF that compares the two versions. Less than an hour in Photoshop (and I'm super-slow compared to most of the people who work in PS):

And here's the final. Click to enrage:

Glass Jar Jar

Always like to try different stuff...

Waterfire

Cthulhu PVD

Working in progress...

Thumbnail sketch (yes, in pencil):

Digital composition, for color and balance:

Digital illustration, about 3/4 of the way done: