Some more from that new series of drawings...

Three Cthulhus

30 years long childhood trauma

Zombie Hand Video Part 1

This video is the first in a two part series showing me pencil, ink, and color a zombie's hand. By the end of this video you'll see the piece progress from pencils, to inks, to sketchy value work (in preparation for the spot color added in the next video).

More at my sketchblog / portfolio!

My First Moleskine

I go to a monthly artist meetup at the Blick Art Store in Wheaton, IL. On my second visit, this past weekend, I was graciously given a free Moleskine and assorted other supplies by the owner, and a talented bloke in his own right, Kevin.

Now, it's pretty common knowledge that I draw digitally. I've done a scant amount of traditional work, mostly relegated to doodles with ballpoint pens and the like. Going to this forum and talking with guys like Alex Wald, Dave Dorman, and Charlie Athanas had me curious, though. Might I be missing out on a lot?

So, I was really happy to get the little package of goodies from Kevin. It left me no excuse to avoid something new (I'd often balked at the $10+ price of Moleskines in the past - but have no problem saving up for a new Cintiq, heh!). I went about making a sketch or two with a 5mm mechanical pencil, but decided that I wanted to try for lots of value changes, and I suspect that wasn't the right tool for the job.

I stopped back into the store a few days later, and Kevin fielded some painfully stupid questions. "What's a 2H pencil and why do I want it?," probably was the worst. He directed me to a few things, I bought a couple pencils, and continued home, the pencils burning a hole in my pocket for the next hour and half of driving.

These images are the first attempts with graphite or, really, any traditional value work. Only a few minutes a piece, half mechanical pencil, half 2H regular (regular?) pencil.

The Moleskine's paper quality was really great. I even got one with predetermined panels for storyboarding/comic roughs. I was a bit trepidatious to jump into traditional work (I'm so back asswards), but I'm really glad I gave it a go. It's exciting to get to draw everywhere I go, and I can't afford a portable tablet laptop while saving for the Cintiq, so this fits that niche nicely.

Is it wrong that the prevailing thought while working with pencil was, "This works just like the pressure sensitive, flat variant of the pencil tool in Painter!" heh?

hello goodbye

So fellas many apologies for having been away from this place for so long. It never looks like a lot when you've got them in your hands but I've been trying to finish three books before I go away:

http://bonehousebooks.co.uk/shop.html

And on top of that I just held an exhibition at the Art-Holes favourite London hangout of Brick Lane as a kind of book launch and going away event:

http://flickr.com/photos/mr_boobytrap

some new stuff

I do not consider myself an artist, i'm an illustrator of my own ideas. The ideas are intended for intrusion into reality in some way or another. Ultimately, i'm an aspiring city state ruler, i used to be interested in global domination, but i think the smaller, more homogeneous population allows for more exciting, stranger cultural explorations. If you rule the world, you have to contend with every kind of person, if it's just a city state, you've got less to manage. Anyhow, i got my start with all this designing worlds for old fashioned pen & paper role playing games. The guys who did the art for the old Dungeons & Dragons & Games Workshop products were my first inspirations as an artist, & remain my principal inspirations. Their styles are generally unpolished & obviously home-grown, not directed by the theoretical trappings of art school or the high-art world. I like old Punk Rock & Heavy Metal art for the same reason. So, my latest series of black & white drawings go straight back to those foundations. I've got a show of stuff i've done for the last year or so, along with work from my wife & Goblinko partner Katie at the Museum of Unfine Art, here in Eugene, Oregon.

Lovecraft's Monster Hop

First two of five drawings i'm contributing to the Maison d'Ailleurs Lovecraft show, the quote all drawings illustrate ( in a loose sequence ) is #42:" Fear of mirrors-memory of dream in which scene is altered and climax is hideous surprise at seeing oneself in the water or a mirror. (Identity?) [Outsider?]"

Thanks to Aeron for tipping me up to it in the first place.

More Lovecraft Abominations!

Here's a small fragment from my contribution to the Lovecraft exhibit Fufu previously mentioned. This bit is taken from the lower left corner of the center panel. The full triptych will be on display in printed form this Halloween at the Maison d'Ailleurs in Switzerland and the center panel will be published in the art catalogue for the Lovecraft show coming out around the time of the exhibit. I'm still working out how I'm going to do it but I will be selling prints of this triptych at a later date.

HPL Expo Contribution

Boy, things have been going awfully slow on our Blog, haven't they. I for my part was really busy with moving, renovating, and last but not least I did a short 5-page comic for the Lovecraft exposition in Switzerland, which I believe Aeron and Noah are also participating in. The comic kind of ties into my Molluskhead chronology, and I've based each page on one entry from the "Commonplace Book" (which is basically the concept of the expo), but the book itself also plays a part in the story.
Here are the first two pages:

This is something...

I'm re-drawing this because the character models are off (whatever that means), but...here it is anyway

Primordial

Here's a small chunk of a digital collage I'm working on. The white blobs floating around in the upper left were originally going to be place holder for something else but I think it looks good as it is. Has a weird drifting abstract vibe.

That whole "life" "art" "imitate" business

BEFORE -



AFTER -











Best $12,000 I ever spent.

July = Tee design month?

I'm really glad to have my new site up and running. Updating the site is a lot easier when I'm happy with how it looks (not to mention that it functions perfectly, which is always a plus).

I had planned to do another video blog, but I got two great contracts a few days after my last update. I was invited to do a Threadless Select shirt and I had an offer to do a shirt for Oddica. Both of these were cool in that I got to dictate the subject matter and do my own thing. Oddica offered some poignant art direction and made the whole thing much better, too. I love when the people I'm working with get my concept and I'm happier when they have input that makes it better.

If you haven't been to Oddica, go. Just the other day, as I got a vegan hummus wrap from my daily lunch stop, the employee behind the counter offered me a free sandwich, 'cause, "You always come in with the coolest shirts. You can have my daily sandwich." He broke his jaw not long before and couldn't eat it anyway. Protein shakes and soup, for him, I guess. Ouch.

However, Oddica = free lunch. You can't beat that with a stick.

I'm usually a black pocket-tee sorta guy, but one of the advantages of doing a lot of tee designs this past year has been the freebies. I haven't bought a shirt in about six months. Well, except for a few Herbivore items, but I'm doing work for them now, too. The magazine/shop is for a cause I believe in, and I offered to do some stuff pro bono, but they insisted I at least take store credit. That's fine with me. They have a bunch of awesome vegan cookbooks and gear. I'm eying my recycled bicycle inner-tube belt as I type this. Really rad.

Anyhow, I wanted to post some progress shots for the Threadless Select shirt, which was the first thing on my daunting list of freelance.

Powered by ScribeFire.

It's him. It's DINGUS!

That is the name.

From Monkey Popsicle To Dust

Found this the other day and had to share. I scraped together a pile of stuff for future viewing on the ol youtube, I was surprised at how many full length movies are actually on there. You can see my collected favorites here.

The Pit

Here's an in progress very small area of my Lovecraft triptych that's near complete. A foggy hole in the ground that reveals an abyss of monsters. There's a horror movie monster that I dropped in there as an easter egg but I might take it out. Can you guess which of the beasts is from a movie?

LOGO LOCO

Retro halftones & you. The musical.

My new site, Frenden.com, is up. Let me know what you think!


Detail of Metalman Project submission. Full image here.

While compiling a few prominent pieces for inclusion in my portfolio (I've only got about half the eventual work I want to be displayed up at the moment), it became pretty obvious that I have a penchant for super-saturated, retina searing hues layered with volumetric lines as halftones (the stuff that conjures images of Charles Burns - I swear, I hadn't seen his stuff before a friend sent a copy of Black Hole to me).



That being said, I still want to dry and distance myself, a bit, or at least get a few more tools under my belt, so I'm not a one trick pony (or labeled derivative, not that there haven't been tons of examples of this sort of shading in the halls of history, 'cause there are). I've done some digital painting and, while it doesn't turn out bad, linework is still my first love, so it was natural to try some hatching instead of some mixing.

The first attempts at something like this come in the forms of a colored version of the Metalman piece in my portfolio (see above) and a cheesy, joke "seal" I slap on friend request approvals on the popular social networking sites (see below).

In the former, rather than stack patches of halftoned colors, I used solids inside of the linework and then applied a Photoshop filter to achieve the old, newsprint comic look. In the latter, I used a basket-weave-like hatch that I've seen used elsewhere but can't place the name of and the most common forms of crosshatching and feathering.


That's the giant, cheesy self-portrait ripe for use on social networking sites. I've got an account with most the usual suspects: Virb, MySpace, Livejournal, Flickr.

While I like the outcome, it feels a little more sterile than my other work. What do y'all think? This'll definitely require more tinkering.

Writing process, character design, art direction...

I'm in the middle of writing a webisodicly distributed graphic novel. It's not meant to be good or to publishable, even, but rather to work some story telling kinks out for myself. If I have to switch narrators or narrative perspective halfway through, so be it, etc. I just want the practice and I may as well share the process and the product of the labor with everyone.

I've got an outline and the seeds of the scifi story pretty firmly planted. It seems that character based stories do better than plot based ones, (and those with a nice mix of both doing even better than that) so that's where I've tried to focus.

From a visual design standpoint, I'm looking back to old comics from Gold Key and EC and adding a bit of Wes Anderson on top of that. It's the quirky character designs that seemed to dictate their personality, motivation and, ultimately, story for me.



Sometimes I find it's easier to start a drawing and let the visual aspects of the character conjur some traits as a bit of a brain storm. Lots of pages of my sketchbook are filled with a quickie sketch and a possible backstory, general personality type, or the motivation for the type of character represented visually.

The drawings don't have to be "good" and the character directions don't have to stick. They just need to get my mind going.