busy busy busy

so, it's been a little while since i last posted. and to both of you who are reading this, sorry about that. but lucky for you 2, the reason why i've been away has been because i've been busy. there'll be more to come, but for now, here's one of the things i was working on. i work in a pretty fun place: the world of mirth, a rad toy store here in richmond. not too long back, my boss asked me to come up with a new idea for our store's shirts. we worked on quite a few, and what came out of it were these 2 designs. they were fun to work on because all the proceeds from the shirts' sales go to the harvey foundation, to benefit arts education in richmond-area schools; but mostly because it's monkeys with mustaches, and a robot destroying the city. good times. but those were the designs that made it. my boss and i went back and forth on a few other designs, and these are a few of them:









i still have a soft spot for the diva turtle, and the ninja centaur, too. but the designs my boss ended up choosing are pretty good, so fuck these other guys, amirite?

WHO WANTS TO TEACH ME TO COLOR?

eh?

hey remember these? i suddenly did!

remember when these were gonna be an everyday kinda thing? haaaa.

so, here's the next round of post-it portraits of folks. i originally started these to A: fill up wall space in my new place, and B: to make myself practice. and a great thing about this sort of thing--especially when you're trying out new materials (hello brush pen)--is that it shows you not only your weaknesses, but also how you work around them. i figured this out with the first picture here. that one taught me that when i'm unsure of how to proceed in a picture, especially with how to render something, then i tend to just throw lines at it. now, this might be good or bad; i'm still figuring out which way it's heading, since sometimes it can be both. with some tweaking, i think it could look pretty sweet, and believe it or not, there are other pictures where those piles used to be much worse. but for now, it kinda looks like a pile of lines, and my friend looks like jim carrey in a burn ward. but, that's called learning, and that's why we practice. or, to put it better:

WHY DO WE FALL, BRUCE?

ps - cool stuff on the way. swear.

SKETCH DUMP

an oldie but a could've-been-goodie

so i was going through some stuff, and i thought it'd be cool to share the development process behind a picture. or in this case, lack thereof, kinda. so, this was for a pic i was doing for rva magazine here, about richmond's ghost stories. they didn't give me much in terms of subject matter, dimensions of the pic, or really anything, so what came out was pretty much me winging it, based on what of the article i'd read. so first, the initial sketch:


pretty rough and hard to make out (sorry). basically, since i didn't know much about what rva wanted, i went ahead and went with a safe bet and tried to make it A: spooky (it was for the halloween issue after all) and B: as richmond as possible. so i included the distinctive richmond skyline, a roadmap of rva, a pic of richmond native/creeper edgar allen poe with a skull superimposed over his face (ooooooooooh), and at the bottom, an image of one of the story's ghost children playing. if you're wondering what's up with his hair: the original idea was to have ravens coming out of it, medusa-style. i still like this idea, and i developed it further in another sketch for a different pic. after my editor went through my sketches (i prob did about 7 or so) and picked out the ones he liked, i decided to drop the raven-hair idea. oh well. next sketch:




this was the final sketch, the one i had to show to my editor, so it had to be cleaner and more finalized than the first one. more of the details are worked out. you can see his facial features better; each element of the pic is clearer and easier to understand; and i've started working on how each of these very different images will blend into the next in order to make one cohesive image. much cleaner, and no notes to myself in the margin. which brings us to the final image:




this--along with a lot of stuff i did for rva--was a great learning experience. i've never done a pic quite this way; the layout, the coloring (which i almost never do), the effects; you can pretty much name it. now, over a year later, i can say i still like this image and how it turned out. especially the bottom part with the ghosts of the 2 little girls. creepy. there are some aspects i'd tweak and change of course, but for the most part i like it. unfortunately, it didn't end up making the cut. oh well. maybe next time, rva magazine. in the meantime, here's the other image that i'd had finished for them, which i also still like.


this one was more fun than the other one. it's simple, and you know exactly what the article is gonna be about, while the pic itself remains pretty abstract in regard to any sort of specifics as far as the article's actual content. it shows abstract, ghost-ish creatures (when i was working on it i kept calling them ghoulies), emerging out from behind another distinctive feature known to any richmonder: the statue of robert e lee on monument ave.

and yep, you guessed right. neither one of these ended up getting used at all by rva. try as you might, sometimes with these kinds of gigs, if they don't pay ya, they don't appreciate ya. that said, it was still a fun experience working for rva, and there are a lot of really great, talented people over there. sometimes, this is just how these things go. oh well. i still like em, and at least i got a couple solid images for the portfolio. try again, and try better next time, as they say.

see you next time, kids.

hey deadgurl heeey

because you know you always wanted to see it, here is your very own sexy spawn.* the idea for this came half-and-half from a bunch of good folks, and from netflix instant watch. if you haven't seen the 90's tour de force about black dynamite coming back from the dead to fight cgi for john leguizamo's heart, then you need to get. on. that. shit. spawn=best worst thing of the 90's. you're welcome.

*actually drawn for somebody else. sorry.

ATTENTION NERDS

these 3 guys have turned up a lot here, and will prob continue to turn up a lot. if you don't know who they are, then you prob aren't my friend. if you're not my friend, then, well, what are you doing reading these? move along.

the first 2 are a couple doodles i did a bit ago that i kinda like. and the last is part of a stalled project with a friend of mind that came about with us both bored at work. it started just as a doodle, but i went ahead and made it into a fake cover, because it wasn't quite sad enough. and speaking of which, just wait til my friend gets around to coloring it.

sealin'. the. deal.