Raging Nathans / Nobodys split 7'' art PART 1

Earlier this year I was contacted by Josh Goldman of Rad Girlfriend Records to work on art for an upcoming Raging Nathans / Nobodys split 7". It was great timing because I had been wanting to work on some album art again and had worked with RGR before on previous album art for the Raging Nathans and also another band, robthebank.

Josh came to me with two fully formed ideas of what he wanted, so I could immediately dive in. Here's the two sides in various stages starting off with the Raging Nathans side. Here's my initial sketch based off Josh's idea and direction.

At one point I thought about painting the one side and going the Photoshop route on the other side to really differentiate the two, but Josh and I both agreed the painting just didnt have the right look plus my painting style tends to be looser and I really wanted to pack the details into this piece...

So, I switched my approach, starting off with getting some tight line art inked to color on the computer.....for inking I used a Sharpie fine point pen on marker paper to trace an earlier tighter sketch. Also I had a previous value study from when I was planning to paint the final piece (below). It's good to have this as reference when you are coloring on the computer, since you find yourself zooming in so much and can get lost. So it's almost like a road map for you. Also, as you can see, at this point the background was different with framed artwork on the walls and I hadn't even figured out how to handle the lettering on it.

After scanning my lineart, I opened it up in Illustrator and autotraced it to make it a smoother vector...this isn't completely fool proof and I still spend a lot of time cleaning my lines up in Photoshop, but it at least separates my lines from the background kind of like panes on a window. Then I saved my lineart as an EPS file and opened it up in Photoshop for coloring. Here's a screenshot early on of the coloring process and the final piece including a label for the actual record....

Next time I'll show the process for the Nobodys side. STAY TUNED

Sketches

A lot of the times, people only see the last step in a job - the final piece. But the hours and hours of sketching, false starts, just kind of get lost along the way and left in sketchbooks and stuffed in drawers. You'll notice that for the most part I sketch using non-photo blue and indigo blue pencils - Prismacolor Berol Verithins. Here's a little sampling of some from over the years.....

Movetastic!

Time to showcase another great client that I've worked with over the years - Movetastic! located in Chicago. In 2012, I was contacted by the owner, Pete Horvath, who had seen some of my Joe's Barbershop posters and needed someone to create a series of pin-up characters for his moving trucks and give them each their own personality. We started off with ten and as more trucks were added to the business Pete would drop me a line requesting more....but here's some of the sketches and final designs for the first ten...it was a lot of fun and from what I hear people really appreciated the individuality of the different characters.

Comic books and sketch covers

As a kid, I LOVED comic books and was obsessed with them. I remember from time to time my dad coming home from work and handing me either packs of trading cards (usually from Star Wars or other movies) and comic books - in most cases Batman's various series including the obvious self-titled one, but also Detective Comics, and Brave and the Bold. This era of Batman will always be my favorite visual era of him - the cobalt blue, gray, and yellow version.

In the mid-80's my love of comics kicked into high gear and shifted to Marvel when Spider-man got his black alien symbiote costume. In fact I remember the specific comic book that ushered in a new era of comic love for me - Amazing Spider-man #254. I didn't know anything about Secret Wars and missed the issue where Spider-man returned with his new suit, so it was just a total surprise to me. I just remember thinking the new suit looked cool as hell and I HAD to have that comic to find out what was going on.

Around this time, 1985-86, my dad was the manager at Hauer Music on Far Hills in Kettering, and there was a Gray's drug across the street that had baseball cards and down the street was a pharmacy that had a ton of comic books. They had one of those spinning comic racks and they used to pack each holder like 10-20 comics deep. This was back when comics were like 60 cents, so if I walked down there with $5 I could get quite a bit including some Big League Chew, Lik-em Sticks, etc. etc. My love of comics continued through high school and switched AGAIN back to DC along with the Batman movie craze of 1989. Around this time my favorite comics were The Killing Joke (favorite comic ever) and Arkham Asylum and a lot of my work at the time revolved around Batman, and the Joker. This was also around the time that I found Maverick's in Kettering (I lived a sheltered life) and walking in there gave me the same feeling I'm sure some people do when they walk into a church - you know, like a choir singing, warmth, and stuff. Unfortunately it wasn't within walking / bike distance of my house or Hauer Music so going there was a rare thing, but that made it more special. When I went off to college, finances and the overwhelming "newness" that goes along with being thrown into a whole new experience made me lose interest in comics. Every once in awhile I would pick up a copy of Wizard so I still knew what was going on and from time to time would get special issues (Alex Ross' Marvels, The Death of Superman, Batman Knightfall, etc.). Also, around this time my friend Hoffa introduced me to independent comics like Milk and Cheese, Reid Fleming, and others. Although I wasn't buying as many comics, during this time I thought that maybe drawing comics was something that I wanted to pursue, even taking a comic book drawing class in college. Well I quickly realized I wasn't cut out for drawing comics for a couple of reasons. I LOVE consistency and in the one and two page exercises we were doing I could see my interest not only start to wane, but also the consistency of my artwork. So it dawned on me that a 30 page comic would probably make me have a nervous breakdown. Nowadays after having a few lengthy projects under my belt that might not be the case but I just remember at the time think it wasn't what I wanted to do and if I was to contribute to that industry it would have to be as either a cover artist or just doing pin-ups. A number of years later I did a 4 page comic for an anthology series called Faesthetic and actually had a lot of fun with it. They have a theme for each book and in this case it was "ghost story". My approach was a little twist on a whole avenging spirit Tale from the Crypt type story....

While my career has taken me in a lot of different directions , I think deep down I still dream of doing something related to comics but also think any chances I had to board that ship have probably passed me. But doing sketch covers has allowed me to act out some "What If?" scenerios with some of my favorite comic properties. For people that don't know , sketch covers are comics with blank covers sold to the public that artists can draw on. Here's some of the various covers I've done over the past year and I still have a huge stack of blanks. I even ordered some new Walking Dead ones that I should be getting this week...so be on the look out for more.

P-4!

I can't remember the exact year, but back when the whole designer vinyl craze was ramping up I was asked to be part of an artist created series of characters that would be produced using PVC plastic. Unfortunately the project eventually imploded but I came up with this little guy I dubbed P-4 ( short for Power Plug Pee Pee ). I think he's pretty self explanatory...incidentally enough I had been working on some sketches for a guy on another project and he pulled the whole "if this works out, we'll get to work on a bunch of your personal projects", which I've heard before. Its a game people play when they want to get stuff either cheap or for free. But I showed him P-4 and right off the bat he was wanting to change the shape of the mouth and most stupidly take off the plug to make it more "kid friendly".....it was then that I realized he didn't "get it" and would essentially be negating the point of the character. One day I hope to see him realized as an physical object, but in the meantime here's some drawings of him over the years as well as his female counter part - SC. I'll let you guess what that stands for.

Some variant paint schemes including a C-3PO version