Playing catch up

Haven't posted for awhile and thought I'd do a little catch up...mostly I've been working on commissions that I can't show yet but will very soon.... Did a poster for a Carcass / Deafheaven show awhile back...

Also Artfest went well...met a lot of great people and it was great practice for merchandising my art. I always have this pressure to keep moving onto the next thing, when I should be looking at some of the work I do and figure out ways to make money on it even after its finished. So for Artfest, in addition to having original for sale, I also had matted prints and button packs. Also got a little help from my dad constructing a temporary wall for the booth that I shared with Matt Freeman of Freeman Design Co. Next year the plan is to do a 4FRNT reunion booth with Mike Guidone and Jeff Richards.

I haven't always been a political person but around 2003 that fuse was lit in me and the recent election has lit it again so I've been working on various Trump pieces. Safe to say Im not a huge fan. LOTS more to come.

Art Fest / Infusion Art t-shirt design

Next month I will be participating in the first annual Infusion Art Artfest in Beavercreek, Ohio where I will be showing off some of my artwork and peddling my wares. I also just wrapped up a t-shirt design for an art endowment called Infusion Art to be sold at the event. While brainstorming ideas I started doing research on art goddesses and came across a wikipedia entry for a Benzaiten and thought it would be a perfect visual way to not only represent an artist but depict various different art techniques and tools.

Raging Nathans / Nobodys split 7'' art PART 2

OK, now for the other side of the Raging Nathans / Nobody split 7" I created art for. This is for the Nobodys side and for a song based on a local Dayton celebrity named the Brown St. Pimp. He even has his own facebook page. HA.

Final line art was done with a Sharpie fine pen on marker paper to prevent bleeding. Line art was then scanned and autotraced in Illustrator to clean up. Then I could dive into the colors....I double teamed both pieces at the same time so I could have some similar colors and they would work well together.....

Eventually we had to start thinking about the art for the center label. Here's some of the sketches for that....

And the final piece along with the label sticker.....

Anyway, I had a blast working on the art for this split. Radgirlfriend records is taking preorders right now.

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.....

First freelance job

I was looking through an old storage tub the other day filled with my issues of Juxtapoz, Star Wars Insider, Heavy Metal, etc. and came across a tattered copy of Transdimensional Times. People who lived in Columbus during the mid 90's might remember it - it was this crazy zine filled with government conspiracy, alien abductions, and is also the place where I consider my first freelance job to be printed. Back in 1996, I was a senior at Columbus College of Art and Design and through a mutual friend ended up doing ads for Stained Skin Tattoo and Body Piercing Studio located on High St. when it was owned by Durb Morrison. I got $10 to illustrate the ad and honestly I remember at the time not only being amazed someone was PAYING me to do art for them but also willing to get it printed. Since then I've had some amazing things done with my art (Hot Wheels, rock posters, motorcycle helmets, etc.) but I'll always remember the feeling of that first freelance job almost 20 years ago.

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.