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

Logo and graphic design

Even though I technically went to school to study illustration and fine art, as part of my education I also took some ad design and graphic design classes. Over the years from time to time I will be asked to create a logo for someone and it's definitely a different type of challenge for me. My approaches will vary for each one depending on the type of business I'm working for and here's some examples. This first one was a sign design for my friend, Mike Guidone's shop Monkey Bones, located in Beavercreek, Ohio. Also here's some of the different stages and variations it went through....

Next up was a new logo / shirt design Stained Skin : Second Skin, located in Newark, Ohio and owned by Jeremiah Hanzey. My inspiration for this was Star Wars / Boba Fett and creating a character who would be a personification of tattoo machine....

In 2008, I was approached by Mike Musto to create a logo for a car culture inspired clothing line called Mr. Angry. Obviously personifying anger was the inspiration so I tried to figure out a good way to get that across but also tie it to hot rods and speed....

In addition to a variety of t-shirt designs, I also worked on some logos for a car race he was working on....

Next up, last year I created a logo / t-shirt design for Zombie Dogz, a local food truck that serves great food and has a really large following - whenever they set up, the lines are long as hell.

The final one I'll show is the design I made for my tax Lady, Elaine Janicki at Bayer Janicki Tax Service. This obviously is not the typical company I would design something for, but I saw it as a challenge to be forced to work in an understated manner and actually is one of my favorite things I've done. I know, weird , huh? Here's the first round of choices I sent her....

The first five were me trying to do what I thought a tax service logo would look like. For the last one though I remembered that Elaine, being from Chicago originally, was a huge Cubs fan. So knowing that about her and wanting to make this very personal for her, I got the idea to take the Wrigley Field sign outline, rotate it and plug her info into it. I was actually surprised how well it worked. When I showed it to her, she instantly gravitated toward that design even though she didn't recognize the sign outline.

Well that's all for now. In the future I'll show some more graphic design work I've done......