Gone Fishin'

A new week, a new film! Please check out Gone Fishin', a Seth Martin & Friends short. This time Seth and Trace Cherokee head out to Beech Fork Lake for some recreational hijinks. I did the titles and illustration, but unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to the boat for the shoot. Always sad times to miss a boat trip!

Trace is really becoming one of the break-out stars of the show. Please enjoy!

Tiki Tim

My cousin Tim bought a portable drink kart towards the beginning of the summer; it's the kind of thing you see set up at festivals and other outdoor events vending cold drinks to the hot and sweaty patrons. The drink cart happened to be tiki themed, so he asked me to come up with a tiki logo he could maybe use on T-shirts and things. Basically he just asked me to "draw a tiki," so I took the liberty of making it resemble him. I also wanted it to be simple in color and style, sort of a mod-tiki hybrid.

Gone Campin'

It's finally here! You can now watch the finished version of Gone Campin, the first short from the series Seth Martin & Friends. As I've stated before, the show centers around Seth having adventures with his puppet pals. It's made by Brainwrap, a production company consisting of my friends and I.

I am immensely proud to have been a part of this project because we're just a bunch of guys doing this for fun and seeing where it goes. We're learning how to do it as we go, so being able to look at the finished product is really gratifying. I created the graphics for this short and stuck my hand in a puppet or two, among other odd jobs, but the real work was done by the other crew members who built the puppets, wrote the script, edited the film, and overcame the plethora of technical issues that always seem to go hand-in-hand with making a movie like this. I'm so happy that all the kinks have been ironed out and that the short is now up for all to see. Please watch it in all its HD glory!

SlashFilm Writeup

SlashFilm.com has done two articles about the upcoming 3G show at Gallery 1988, and this latest one features the poster I designed for the show. It also features a good chunk of the work that will be on display. Check out the article, and check out the Autumn Society blog for a lot more work from the show!

The show opens of September 3rd at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles, California.

Gone Fishin'

This is the title card illustration for Gone Fishin', a new short from our series Seth Martin & Friends. I believe this short clocks in at just a few minutes, and stars Seth and his puppet friend Trace Cherokee. It was shot in a single day on location at Beech Fork Lake.



Hopefully this short and Gone Campin' will be up soon. Both of them are almost finished and look amazing in all their HD glory. This drawing was quite a bit of fun to do because these old cartoon-style title cards don't really need to make much sense, they just need to have a fun and striking image. Once I came up with this particular idea I knew I had to use it.

Turning Japanese

Here's an image I stole from the Autumn Society blog of the Turning Japanese show. It was the last of the three summer shows at Brave New Worlds comics in Philly, and should be wrapping up soon. You can see my pieces in this photo, which both sold! So thanks to the buyers, whoever you are!

Please check out more work from the show here!

Gizmo Busts Willy

These are my pieces for the 3G Show at Gallery 1988! As I mentioned in the last post, this show features work by Autumn Society members, all based on Gremlins, Ghostbusters, and Goonies. Please click the images for larger versions!

We were asked to create three pieces, one for each movie, but I knew that I wanted to mix it up a bit. I thought it would be cool to have characters from all three movies crossing over and interacting with each other. The central idea was to have Gizmo using a Ghostbuster trap to capture the ghost of One-eyed Willy, and have the whole scene carry across all three pieces, as you can see above.

I knew that I still wanted to draw more characters, so I decided to design custom mats that would let me add an extra scene to each piece. These characters were a blast to draw, and most of them clicked right away without the need to re-work my drawings too much. Sometimes I strive to push my drawings further than I'm able to achieve, but I was really happy with the cartoony aspect of these.

This is also one of the only times I can think of where I designed a series of pieces specifically around how they would look framed. It makes displaying them digitally a little bit tricky, and hand-cutting oval mats is about as fun as it sounds.

These are among my favorite things I've done recently, and I enjoyed going back and watching the movies for inspiration. Gremlins 2 I watched so much as a kid that I still remembered most of the dialog (I like it better than the first one,) and the Ghostbusters movies I didn't really need to revisit as, like many people, I have them pretty well memorized.

3G Show poster

I was asked to design a poster for the upcoming 3G show at Gallery 1988, which is a tribute to the movies Ghostbusters, Goonies, and Gremlins. My actual pieces for the show didn't lend themselves very well to being reused as a poster, so I decided to create a separate design. I wanted it to be cool (of course,) but I also needed it to be simple so that I could finish it quickly and move on to creating more artwork for the show. This idea evolved from wanting to have three similar items themed after the movies, to toys, then finger puppets, and finally to these paper doll...things. I tried to find the official name for them when I was creating this and came up with nothing.

At any rate, the show is shaping up to be huge. This is the first collaboration between The Autumn Society and Gallery 1988 which is very exciting. Both of these places have given me amazing opportunities, so the fact that they are partnering up is pretty darn cool.

Back to the Future Wallpaper

Front Magazine has a wallpaper version of my Back to the Future illustration up on their site, which you can download here. Their website is not work safe, so be careful!

Soccer Spread for Front Magazine

In the land where Front is published this sport is called football, so I had to change my terminology a bit when working on this assignment.

The point of this piece is to show an evolution of soccer/football players over several decades. From left to right: the 40s and 50s, 60s and 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s.

You'd be hard pressed to find somebody more disinterested in sports than myself, and I dare say that I have an active dislike for soccer (it's okay, the World Cup is over so you can admit it now too,) so this was a challenge for me on several levels. I'm guessing this was either a very last-minute addition to the magazine or the artist they had lined up for it bailed at the last minute, because I only had about four days to get it done and my deadline was the actual time that the whole magazine was due at the printer. It was down to the wire!

Not that I'm complaining about this stuff; I'm very grateful that they trust me to get last minute work done for them, and I'm always open to drawing subject matter that I would never think to do on my own.

The writer for this piece had a very specific vision for the artwork, so I had lots of details to get right on each player. My main creative contribution was to add the fade from sepia tone to full color, which I thought would be a good way to show a progression of time. As usual, all the white space you see here will be filled with text and headlines.

"How to Party Harder" Front Magazine Spread

This one took a while. It's three two-page spreads that not only needed full backgrounds but also required 24 specific characters that had to be designed and drawn to represent certain personalities and scenes. For example, the girlfriend leaving the drunk boyfriend, the nerd, the goth girl, etc.

The idea of this feature is to resemble a side-scrolling video game where we follow the main character as he makes his way through a house party. All the empty spaces you see will be full of party tips and other text when this is printed in the magazine.

These days I tend to get really busy all at once, so even though I had about a week to get this done I still found myself working on it until 2 am the night before the deadline!

The other two spreads are after the jump because they contain some nudity and sexual content. Gasp! So if you are reading this from the main blog page click "read more" below to continue.

Stonehenge

My cousin Sean wore the Dungeons and Dragons shirt I designed while visiting Stonehenge! This is him and his wife Mary.

Also thanks to Sean, the flash intro to my site is no more. He helped me get rid of it so that when you go to www.albinoraven.com you now see the main blog page. I noticed that people who were linking to my site had started to list it as "http://albinoraven7.blogspot.com" to bypass the intro, which makes sense, but it's not as memorable or professional as the shorter version so I decided it should probably go.