Christmas Drawings Part 4

Yesterday I posted the drawing I did for Justin, and today I feature the piece I did for his wife and my friend, Staci. As with the other drawings I combined two of Staci's interests, but this piece stands apart in that it doesn't feature any pop culture references. Staci is a very active artist, and I thought it would be cool to take a couple of the themes she commonly uses in her art and apply my cartoony style to them. Back when we were in college Staci often used bobbers in her sculptures, and currently she does very cool ink drawings of birds that wear cut-paper dresses. My description doesn't do them any justice whatsoever so you should really check out some of her birds here.

Sometimes I can have a hard time re-envisioning things in a cartoony style; I fail to push the drawings as far as I'd like and end up retaining too much of the original subject, so I was really happy that this piece didn't suffer from that and came out exactly as I saw it in my head.

Christmas Drawings Part 3

This drawing was for my friend Justin, who has his own art blog that you can check out here. Justin and I both love Mario Bros and Hellboy, so this was an especially fun piece to do. The thought of Hellboy needing to don the famous frog suit to join Abe underwater seemed very funny to me. I also thought it would be cool to infuse a Blooper (the squid enemy from Mario games) with Mike Mignola's style by giving him those trademark octopus tentacles that Mignola loves to draw. I would certainly read this comic and/or play this game.

Christmas Drawings Part 2

The first Christmas drawing I posted was for Dave, and this one was for his wife, Carrie. As with the other drawings I tried to combine two of her interests: She likes Kirby, and, well, who doesn't like the Muppets? Any video game fan knows that Kirby's signature move is to inhale his enemies and copy their abilities, so I thought it would be cool to use that in an unconventional way. I've seen lots of people base fan art around this same idea, but the thought of applying Kermit's iconic design to Kirby seemed like a winner. Kermit's design is really pretty amazing; so memorable yet so simple. I mean what else can you think of that uses that "collar" and eye shape?

2 Year Anniversary

This is my anniversary present for my girlfriend Hillary! The main concept was a comic cover that features the two of us as superheroes, but beyond that I just tried to include things that I knew would be fun to draw. In other words, there's not much rhyme or reason to what sort of story this comic would contain, or much thought given to our superhero personas (aside from the fact that she's a super dentist!) The things I can tell you about that do have meaning are the Delorean, which is a car we'd both like to own, the obvious dental references, the card featuring the logo of my other superhero character Fakeout, and the box that holds the issue number. The 17th issue in the month of January refers to the date of our anniversary, and the Martin Luther King graphic is because our anniversary is on MLK day every year.

You also might notice some Mike Mignola inspiration in the style and composition.

Christmas Drawings Part 1

I decided to do fun drawings for all of my pals this Christmas. The idea was to make them simple, silly, and customized to each persons interests. There are ten in total, and I will post them one by one!

This first drawing is for my buddy Dave. In terms of interests there is nobody I have more in common than Dave, mainly due to the fact that he collects as many toys as I do, and we both love delving into the history of things like animation and video games. I decided to take the famous statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse and put a Mario spin on it, so here you see Mario and his creator Shigeru Miyamoto. I wanted to mimic the real statue as much as I could, so I put them in front of a end-of-level Mario castle and tried to make Mario's hat and nose resemble the shape of Mickey's ears.

Wet Hot American Post

Here's my piece for Gallery 1988's comedian tribute show Is This Thing On? Please click on it for a much bigger and clearer version! This show is the biggest in the gallery's history with over 100 artists featured, so to keep things orderly some subject matter was assigned and I was asked to portray the 2001 comedy Wet Hot American Summer. At first I was a little intimidated because I wasn't overly familiar with the movie, but once I realized they were essentially trusting me to cover over a dozen comedians instead of just one it really gave the piece a sense of importance for me.

As I mentioned in my last post I had a lot of trouble actually shipping this piece to the gallery, so I won't repeat that story here. But I will mention all the other cool news I've received:

First, here's a mention of the show on slashfilm that features my piece, as brought to my attention by Chris from Cubeecraft.com

Second, the amazing Chogrin, head honcho of the Autumn Society, attended to show's reception and took this awesome photo of comedian Paul Scheer pointing to my piece! You probably know him best from the VH1 shows like I love the 80s.


Cooler than the photo itself is the fact that this is such an awesome gesture from Chogrin. So cool that he took this photo for me!

And lastly, I just received an email from the gallery saying how their efforts to make this their biggest show ever were a complete success as they have gotten nothing but glowing feedback. Celebrities stopping by the show included Paul Scheer, Rob Huebell, Chris Hardwick, Sarah Silverman, Jeff Ross, Jerry O'Connell, Nick Kroll, Lake Bell, Martin Starr, Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Cera, Kevin Nealon and Doug Benson.

In a separate email I was told that David Wain, a comedian you may remember from the Comedy Central show Stella, (and writer and director of Wet Hot American Summer) saw my piece and loved it, and apparently it got him excited to get involved in a W.H.A.S. anniversary show at Gallery 1988's new Venice location! I really couldn't ask for a bigger compliment than that!

Amazing things happen every time I'm involved with Gallery 1988 shows so I can't thank them enough. Please do yourself a favor and check out all the other amazing work from this show here and here.

"Is This Thing On?" Opens Tonight!

Gallery 1988's biggest show ever opens this evening. Is This Thing On? is a collaboration with FunnyorDie.com that pays tribute to about every stand up comedian you can think of. I am very excited to be a part of it, and now that the show is opening I should be able to post my piece soon!

I was worried for a while that my piece might not make it into the show because of some grudge the post office seems to have against me. I had to put it in the mail three times, and even though I originally sent it out with over a week to spare on the deadline it ended up being late because of all the shipping problems. The first time it arrived back at my house in pieces, so I had to completely reprint and re-frame it. The second time it made it all the way to the L.A. post office where they thought it would be funny to just send it back to me. Every time that package arrived back on my doorstep it felt like I was stuck in a bad dream.

But! Everything worked out and I cannot thank Gallery 1988 enough for inviting me to participate and being so understanding about the whole thing. I would love to be able to check out the reception as I'm sure tons of comedians will be there. Sigh. I'll make it back out to L.A. at some point.

Tron

Olivia Wilde as Quorra from Tron: Legacy. I had this idea while watching the movie and thought it would be a fun excuse to do a quick drawing that let me play with the movie's art style. The movie was alright; I wasn't wowed by it or anything, though admittedly I'm not a Tron fanatic. I think I mostly enjoy the idea of a movie having a video game aesthetic. I really like how the first movie looked like vector arcade games of the 1980s while the sequel very much had the feel of the science fiction shooter games of today.