The Host with the Most

I have to say that this is the most bizarre assignment I've gotten from Front Magazine, not for the theme of the article but just because of the stuff they asked me to draw. I never thought I'd have to draw a Princess Diana Pac-Man ghost or a girl in a Spongebob mask with a bear trap. Honestly I was a little hesitant to post these without photographic proof that they were for a magazine, hah!





I'm actually pretty proud of my coloring on the second spread, the one with the guy pushing the shopping cart. And this was the first time I was asked to illustrate the title of the article, so I drew all the words that appear on the house in the first spread. I apologize for the language and adult imagery if there's anybody who's offended by that sort of thing.

Are Your Friends Aliens?

Another illustration I did for Front Magazine, this one featuring aliens in human form. This was a pretty breezy assignment, nothing too unusual, just a lot of referencing photos from movies and TV shows. I believe the note I was given on the background was to make it reminiscent of a Mars Attacks trading card.



I struggle sometimes with drawing people in normal standing poses, I think because my natural tendency is to want to draw strange or cartoony poses. For that reason there are some things here I feel like I would go back and change if I could, but it doesn't bug me too much since this wasn't one of the larger articles.

Oh, I also remember that at first I drew a random building next to Big Ben, then realized that since this is for a UK based magazine I should probably actually get the surrounding skyline correct. What looked fine to me would probably stick out like a sore thumb to people who actually live there, so I found a reference photo from the angle I needed.

Odds and Ends

I've been busy as usual, mostly working on a unique piece for an upcoming art show, so I'll share that with you soon. In the meantime, here's an awesome gift that my friend Justin got me. You need to be a Hellboy fan to understand why this is so cool.


And here's a gift from my girlfriend in celebration of a large project I'll be starting early next month (the paint can is a hint.) I can't wait to start posting about it.

On an odd note, I have a post from over a year ago that for whatever reason keeps getting spammed over and over. I don't know why that post in particular gets all the spam instead of my entire blog, but I suppose I should be thankful for that. It's about a T-shirt design I did called "Mushroom Kingdom Pizza" which depicts a fake ad for a pizza shop run by the Mario Bros. Check out this latest spam comment it received:

"I had already tasted their pizza.One of my friends bring pizza somedays earlier from Mushroom kingdom pizza. it was not bad at all. "

Oh really? You've eaten pizza from a shop I made up that's run by two video game characters? ...can I have the number? If only all spam was this entertaining.

Strange Kids Club Interview

An interview with yours truly has been posted over at the Strange Kids Club, so go check it out! Topics include everything from Mayor McCheese to my artwork to a certain puppet show I'm involved with. Thanks to Rondal Scott!

Skadi

This is a drawing I did of Skadi, a web comic character created by artists Katie Rice and Luke Cormican. I drew this close to two months ago now and I sent it off to Luke just to show my appreciation. I recently got emails back from both of them which was thrilling, and Luke asked if I'd be okay with the drawing being included in a Skadi book that they're planning. How could I say no to an amazing offer like that?


Here's Skadi as rendered by the artists themselves, and you can check out the web comic here. Also, do yourself a favor and check out Katie Rice's blog, her sketches always amaze me.

3D Photos

I'm in a bit of a holding pattern today while I wait for some info on my next project, so I made this to pass some time.

My friend jokes that whenever I get a new gadget I have to push it to its limits and see what it's capable of, and I guess that's true. Once I had the idea to take pictures of red/blue 3D images with the 3DS' camera I had to try it out, and sure enough it worked. I wanted to make some sort of simple guide on how to do it, so here you go.

The ability to take 3D photos with this thing is amazing to me, I think there are tons of possibilities that have yet to be explored. Like maybe setting up dioramas or even figuring out a way to create and view artificially 3D images and artwork (something like a still frame from an animated 3D movie.) Here's hoping some websites crop up in the future dedicated to this purpose.

3B Poster

This was posted to the Autumn Society's site a while ago so I neglected to give it an official post here. I created one of three poster designs for the upcoming 3B show, and there are three variations of this one design: the informative version you see here, a postcard, and a poster with less text that will be for sale at the gallery when the show premiers. Right now word is that the ones you can purchase will be limited to an edition of 100.

The 3B show opens on May 5th at Gallery 1988's new Venice location, 214 Pier Avenue in Santa Monica, California.

Ready

Cool things ahead.

The 3B Show!

These are my pieces for the Autumn Society and Gallery 1988's 3B Show which features artwork based on Back to the Future, Bill and Ted, and Beetlejuice. The show opens next month and is something of a sequel to last year's 3G Show.

For whatever reason I hit a huge creative block when I was trying to come up with ideas for these. Most of the time I'm working on so many things at once that I've already started thinking about ideas for my next project before I finish my current one, but this time I was absolutely stumped. I think partially the problem was anticipating what other people would be doing and trying to do something different, while also feeling a lot of pressure to create a great piece for Back to the Future, my favorite movie of all time. In the end I tried to just have fun with it and not worry too much, but I can tend to stress about these things. I did decide early on that I wanted to reference Back to the Future 3 since I feel like it doesn't get much attention, and I didn't want to reference Death from Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey despite him being one of my favorite parts (I figured a lot of people would probably want to use him in their pieces as well.)

The artwork I've seen for this show looks amazing. As always, I am honored to be in a show with so many great artists at Gallery1988.

Strange Kid Shorties #2

The second installment of my web comic for Strange Kids Club went up today, direct link here.

Also, my friend Carrie alerted me that my name was trending on Twitter today and I was able to track it back to an article on ComicsAlliance.com where they posted a ton of my work and had nothing but nice things to say. Really cool, thanks a lot CA!

Geek Art

The owner of Geek-Art.net contacted me to let me know that he had featured my two newest Bowser and Zelda inspired shirt designs on his site. It's a French site but written mostly in English, and there's a ton of great artwork on there so you should check it out. I'm sure I'll be visiting frequently.

Also, I was quite surprised to see an article on ToplessRobot.com that was titled "Worst Nerd Shirt Ever" and featured a picture of my George Lucas/Chewbacca shirt. Turns out the article was about a contest that Splitreason (the company that makes and sells my shirts) was sponsoring for ToplessRobot readers. The point of the contest was to see who could come up with the worst nerdy shirt idea ever, and the winner got some free Splitreason swag. The photo of my shirt was just used as an example of one of the cool designs you could pick from if you won (I hope.)

Rob, the guy that runs the site, also continued to recommend my "Winner's Don't Use Drugs" shirt in the article. I'm really happy that I made something that pleases him so much because he has a bit of a reputation among visitors of the site as being one of those nerds who seem to hate more things about nerdy culture than they like.

Front Issue 151

That's right, I have eight pages of illustrations in just one issue! I had no idea they were going to run two of my article illustration sets in a single issue, so for a while I thought I must have missed the "Build the Ultimate Gang" piece. I've posted the original illustrations before so there's not much new to add here. Oh, except that the title of the second article, "Live like you're minted when your totes f*cking skinted" means "how to live like you have a lot of money when you really don't." Slowly but surely as I work for Front I'm gaining a sense of British slang.





I apologize for the bad quality photos. If anyone has any pointers for taking good pictures of magazines I'm open to advice.