Cubees at Zakka

Just one week after the 2 Art 4 TV show, Chris has more cubees on display at a place called Zakka in Brooklyn as part of a larger art display in the area. Again he used a large version of my Venus de Milo Cubee. You can check out more info and photos here.

Chris also has really cool news involving the new 25th anniversary Ninja Turtles movie Turtles Forever, where the turtles from the old 80s cartoon team up with the turtles from the newer series. Cubee versions of the turtles make a cameo in the movie, as well as Chris himself! So I am especially excited to see it (as if seeing new animation of the old turtles series wasn't cool enough.)

Sans Mutagen

My newest shirt design based on Bebop and Rocksteady from the old TMNT cartoon.

You can vote on it here.

I've always loved the design of these guys. Their complicated clothes and accessories seem like they would be so hard to animate, so they strike me as characters whose toys were designed first, then their animated counterparts were based on those. Judging by what I know about the history of the Ninja Turtles cartoon I would say that was probably the case, even though the original toys do differ quite a bit from their appearance in the animated series, so go figure.

These animals were a ton of fun to draw, maybe because it's just been so long since I've done anything "realistic" to this extent.

2 Art 4 TV

This is a photo of the Cubees featured in this years 2 Art 4 TV show in New York. On the far right is My Venus de Milo, which Chris asked if he could use for the show. This may seem a small victory as this is really Chris' section of the show, but it is really exciting for me and I absolutely have to thank him for my first ever chance at showing art in New York, the art capital of the world! Take THAT art professors who told me drawing cartoons would never get me anywhere!

Photo taken from the Cubeecraft blog.

Bullet William & Robert-Omb

My newest shirt idea which is up for voting now. This came from a brainstorming session with Kyle. I liked both ideas enough that I didn't want to pick one over the other, but I wasn't sure how to combine them on a single shirt so I asked the voters for suggestions.

Also if you don't know the proper names of Mario Bros villains this shirt will be lost on you, but I guess that's the whole point of gamer-centric shirts to begin with!

Something for the ladies

Finally a baby tee for the girls! Buy it here.

There's also a baby tee featuring my pinup drawing on the way, as well as some girl's undies with an as of yet unposted design, so I'll be sure to update when those become available.

Store is open for business & other updates

I finally manged to get caught up with all the things I wanted to update on the site, not least of which was adding a store page. The links on the page take you to product pages on Splitreason.com, so it's not really an actual store as much as it is an organization of photos and links, but some people who wanted to buy one of my shirts didn't know how to tell which ones were mine when looking at the entire Splitreason catalog, and really they shouldn't have to sift through it all anyway. (Not that I don't think all the shirts aren't worth looking at, but you get what I mean.)

Organizing the links and photos was part of the work, but another big part was adding a store link on the top and bottom navigational fields of every page. Sounds easy, but can be tricky sometimes.

The only other page that got a significant amount of work done was the voices section, where I took away a few of the older items and added some new ones, as well as updated the Cubees page since all my Cubees can now be found in the art section. It's now a showcase of videos, press, and fan images related to Cubees I've created.

Every last page on the site received changes. Most were pretty minor, but they were still enough to keep me busy for a while.

Dia De Los Muertos

This is the piece I created for the Autumn Society Dia De Los Muertos gallery show in Philadelphia. The idea of making a piece for this theme seemed really fun to me because it's probably not something that I would ever do on my own, but I still got to do pretty much whatever I wanted. That may seem obvious, but doing T-shirts all the time means I have to constantly be concerned about how clear my ideas are. Basically if I don't hit people over the head with a joke I get comlplaints, so it was nice to create something that had to adhear to a theme but still gave me free reign.

I had a number of ideas for what I wanted to do, and this was the one that won out. A close second was to take things aside from humans that can be "dead," like canceled TV shows or companies that have gone out of business (which we certainly have no shortage of right now.)

But ultimately I thought it would be funny to play on the religious/ritual side of the holiday. One of the many traditions of the Day of the Dead is to make and offer bread to the deceased. Although this bread is actually eaten by the living, some believe that the dead eat it first, leaving it devoid of nutrients. So I started to think about what would happen if the dead really did come back to eat the bread. It's what the person making the bread fully intends to happen, but if it really did I bet they'd be a little freaked out. Just like how the Christian belief is that Jesus will return some day, but if you go up to a Christian and tell them you've just seen Jesus they would just think you were nuts (or patronizing them, I suppose.)

At any rate, it's not meant to be disrespectful, I just think it can be good to look at things we take seriously with a sense of humor, or at least an open mind. I actually think this holiday has a much better way of handling death than the traditions I'm used to; they see it as a reason to celebrate what we had rather than mourn what we lost.

Grand Theft Happy Meal

First, thanks to everybody for the feedback on the art page. It really helps to know people are looking and like what they see. For Ian, I'll have to try and write at length about the process of working on my next piece (which is underway) since he requested it.

I've already updated the art page with the piece above, my newest shirt design. It's a Grand Theft Auto themed Happy Meal. It wasn't until I actually started drawing this that I had the idea to make the meal come from the game's own fake restaurant chain, Cluckin' Bell. I'm surprised that even occurred to me since I've never owned any GTA games, but I do tend to notice brands in fictional works because I really like the idea of creating your own brands to populate a story setting.

You can vote for the shirt now!