Possum Saloon Art Show, Again.

So once again I've been extremely busy, as some of you know, but I have some new sketches in the works so there should be some activity around here in the near future.

In the meantime, my friends at the Possum Saloon gallery have turned last month's show into a regular event, which will happen every month starting this Thursday in conjunction with the Downtown LA Artwalk. As before, it'll be an eclectic group of artists displaying work, and some bands and DJs performing as well. It's completely free, and there will even be free wine until it runs out. They asked me once again to include some work, but it was kind of last-minute so I'll only have a few prints up this time. I'm actually not familiar with any of the other artists except Tamar, so it should be interesting. Either way, if you're in the LA area you should definitely come down, the Artwalk is a lot of fun.

Here's the flyer (click to enlarge):

Cereal Mascot Reunion

For some reason this image has been swimming around in my head for a few years now, and finally - after chipping away at it bit by bit over the last couple months - I've brought it to life as a large, absurdly detailed print. It's kind of about the strange, uncomfortable feeling of reuniting with old friends only to find that the magic just isn't there anymore - and in turn, about the melancholy "nothing will ever be as good as it used to be" type of nostalgia, of which I am increasingly fond. And of course, a tribute to the late, great, wood-paneled, shag-carpeted 1970's rec room.

Click to enlarge:



Download the hi-res wallpaper: Standard (4x3) or Widescreen (16x9)

Order the 22" x 17" limited run fine art print

Details: Trix Rabbit, Frankenberry, Count Chocula, Cap'n Crunch, Tony The Tiger

Sometime soon I'll post a detailed step-by-step of how this was put together, for those interested.

In other news, I polished up a couple images to get them print-ready for the Possum Saloon show last week, so now Headache and Miscarriage are available as prints. I'm also now offering smaller 11" x 17" sizes on some of the prints, for those who don't want the full size.

Possum Saloon Art Show

If you're in LA, you should check out the Downtown Art Walk on Thursday (the 10th). An "art walk" sounds lame, I know, but supposedly it's pretty cool, and some friends of mine have asked me to contribute art to a show they're organizing as part of the art walk. Here's the flyer:



There will be art and music and free wine, it should be a good time. I'll be showing a handful of prints from Sketchblog (which will be for sale all nice and framed), and if I can get my new print done in time, I might debut it there.

And just for the sake of including some art in this post, here's an illustration I'd all but forgotten about, that I did five years ago for an article in a remarkably unfunny humor magazine in New York. I don't remember what the article was about - something about a professor losing his mind - but the image turned out pretty good:

(click to enlarge)

We Could Build A Better Robot, If We Only Had Arms

(click to enlarge)



Here's the original sketch, and the outline, and the pre-Photoshop coloring.

Crabwalk

SketchBlog returns! I can't believe it's been over a month since the last post. As some of you know, I've been extremely busy with other projects, but I finally had time for some drawing tonight, and I think I'll be posting on a regular basis again now. So here's a new wallpaper for you:

(click to enlarge)


Right-click to save:
Wallpaper for standard (4x3) monitors
Wallpaper for widescreen (16x9) monitors

Oh, and if you hadn't noticed, there's now a pack of iPhone wallpapers on the wallpaper page (they're sized for the iPhone, but they'll work in other phones).

I'll post new artwork soon! In the meantime, if you're bored, you can enjoy some pictures I took of cheap/awesome alien tourist attractions during a recent stop in Roswell, New Mexico - click the photo for the full gallery:

With Apologies To Cesar Romero

I've been pretty busy lately, but I've been slowly chipping away at a couple different illustrations, which should be showing up here soon. In the meantime though, my friend Ollie once again asked me to draw something for her band, The Oohlas (I did this image for them last year), for a poster/flier for their upcoming LA show with Stellastarr*. And since Ollie encourages me to be as weird as I want, I just couldn't turn her down.

(click to enlarge)



The genesis of this image was a series of text messages which went something like this:

Me: Any particular theme I should run with?
Ollie: Idunno dude, just go crazy, but maybe something Ronettesish.
Me: Ronettesish? Is that defined as "related to or involving the 1960's trio The Ronettes?"
Ollie: Yes. I'm really into them lately.
Me: Okay. So, hypothetically, if aliens with paper Ronettes masks were feeding a sea monkey, which celebrity or historical figure's head would the sea monkey have?
Ollie: Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger.
Me: How about a two-headed sea monkey, with both heads? The two jokers. Sea monkeys have built-in joker hats, it was almost meant to be.
Ollie: Perfect! This is going to be amazing.
Me: I feel kind of guilty for excluding Cesar Romero, but at least now I can call the image "With Apologies To Cesar Romero." It has a great ring to it.
Ollie: You're insane.

Headache

I took a few minutes to clean up my horrendously messy desktop yesterday, and decided I wanted some new wallpapers to decorate it with. Here's the first one, which is probably the result of me playing too much Q-Bert lately:



Right-click to save:
Wallpaper for standard (4x3) monitors
Wallpaper for widescreen (16x9) monitors

Also, FYI - the Presents Opening Children print has sold out (thanks, Digg), and Troublemaker is getting very close, with the Mario print not far behind - in case anyone had been eyeing either of those.

Miscarriage

One thing I've learned about myself from doing Sketchblog is that I actually don't like to just sketch. When I see things in my head they're colorful and very detailed, so sketching them - quickly, without color or detail - just doesn't feel right. When I did this sketch a few months ago, it didn't satisfy me because it was so quick and dirty, while the image in my head was much more elaborate. So, I decided to revisit it, and bring it up to its full creepiness potential:

(click to enlarge)


Here's the process for those interested:

Step 1 (sketch)
Step 2 (base color)
Step 3 (skin texture and lighting)
Step 4 (details)
Step 5 (final)

Leaving Town

Usually when I draw something I have a very specific idea in mind from the beginning. Sometimes, though, I just start doodling and see what happens, and that's where, many hours later, this came from.

There's quite a bit of detail in it, so please, click to enlarge:



This is available as a print.

Detail

Initial sketch

Oh, and here are a couple pretty cool robots that came out while I was sketching.

My Office + Artifacts From My Youth

It's a busy week for me, so I don't have anything new to post. However, last week someone had asked if I could post some pictures of my setup, so I snapped a few while my desk was uncharacteristically clean. This is my humble, temporary office in my LA apartment. I hang out in here pretty much all day, every day, doing work and drawing pictures and dicking around:

(click to enlarge)



From left to right: A TV for video editing (with a spider skeleton above it, and prints drying below it), an extremely geek-chic USB drink chiller, a Mac Pro with two Apple cinema displays, a Final Cut Pro keyboard, the lovely Cintiq 12wx tablet, a Kaiju Eyezon figure, a vintage 1982 Vectrex game system (more on that in the near future - and yes that's A.W.E.S.O.M.-O sitting on top of it), a vintage Metropolis poster on the wall, a buttload of hard drives barely visible on the floor, a big-ass two-headed dragon thing, an incredibly rad Japanese clock, one of my many metal robots (this one I got at the wonderful Wound and Would Toy Company, which has a fantastic selection of vintage robots), a MacBook Pro, a framed lithograph on the wall from a series I designed for Nine Inch Nails (although you can't see it because of the glare), and, most important of all, the Bib Fortuna ceramic mug, currently in use as a pen holder. On the sides of the room you can't see here are a couch, a big filing cabinet full of cables and equipment, a giant sexy printer, a bathroom, and a walk-in closet that you can't walk in because it's filled with all kinds of crap.

I snapped these while I was playing around with an early version of the tree people drawing. Here's a close-up of my main work area, since someone had asked about how the Cintiq tablet fits in with my monitors and keyboard:

(click to enlarge)



Just so this post isn't all boring pictures of my office, I'll throw in a little gem I happened upon while cleaning out some old hard drives: When I was young, I never had a video camera. I begged and begged my mother, but she said they were too expensive. It wasn't until I was around thirteen that my Uncle got a HI-8 camera, and he let me borrow it a couple times. For some reason, the first thing I wanted to do with it was make Claymation movies. So, at age thirteen, here is one of my first experiments with a video camera:



I filmed that on HI-8 with the camera's fancy frame-by-frame recording option, then I recorded it onto VHS while dubbing in the audio live through a Radio Shack microphone hooked up to a cassette recorder running out to the VCR. It's pretty amazing how much easier things have gotten even since my childhood for kids who want to play around with video. I borrowed my Uncle's video camera again a couple weeks later and began work on an epic sequel, which involved a mad scientist kidnapping Mr. Clay's newborn baby and enlarging him into an angry giant monster who wrought unspeakable carnage upon a Micro Machine city. I never was able to finish it though, and sadly, I think the footage is now lost. Anyway, more fun samplings of my absurdly violent teenage artwork can be found here.