Showing soon + new painting

I'm back in the studio after being busy moving. I've got a show for these new paintings at Edo Salon and Gallery in September. I think that knowing I was going to be showing these soon and where might have made this painting go up a notch. Not sure, but I am going to be busy this summer making paintings for this show, and I'm very excited about it! I'm making a painting for a he-man themed group show next. I was looking up characters today, and they're pretty ridiculous. It should be a lot of fun.

Born Anchors CD cover

I worked on a CD cover for Born Anchors. It never really made it to completion, so this is it's last manifestation. The colors, concept, and type are not mine. This is kind of a sad job for me. I like the guys in the band, and the music, and I wish that the concept they wanted had worked out, but it didn't. I was not creatively active on this assignment, my role was more of "the hand." I just drew whatever the guy I was working with wanted and didn't really participate in the concept or anything. The comics style portraits I did on my own at one time in the process, they might become buttons. I like them a lot, even though they're certainly a departure for me. I've been playing around with a lot of different styles lately, and the projects that I've been conceptualizing have been all over the map. This was when I was thinking a lot about developing a comic book style. I'll be the first to admit a strong influence from Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl, Gorillaz). Fun though. But yeah, the cover, not so much. I'm not sure where it went wrong, but it surely did.

Last record cover?

This is a record cover for a Mexican hardcore band called Maladie It's got an Egyptian Death theme. Mummy, blue lotus, stars of the underworld. Good times. I got to do whatever I wanted on this one, and that's the way I like it. They did some of their own changes after passing it off, but I'm showing it the way I intended it to look. This is probably going to be my last record cover, at least for a while. I've finally finished all the covers I had committed to doing, and I don't want to do them anymore. They are labor intensive, and I don't get paid hardly anything to do them. If I got a decent offer to do one for a large label or something, that's a different story, but for what I'm making now it's just not worth the time and stress. I'm supposed to work on some drawings to go in the layout of a record cover, but that's a bit of a different beast.

I'm not sure where my next move will be. I have some editorial illustrations coming up, but if you haven't noticed, illustrations in magazines are waaayyy down. I don't think it's realistic to try to squeeze a living out of those alone. Possibly comics, or concept art. Maybe I'll hunker down in a master's program until the economic shit storm blows over. We'll see.