Tattoo

Sometimes people get tattoos of my art, and I think it's awesome. People often ask for my permission, which I don't really understand, of course I'm O.K. with it, why wouldn't I be. I like to have pictures of them though. This person was nice enough to send me one. Oddly, about an hour after receiving this photo, a guy from Australia asked if it would be O.K. to get my G.F.P. painting (or parts of it) done as a sleeve, of course I said yes, I think it's great.

There was another case like this where the person had gotten a t-shirt design that was meant to be white on black, so they had to have it inverted, and somehow it still makes sense and it looks good. The second tattoo is the guitar player from that now defunct Bafabegiya.

Orchid Shirt Design

My friend Raj came across this on E-Bay. A guy from the U.K. was selling it. I emailed him and pretended to be all pissed about it, even though I basically just thought it was awesome and funny! I totally like Orchid, and I would have loved to have actually worked for them, but unfortunately I'll never get to. The guy was really nice and he got ahold of the person who made it, some dude in France, who was apparently quite embarrassed about the whole thing. All I really wanted was for him to send me one, because I thought it would be awesome to have, and I'd always have a funny story about it, but he was sold out. It makes me wonder if I should make the images on my website smaller to decrease the likeliness of this happening, but I think people genuinely like the large images, and I've heard about, read about, or seen them on many a fans desktop.

Update for Tony Wolf

This is some recent stuff, mostly from my sketchbook. There's the winged skeleton figure. I went to the Filmore recently and was looking at the posters and decided that I wanted to make one and try to sell it to them. So I did the sketch painting and I liked that a lot, then I did the larger version. Something was lost between the two, but oh well. The content is nothing new or interesting, but I still had fun doing it. I'm trying to get away from drawing really cliche things like skeletons. I just took this awful picture of it, just to post it here, but I need to take it to be professionally photographed. Then we've got these intricate pen drawings. There was a time when I wasn't working very much and I was so bored that I just wanted to do really intricate things to fill my time. So I just tried to come up with some images where I could draw patterns and lots of feathers. In the end they didn't take very long so I was still bored. Same thing with these trees. They were painted over shitty drawings. Lately all I want to draw is trees. They're similar to the pen drawings because I just used them as a means to escape boredom. So I tried to paint every section a slightly different shade of the same color. It took a while. Then there's this mummy. I saw a little thumbnail of a c.d. cover in a magazine recently and it was a mummy's face, it looked cool and inspired me to draw one. Again, wanting to do intricate stuff, I made sure there were lots of wraps to paint. Seeing these all together I notice that I've been using the same colors for a while, that dark green under-painting with black and french grey/blue, then deep portrait pink, I think it looks nice. I've also been very painterly lately and I like where it's going. Maybe I should explain the title of this post. Yesterday Tony Wolf of the fantastic band Greyskull was telling me how he checks my blog daily and wanted to know why I don't update it very often, so there you go. When you get back from tour, this post will be waiting for you! I'm not going to have a job for a good long while so HOPEFULLY you'll be seeing a lot more art work from me. Look for the second Unified School District cover in the next couple weeks. The a couple weeks after that there should be a 12" cover for the band Ed Gein, easily the biggest band I've worked for, I'm very excited, more on that later. Then a cover for the ever so young and passionate band from Reno, Groove Box Replica. Then someday a cover for Greyskull, once they get a permanent drummer and get into the studio. In the spare time I want to work on a comic book, but don't expect that any time soon.

Unified School District

This group from Oakland called Unified School District has commisioned me to do thier CD cover. This is what I did. I probably should have gone over it with them, as opposed to going stright to finish, but I didn't. They said they liked it, but that it was too Hip-Hop, which they didn't want. The really hard part about all this is that I don't really know anything about hip-hop so I didn't know that it was a common thing. I can't really dispute it because he sent me the very similar image (posted) that he himself had done some time ago. I've only gone through the hip-hop CD's a couple times, because I'm never impressed with the covers, they always seem to be a photo of the artist looking hard, or something money related, or the sexy girl thing, so I didn't think that this would really be too hip-hop. It reminds me of hip arty zine-punk kids and thier love of all things 80's, lets call them "neo-mixtape girls". This is, sadly, the first time that a client has not been happy with what I produced, but surely not the last time. I'm re-doing the cover now. It's standard practice in the industry to charge again if you have to do the work again, but this is my business and I'll run it the way I want, and I just want them to get a good record cover out of it. I was really struggling to come up with ideas for this, but in conversation with the group they said they wanted me to do robots, and suggested "an idea of a old rusted robot that has been left in a field sprawled out with overgrowth of nature covering bits of him..." Sounds good to me, I'm running with it, more on that when it's finished. The other image is from my sketchbook, I did it a couple months ago and thought it would be good for a band, so when this came up I thought the idea would work.

Blues

So this is some artwork I did for this band called Blues. I'm still in the process of finishing this one up, putting it in the templates etc. It's going to be a digipak CD with a pocket instead of a tray. I've got two versions of the inside, I still haven't decided which one to go with, or if I'll do it pink like the outside....ha, pink on the outside, I like that. It may be a one sided LP eventually which I would be really stoked on because it would show the art so much better. I'm a little obsessed with trees right now. The last CD it was ghosts. I don't really work digitally so this is a change of pace for me, but I like the flexibility. I just realized that the pinks are very different, I'll have to change that. Oh well, you get the idea. To be released on Rome Plow Records, who have been very nice to work with and have an affinity for making quality releases. Yeah, they're cool guys and I hope to do more things for them in the future.

Bafabegiya CD

The bafabegiya cd cover is uncropped. Next: Greyskull cd/lp and comic book pages for comic-con.

Juvinals Record

As soon as these guys from Pirates Press get back to me this will be done. I've emailed them twice and all I need is their goddamn template but they haven't responded. This is a new way of working for me, all little lines of color that add up when mixed by the eye. It comes from impressionism. I like the effect but it was a little on the time consuming side. Every area had to be painted at least 3 times with an opposing mesh of hatchmarks. It's a little tedious. I don't know how commercially viable it is, but Barron Storey does it so it must be possible.