Recent good news

I've never posted these kinds of things on my blog before, but they're good to share. Hopefully I'm not being too self-absorbed. I used to keep a list of sites that had featured me or blogs about my art, but it got way out of hand and I gave up. If you have a website, definitely put some tracker code in it, it's good to know where people are linking to you, and what they're saying. I was using stat counter, but I changed to google analytics. Anyway, this was some nice stuff. I'm always surprised and somewhat delighted when my site is featured for its design and not for the illustrations. In this case my first reaction was "well, yeah, obviously they liked my site, look at all the pink", but they got it off this other, less popular site called the daily slurp, which does not share my color preferences. Cool stuff. Once again, got the creepy comment. I don't know if I'll ever be able to take the dark edge off my art, especially since I don't see it. Maybe I don't need to. People like it, that's what matters.

Panther Attack

One of the guys from born anchors asked me to do a poster for this show. I said yes, even though I'm busy, just because I really wanted to draw panthers. In my mind, this was going to be much lighter, almost cute, but then in drawing it, it became scary. An ongoing problem for me. I like it a lot though, so that's all that matters. Client needs, whatever. I thought it would be fun to mix something scary like zombies, with something cute, like the panthers I drew in my sketchbook, very much having Deth P. Sun in mind. Then I drew them and they just looked terrifying. Oh well, I'm working on getting away from that. Baby steps. I might be doing an album cover for Panther Attack in the future, so be on the lookout for that. The ink drawing was really tight, using a refillable Japanese brush pen that didn't belong to me, and now I really wish it did. I have my brother looking out or one because he's living in Japan. I have a feeling I'm going to be sending him on a lot of missions to find technical pens, brushes, prints, etc. for me to nerd the fuck out over. He likes to draw, so it's not all bad for him, and I encourage him to do so because he really does have talent, but I think he feels overshadowed by me.

A lot of photoshop effects in this one, maybe too much, opinions?

Panthers

I'm doing a poster/flyer for a band called panther attack, so I did a google image search on panthers. I was a little bothered by these images. I don't understand why this is such a popular image that it needed to be ripped off over and over. Is this seriously such a high selling poster that it needed to be bootlegged? Are thousands of people hunting the internet looking for paintings of carnivores to buy solely based on their level of "bad-ass"? What's going on?

The Prosthetics Shirt

They had a couple ideas. The other one was venus fly traps tearing people apart. I would have liked to draw them, but I couldn't make it work in my mind without looking like a gorey death metal album cover.

Ed Gein vinyl

I saw this on Ed Gein's myspace blog and I thought I'd share it.

"Judas Goats & Dieseleaters on VINYL!!!!

The vinyl for Judas Goats & Dieseleaters is FINALLY out!

After over a year of ridiculous artwork bullshit (the details of which I won't get into) we finally got someone awesome to do the artwork. That someone's name is Jeremy Forson. He did an amazing job with the artwork and layout for these puppies. They finally arrived yesterday and they look kick ass! We are totally stoked on them!

Head over to the Hex Records site at www.hanginghex.com to check them out and order one up!

Also go to www.jeremyforson.com and take a gander at his artwork because his shit rules!"

I love getting reactions like that from the bands I work for. It's good to know I hit the mark.

Born Anchors Tee

This band shares members with Heiress. They apparently like the work I did for them and wanted me to come up with a shirt. http://www.myspace.com/bornanchors. I think they're a really good band, and I had fun (trying) to do something more light hearted to suit their music. They sent me a preview of their idea for placement, and I think it looks really nice, I'm excited to see how the come out. I hadn't even thought of placing it there, but it looks like it was made for it. I'm happy that this was a successful endeavor after hearing that Tristan Tzara went with the original art, even though the label guy liked it.

Tristan Tzara 7"

This was for a DADA band from Germany that broke up a couple years ago. I was going for DADA assemblage meets hardcore. Successful? I suppose not. The band decided to use the art from the original release of the 7". So if you're in a band and need a 7" or CD cover fast, you can use this one I guess :(