SF Magazine and Juxtapoz

Hey kids. Big news is that my profile in Juxtapoz Magazine is finally out. I consider it a milestone in my career, and an honor. The painting reproduced well, so that's great after my disappointing reproduction in Spectrum last year (by the way, I didn't submit this year, which was probably a mistake). So I've been waiting for weeks to show this painting for SF Magazine. This was my best assignment to date. The article is about dark films in SF (which is perfect for me. right?), the due date was 2 weeks, and I was well paid. It's just the best imaginable job for me, and it fell into my lap through an email out of the blue. So I rocked it. I'm stoked of the piece I did, the AD was stoked; everything was awesome. I worked closely with the AD, Alejandro Chavetta on this, and he was just fantastic. He didn't tell me what to do, he just gave me a general idea about the direction he needed, and helped me flush out my ideas. Really, the whole thing was just great. I finished well ahead of the due date. This is a combination of painting and digital, that I feel came out showing the best traits of both. The only thing that bothers me about this painting, is that actual parks at night are way more spooky than this painting. I'll do another post with more about my process at a later date.

Mctarty.com

This was a commission for mctarty.com on the theme of "Scottish African". In spite on this being for an art director/writer creative team, all I was asked to do was "Scottish African". Pat Mckay is of Scottish decent, Feh Tarty is Liberian.Some projects are like that. I wanted to keep this one light, and since it was intended to be put on a white website, I made it a vignette. It feels very different from my normal work. I feel like I'm always changing things up, but this one's especially unusual for me. It's so unusual that I don't even know what to think about it yet. They were happy with it though. I'm not sure if it fits in my portfolio, so I don't think I'm going to put it on my site.

Oh yeah, so the tartans are Pat McKay's family's, Thistle is the nation flower of Scotland, and red deer are apparently common there. On the other side the leopard is part of Feh's tribe's folklore, the pattern is either Liberian or at least West African, I don't remember, and the flowers are pepper flowers, official flower of Liberia.

Nobody Loves Me drawing

I have been itching to do more personal work, and be overall more prolific. This is the first of many (hopefully) person art works I will make. I had the idea a little while ago, and for some reason it strikes a chord with me. I originally wanted it to be a shirt design, but once I got going it started to have too many colors to be cost effective for me. Maybe though, we'll see. I didn't think it would come out so....emo. I thought it would be funnier, but in the end it seems sad. This is a common problem for me.

Flickr account

I made a Flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremy_forson/ or my SN is jeremy_forson) and I started uploading all my art on it, or at least the things I have shot or scanned. What I realized very quickly is that I have a lot of art that I do not necessarily want the entire world to see. So if you REALLY want to see all of the terrible old things I made, you'll have to add me as a friend on there. It's nice to have everything in one place that I can access from anywhere, and they're backed-up.

Graf Orlock Kali shirt

So a little while ago, I saw Blues when they were here, and they here about to do a few dates with Graf Orlock, I told Jeremy (from Blues) to tell them that I'd like to do a shirt, and it happened! I love that. I've long admired their package designs and shirts, so I was really glad to be able to work with them. Stephen from Greyskull is now playing with them (now Sven), so I'm sure that helped as well. Sven told me about what they wanted, and I was stoked to draw it. It's Temple of Doom themed, Kali standing on Indiana, holding the head of short round. I think Hindu imagery and mythology is fascinating. Really fun project. It was nice to be able to design a 4 color shirt as well, I'm always pleading with bands to use more colors, because they always look better, but most shy away due to the rise in cost. I did a ton of variations in color, and I really don't know what it will end up looking like, especially since once I gave them the PSD, they can really do whatever they want with it.

Dead Stare logo

Logo for the band Dead Stare from Tacoma. I started out with they font Interstate, I wanted something very bold, because that's usually the way hardcore logos look, then messed it up with an inky toothbrush, then sprayed it with black and white spraypaint, only slightly pushing the nozzle so that it came out in large drops. Then I cute them out and arranged them so. At this point it was illegible, so I cleaned it up with a white-out pen until you could pretty much read it. Graphic designers hate this kind of type, so difficult to read, but illustrators tend to care more about what it looks like than how readable it is. Finally, I scanned it and ran it through a stamp filter. I don't advocate photoshop filters in general, but I found that the stamp filter does a good job of making things looks like they've been photocopied 10 times. I'm really happy with this, I think it suits the band's brutal sound perfectly.

Prosthetics Towers Shirt

The Prosthetics hired me to do another shirt design for them. This was the request "Hey, our idea is to have four or five men in business suits, each smoking a cigar. The smoke from the cigars would rise above them and form the twin towers. The heads of each of the men would be the heads of pigs." Also, red shirts. This is what I came up with, I couldn't make it work with small business men. So now I've got business men with truck heads, goat skull heads, and pig heads; none of them my idea haha. I'm going to start to be known for these. Come to think of it, a long time ago I did an ant headed business man. This idea is common I'd say. So this design is very different from the last one I did for them, or any of my other shirt designs. I was looking at Jake Bannon's designs www.convergecult.com/, and I thought they were much better than mine, then this came out. As an artist you're not supposed to point out who you're influenced by, but I'm not ashamed, art doesn't just come out of a vacuum you know? The pig head reminds me of pageninetynine as well, also some of my favorite art ever. This shirt is probably one of my strongest, and that sucks because I didn't really draw it, it's more of a collage.

There's something about this gritty style that works so well for hardcore bands. It's like a direct visual parallel to the music. The sprays, scratches, and photocopy artifacts give it a grimy look that suits the heavy distortion perfectly. They also make it somewhat hard to read or understand, like the unintelligible lyrics.