My studio!

I've had a studio since....October??? I never got around to really showing it, so here we go. Firstly, I think I need to point out that this is going to be a big pain in the ass because there's like 50 pictures and the way blogger is set up it's hard to have the picture, then a caption, then the next picture...sigh. Anyway, it's in the dogpatch area of San Francisco, which is kinda out of the way (see shot showing how far it is from the downtown), but it's good if you like industrial wastelands as much as I do. The building is photographed here too, it's the only one that look habitable, it's a whole block and there's all kinds of businesses in it. Video companies, bakers, furniture makers, printing companies, etc. I made a long panorama of the space. From left to right it's Kelly Lynn Jones and the Little Paper Planes, then Becky Ebeling and Stacy Martin (I don't know if they have websites), then Michelle Blade, then Deth P. Sun, then Marci Washington, then me. The area is full of odd little alleys and decaying buildings, from which I derive a lot of inspiration. On foggy nights it's all kinds of creepy. I walked around today annd took a bunch of pictures thinking I might make them into drawings. I got a little carried away with the photo-merging because it's really easy. I though I would be able to draw the buildings after merging them, but they went all bananas on me and look too creepy circus mirror to draw. There's that red (ranchero or el camino?) that was just in somebody else's blog, was it Mike Giant? Anyway, it's always around here. My square of the studio is at the bottom...it's messy right now.

Wondercon is over.

Exciting prospects for me that I can't mention right now. Made good connections, and new friends. I'd like to thanks Super Ugly, J.J. Kirby, Camilla D'Errico, Moritat, Jonathan Wayshak, and Kevin Leung for being extra rad and helpful.

Comics samples for Wondercon

These are some penciling and inking samples I've been working on for Wondercon (comic book convention). The first eight are from a sample script off the Dark Horse website. They provide it for would be comics pencil artists to complete as a demonstration of skills. The 5 pages after that are inking examples that I didn't draw, also provided by Dark Horse. The pencils aren't really pencils, you might have noticed, this is because I don't care for drawing with pencils. I rough my drawings out in pencil, but they're pretty messy and don't come together until I ink them. I completed these all very quickly. I was more concerned about keeping up the fast pace needed to be a monthly artist, and telling the story, than making the best pencils ever created. I'm hoping to find gainful employment in the comic book world this weekend, but if I don't I'll be back in the studio working on a series to pitch to publishers. Wish me luck!

11 portraits

I did 11 portraits for the new Graf Orlock record. Quick and dirty, but they still seem to have come out pretty good. The band wrote a screenplay, and it's about a time traveling assassin. On the cover there will be a cross hair, and you can put whichever person you want into it. Reagan obviously was not assassinated, but they felt he should have been, so he's in there as well. All members:
Julius Caesar
Tupac
Abraham Lincoln
Franz Ferdinand
Lee Harvey Oswald
Ronald Reagan
Leon Trotsky
Malcolm X
Jesse James
John Lennon
Robert Kennedy

Valentines Day present

Yeah, I do cute sometimes. Umm, what else to say....Oh! Technical stuff. This is on a piece of multimedia paper (get some from Moses at the artist and craftsman supply, it's cheap and rad) mounted to a pre-made art board (from the same store). It was a good way to work. I got the joy of working on paper, but it was presentable without a frame, which is always a plus. I used orange and violet. I wrote those colors off in 2002 after an illustration went terribly wrong in Randy Chavez's class, but I decided to try again. It was troublesome, but in the end I overcame their powerful vibrancy and unpredictable tinting strengths. I wanted to make something cute, but not cliche, no hearts and such. I actually have lots of fun drawing things like this, but metal bands don't usually request it. Whatchagonnado. Oh, and I think I'm going to start putting my name of things, not with one of those awful watermarks, but as I did here. I know my images get distributed all over the world, and usually in blogs and such they link to my site, but I wonder if sometimes they don't. Any thoughts on this are welcome.

Punk and Dishonesty

I had a new assignment to make an illustration for a small article about how in the early days of Punk, there was a lot of songs about liars. I did tons of sketches, trying to stay away from cliche's and such (pants on fire, long noses) and ultimately decided that I just wanted to stay away from things being too literal. So that's the first illustration I did. Turned out that they wanted something more literal, so I did the second one.