Dapper Cadaver Tee

3 color tee for Dapper Cadaver. They are available for purchase here. Really fun project for an amazingly unique company. I don't accept much illustration work these days, but when the owner asked me to do this one, my mind ran wild with all the possibilities. Obviously I had to do it. The client was madly in love with my Killing Death painting, so basically this was his concept for the shirt. It worked out well.

Fancy Octopus 2

I made this on my iPad with Procreate and the Adonit Jot Touch 4 stylus. At this point in my life I don't have a lot of free time to paint, or a studio area to paint in, but working this way is pretty satisfying and I am happy with the results. The wet brush feels much like oil painting—it's easy to get lost in the blending. It creates some nice soft edges that I never got with acrylic. I can't work on the computer when I get home. Because I'm on the computer all day at work, at home I need to switch it up or I feel sore and stressed, like I'm working a 15 hour day or something.

Lady's Foot Cream

I just let my mind wander on this, which I find very fun and rewarding. I can't stomach making art unless it comes from a place of pure ridiculousness and exploration. I have no interest in being profound or high-concept. This was a random sketch that I took to a way higher level of polish than it deserved, but it made me laugh, and that's worthwhile to me.

Well, obviously I haven't posted in a while! I've fallen into the void that is the video game industry, so naturally nobody sees what I've been doing till 2 years later. Also, I'm expecting in July, so I had to make a baby shower invitation. I like it a lot, but looking at it I can't help but think: "I used to do nothing but record covers for punk and metal bands!?" It blows my mind how things have changed...and how much I've taken to working in vector.

Distillation show

I am going to be in a show at Phidias Gold. Haven't been accepting a lot of shows for the past year, but I took this one because it sounded fun, and the line-up is killer! I took 360° photos that I want to make into an animated gif or something, so that will be up later.

Quests UI

I badly want to get into designing user interfaces for games. I think it's the perfect job for me because I get to do a variety of technical and creative work. For some reason that makes no sense to me, people don't want to do UI design in the games world. You get to do illustration, design, animation, and some light coding—while solving the puzzle of how to clearly communicate information to the player. I think it's fun, but I guess it's not for everybody. This would be an overlay menu for a fantasy MMO like World of Warcraft. It was given to me as a test. The company decided not to hire me because I don't have experience with a specific technology they are using, but have been very helpful and gracious by recommending me to their friends and colleagues.

This was the wireframe. The art direction was to be an edgy, mystical, fantasy hardcore MMO style like WOW and League of Legends. I want to talk about the UI decisions I made, but I think it would become a TL;DR situation. If you have any questions, leave me a comment :)

Head Labs

This is a Flash Project I did a little while back. I had so much fun that I thought I would do a lot more Flash animation projects, but it looks like my life is heading in a different direction. I'm not sure how technical I can get of this blog without losing you guys, but I'm gonna go ahead and explain the project anyway. It started off as an HMTL5 project that was meant to just be for fun and learning. I thought I would do some simple animations in Flash and use Grant Skinner's Zoë air application to export sprite sheets that I could manipulate with javaScript. Well, I ended up getting really into the Flash animation part, and what I thought would be around 25 frames ended up being around 180 (even though it's shot in 2s). The sprites (as you see here) got to be WAY TOO BIG to use, as they are 1.2 MB, whereas the Flash swf was only 143 KB. I probably could have cut down the number of sprite images by programmatically jumping around the frames, but it seemed too tedious. I decided that this kind of animation was not going to work for sprites, and since I basically already had it built in Flash, I continued in that direction. Then in further digression from the goal, I started doing sounds. I had no idea how to do that, so I taught myself Adobe Soundbooth, and got pretty good results considering that I just used the mic on my laptop.

The project lives here: Head Labs Site