sigh....

I used to be able to draw, what the fuck happened?????

Anchors LP

Basically this band told me exactly what they wanted. That kind of thing is hit or miss, but I've decided to not do ideas that I think are dumb or can't imagine coming out well. This one looked good in my mind so I went with it. They also wanted a guy strapped to an anchor in the scene, and I city scape above. I thought the city scape would be way too much and it needed some open space, so I didn't do that. When I imagined it with the city scape it looked like the kind of indie comics outsider art style where they try to cram everything into one drawing, like here's a bunch of people with spots on their shirts and there's garbage cans and a banana peel on the ground and a cat and a dog and some ladies silhouette in the building window etc. I didn't want to go there. You can see in the scan that I actually did the guy on the anchor, but they asked me to take it out of the finish b/c it didn't look how they imagined. I had a hard time even imagining that in there, which is maybe why it didn't work out. It didn't make sense to me to have a guy on an anchor, with no water around or anything. If he was in the ocean... that would make sense to me. They wanted their name in roots. I've been seeing that a lot lately, roots or sticks, or something, but most of the time it's illegible. Luckily they didn't want that. Still I don't think it works graphically, it's very hard to read, especially from a distance. The original painting is brighter and has a pink sky, I de-saturated it in photoshop because I thought it was too chipper for them. Maybe it still is.

Heiress Demo

This as a demo for a band called Heiress. They said they like the stuff I do with dismembered people. I'm not doing a lot of that these days, but I had fun drawing these all the same. First I did the green one with the trees, but they wanted something else because it looks too much like the Blues cover I did, which is on the same label, I didn't even think of that. So then I did the castle. I think it's a strong design ( I imagine it folded in half, since it needs to cover a CD) but looking back on it, I don't think it makes any sense, which is kind-of what they thought, or what they said is that it didn't suit the band. I still really like the headless guy and I would have liked to have seen that drawing used for something. So then the guy in the band says he has an idea of crows in trees with hands hanging on strings and a guy in tall grass with no hands pounding the ground. So I went back to sketching, as seen in the sketchbook page. My sketchbook stinks, I think someone hid a slim jim in it when I was in New York. I've started doing my thumbnails and brainstorming in sequential/comic form. It helps me develop a story around the image. And painting them, there's more that I've been doing for the new Blues CD. So that takes us to the brown ones. The scratchy logo and the larger figure is the final. They really liked those letters from the original piece so they asked me to put those in, and they thought the stick hands were not clear enough because they looked too much like the grass, so I made him larger and I like it a lot better. I didn't want to just do no hands, and I really like that movie "Titus" so there you go.

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.