Art crisis

I'm almost 2 years out of college, and I'm having a bit of a life crisis. Not the stressfull kind exactly, but I need to change something, because I don't like the way things are going. I think I'm at the point where I have a good job, and I'm looking down the metaphorical road of my future. A horribly long, terrifyingly straight road. In other words, I'm bored, and I feel like I'm getting into the rut of the 9 to 5 life. I've only been doing it for a couple months, but I'm scarred of where it's going. My remedy to this is that I HAVE to do more art when I get off work, in spite of being worn out. I'm working out ideas for a comic right now. It's something I can at least work on while taking the bart train to work. I've been slacking off way too much, and having too much social time. I feel my potential slipping.

Mature art

I'm sticken with sudden sadness over the realization that my art is much too teen to be truely respectable. It seems to be an over-rendered version of angsty math class doodles. This disturbs me greatly and I feel that I need to drive towards pulling away from the creepy school gutter. I've been trying to move in a different direction for a while, but I'm hung up on a couple problems: I've been doing creepy art for so long that I've gotten good at it and it's difficult for me to work in a new style, and my "clients" often demand or at least expect that style from me. I'm trying to figure out where to go with my art to make it more mature. Suggestions welcome.

Don't be mad....

I know, I haven't shown anything new in a while, I'm sorry. I think after that series of record covers I was feeling a little burned out. I've also started a new full time job as a flash developer/interactive artist at a major advertising agency. Lots of perks, free time not being one of them. Also, I have a substantial life these days outside of my house on account of my ongoing happyness and lack of depression, most would agree that it's good thing but it's killing my career.

News for now: I don't know how much I said about it, but I still haven't heard from Burton about the snowboards I was supposed to do, I think that got lost in the process. Pretty disappointing. If all goes well there will be a page of me in Juxtapoz around the end of the year, which I've very excited about.

The new Blues CD should come out soon, and it would appear that they were quite happy about the art I did for it: Blues on Myspace. If you emailed me recently about a job and I haven't gotten back to you, I'm sorry, things have been hectic. I'm not blowing you off, just send me an email again. I need a rep or something, fuck. I don't even remember who's paid me, yikes!

Ice Druid Character

For Conceptart.org's Character of the Week #77. Character Idea "Ice Druid". Another thing I did because I was unoccupied at work. I actually sketched this out digitally first, printed it out, traced that, etc.

Another Skull drawing (sigh)

Just messing around. I could see it being a band shirt even though it's uninventive.

Mummy

I have a new job, and when I'm not doing anything I'm allowed to work on illustrations or play video games or whatever, so I made this one yesterday. I don't have a scanner here so I just found a picture of a mummy and basically traced it in photoshop. I brought my Wacom tablet in from home. It was a little frustrating for me. I don't like drawing on the computer. I want to do something less referenced and see how that works out.

Blues CD - "Snakepit"

For this projected I opted to do some art, but not the whole layout. It ended up being a good decision. All these CD covers ended up being due at the same time, and things have been very hectic for me. I don't know how the final layout will look, but they seem capable of handling it. This was one of those projects that makes you question your artistic capability. They just wanted me to do whatever, and they told me the name of the album was snakepit. You can see from the sketches that I went straight for snakes, the literal interpretation. I did the sketch of the guy with no face, and belly snakes first. I kept the no-face thing the whole way through, I do that a lot. Someone said I do that because I have identity issues. I liked it and sent it to them. They seemed to like it and a made a very complete painting of it in my sketchbook that would have been the cover, except that it wasn't working. So I went on to another idea of a snake coiled up in a woman's stomach as if it was her intestines, swallowing her heart. This idea was not very good, and I just couldn't make it work, so on I went. This is when things started getting REALLY bad. I started doing giant fantasy snakes and heart shaped balloons. I even sent them a sketch and they said they didn't think it was right for them. I think that's a vast understatement, but I'm glad they said it in a nice way. This band is fucking hardcore metal, that image doesn't suite them at all. Now that I'm looking at those again, I'm actually embarrassed of showing them. Them there's a stupid drawing of a little girl, sigh..... Also some fossils, I had some weird idea on a plane, don't ask. Playing with some new sharpies there.

After doing the heart drawings I was thing hard about my future as a creative being, and how it may not exist. Jeremy from Blues said something about how it didn't have to be so literal, and I was like, that's good, 'cause I can't make it work and all this shit sucks. After just being frustrated with my successive failures, I just said "You know what, I'm just going to do some creepy paintings and send them to you." They needed the art really soon because I had taken too long trying to make something awesome for them. I didn't do sketches, I just found some pictures of faith healers and made them into these paintings. It seems like Jeremy was really happy with these, it was exactly what he wanted to see from me. I liked the boards so much that I used them in my web-page design. You might be able to tell from the forth panel that I had run out of time, and I couldn't do another painting, so I did that drawing and added some photoshop stuff. I also had a problem getting this one done last week because I just started a new full-time job, and I was too tired when I got home to draw. I'm ok now though, I had to get used to the new schedule.