Legends of Rock #05 - George Harrison
Fab Four week continues with the lead guitarist for the boys from Liverpool. George seemed like a pretty cool guy, and seemed to stay cool for his entire career, which had to be hard. Big props to George.
I’ve been missing sharing music, so I’d like to get back into mixes. I’ll plan on having one each month with an accompanying illustration. It’ll mostly be what I’m listening to at the time with some perennial favorites mixed in no doubt.
Here is a preview of some of the print goods I'll be selling this weekend at The Brooklyn Renegade Craft Fair 2013! I'm partnering up with Patrick Hosmer to bring you posters, patches, baseball scorecards, comics, greeting cards and more! Come on by and chat or get some sweet stuff this weekend June 22nd & 23rd! We've got booth #224 at the setup at East River State Park in Williamsburg. We're open 11am - 7pm both days this weekend and it's going to be great!
Guy Stuff: Things to do to wood
You may’ve noticed that since moving to the city, I’ve missed manual labor and dudely work doubly. When I was home for the holiday weekend, I got a whole lot of guy stuff out of my system, including chopping wood, lighting it on fire and sawing it in half. I also ripped off the paper still connected to a few dozen wire hangers but that doesn’t qualify.
This is the kick-off of a new series I'm working on called "Hey, Koo!", penned by Kalia Armbruster and drawn by me. We'll be putting out a bunch of these haiku comics in pretty much random order and hope to compile them as a collection later on. But for now, enjoy the man with the lazer hands.
Another gig poster for the now Chicago-based DJ Lani Love. I like them all, but this one might be my favorite. This one is up before the event, do you live in Chicago? cuz this bar is in a bank vault...
And a close up on the face without text:
Hair Brain
I believe my hair is gaining majority control over my brain. Evident after shampooing twice this morning, one application on top of the other, already lathered and shaped to my daily specifications. I need to haircut shop. Which celebrity’s photo should I take to my lady?
Phone Pixels
Remember those many months in which all I did was pixel art? I hardly remembered, but this week I re-engaged in a project that is exclusively pixel art. It’s an incredibly different kind of illustration. If you fight its natural blockish restrictions, it can feel like having ten thousand spoons when all you need, really, is a knife. But in this case, I figured out spoons were just right.
St. Valentino & His Corpse Army
Hey folks, today is Halloween. I was looking around my music library and found an old Valentine’s Day mix I made, and boy, it’s got some pretty dark stuff in there for that holiday. It’s all about zombies and lady snatching. SO, I thought it would be perfect to unleash this thing on the day of ghouls. It is a mix of some fine songs with a narration of the young Victor Valentine’s life, written by me and voiced expertly by a computer. Follow Victor on his quest to find a woman, crossing the fields of Chick Chick Chick, swimming the sea Fortuna and scaling the cliffs of Gabeldor. Witness his downward spiral into darkness and evil - and hope against hope he comes out the other end with that he most desires. Enjoy!
I launched my first comic of the new year, Friend Mold! It’s been in the works awhile, this comic, and I’m extremely excited to get it out in the world. It was a lot of work, but it has me anxious to get working on another (which I have begun but is still too early to be showing anything. SneakHear: it has a goat). During the process, the toughest design decision was the cover, and it kept changing. I ended up with something quite different from my initial design, which isn’t all that uncommon in the design process, but most of the book’s illustrations were set from the get go. The Friend Mold idea all came from a thought I’d had coming out of sleep one winter morning. I won’t bore you with dream-details, but the thought spawned a concept, a rough script and definite look within a few hours. Here is a look at two alternate cover designs.
The one on the right is closest to my original concept, which had a rubber like pour-mold with swappable head, chest, and crotch pieces. It just never read as well as it should have and the shadowed relief look didn’t fit the interior illustrations. And that always bothers me (pardon to any comic artists out there), where the cover illustration style has little to do with the interior art. The design on the left was just a bit too morbid when I polled some folks about it. While I did like the face down look, it did slowly give me the creeps when working on it. Made me feel very claustrophobic - which also isn’t the point of the book’s content.
So, check it out, and see the book as it is released, a page a day with the final interior on Feb 14th!