Ghost Writer

So, for the last piece I did before sending my portfolio off to The Art-Dept, I decided to do something a little different. Stephanie from The Art-Dept had mentioned how much she liked the postcards I did for TFA, and how she would like more of that showing up in my portfolio. I personally was really unhappy with those designs mainly just because of the lack of...anything, really. It was pretty simple line and color. So I decided to give some of the technical ideas I was working with on the postcards another shot.


- Pretty cut and dry, a typewriter with a little bit of splattered ink for effect. The postcards I had previously done were entirely done with a wacom. I decided I would try and replicate wacom line with ink. Needless to say, this was a bitch to draw.


- I drew these distorted disembodied arms and the "shadow" of the type writer on the back of the piece of paper (I moved them around on photoshop because I didn't like the original placement). The arms were fun to do, drybrushing and liquid mask...something I haven't done in a while.


- laying the images on top of each other was a little tricky because of the key/finger placement.


- Let's ignore the arms and shadow for a while. I just started coloring the typewriter how I normally would, each color on a separate layer etc.

- I was actually pretty pleased with the cell-shading and thought that maybe it could stand on its own like that. But I wanted to try something new with it.


- Instead of doing over all gradients, I layered gradients within the selections of each individual coloring. Pushing and pulling in and out of the foreground, and adding a bit more form to it. You might have to view the whole image to really see what I am talking about. I have heard this is super easy in illustrator...unfortunately, I have had little time to even pick up the book I bought.


- I then did overall gradients on top of what I had already done, like I normally would do. I basically only layer gradients that are brown, yellow, or red.


- Then drop the arms and shadow back in. I went into the arms and added more colors and gradients just to flush them out a bit and not make them look TOO flat (though I do want them to look flat).


- I added a little texture, messed with saturation and layer opacity a little. My main goals here were to make an image a little more design based, with not all organic shapes, and keep the background white. It ended up pretty good.

Now all I have to do is reformat and resize every single image I have done in the last few years and zip them up and send them over. I am hoping Stephanie will do a little bit of subtraction for me, because I am always terrible at selecting work to show.

Doing this image was a huge pain for one reason alone...It meant that I had to stop playing Nintendo. After going to every game store and walmart in every small town between st louis and bloomington indiana on monday, I ended up getting a Wii off of craigslist a few nights ago. Handed a guy a wad of cash in a library parking lot and was at home swinging my arm around like an idiot in no time. I got three games with it (part of the deal); Zelda, Red Steel, and Call of Duty 3. I have heard Red Steel is crap, so I might just sell it before I even try it out. Call of Duty I have heard is pretty decent....but I just cant do war games anymore, my Medal of Honor days are over..but we'll see. And then there is Zelda, mother fucking Zelda. I have been playing it in small stints in fear of becoming too engrossed and never leaving the couch or getting any work done....I'm not very far yet, but that's just fine with me. I also "downloaded" Super Mario 64, a game I have been wanting to play since I stupidly asked for a playstation instead of an nintendo 64 for Christmas of 96.

Winter has finally come to Saint Louis, the weather is pretty fucking miserable and apparently we are getting a ton of snow tonight. Rachel might be off of work early, which would be nice. Who knows how our tiny little front wheel drive car is going to handle this crap.

A Beautiful World Pt. II

My frenzied lusting for the Wii was translated into a hard work ethic. Go figure. Here is the process for the thing I started what....6 hours ago? (by the way, that's fast for me)

- Had the inks all scanned and cropped nice, I already talked about all of this stuff.


- Filled in some very simple colors. Wanted to go with kind of a desert feel here.


- Using the shading template I came up with earlier, I just basically selected the shadow, added a new layer, and filled with a darker color. I was actually really surprised by how easy this idea panned out being.


- Added subtle highlights by basically hatching with my wacom. I didn't think this would look good, but somehow it did. There are no large areas of lighter color except on the fold over of the scarf. Everything else is hatching. I'll post a close up at the end of this.


- About 30 layers of gradients later we get this. Usually I just use brown and multiply it for gradient. Here I used blues, greens, browns, greys, reds. I think it came out with a more natural feel to it. I also went in and erased areas of gradient where I wanted there to be more highlight in the same hatching deal.


- Some layer effects with ink I already had on the image...

- and a little more messing around with saturation and hue and I am done. After writing this thing there are some things I want to tweak a little, but this is basically it. This whole ink shading this is super effective and super fast...I think im in love.

- A close up, all the darker tones being layered and scanned ink, all of the lighter tones being hatching with the wacom. Easy as pie.

So basically I only want to do one more image before I send a portfolio over to The Art Dept. After talking to Stephanie, she mentioned that there was something about the postcards I did for TFA that she really liked. There is something there I like too, I just unfortunately did not get a lot of time to work on those....so I am working on something to try and pull out aspects of those designs while still being able to play with ink and photoshop a lot.

A Beautiful World Pt. I

So after the last tiger thing I posted, I thought I had it all figured out. I went ahead and started working on another image, and shaded it heavily in graphite on another piece of paper. When I got it all scanned, layered, and colored it just...well, looked terrible. Shading entirely with graphite and then layering cell shading over it just didn't work. Maybe it worked for the tiger, because the graphite was minimal....but not for everything, so basically it wasn't the solution to the problem.

The thing that I really did like with the tiger was using brush strokes as colors, which is something I have been trying to do for a long time and been incredibly unsuccessful at. And then I had an idea:



- Inspired by the visuals of a recent image Tomer Hanuka did, I worked this out. I had recently bought a new type of india ink, and thought that I should probably start with a fresh brush ( I bought a stock pile before I left Chicago, and now I am on my last one ) and it made a world of difference. I should be refreshing brushes a lot more often. I was trying to recreate the inking I had done on "Armor For The Sleeping" because I felt that I was in my prime while drawing that.


- I then just simply flipped the paper over on a light box, and inked in more shadows. This is a ton easier than doing it on a different piece of paper. I was a little sloppier with these inks obviously, because I was to eventually give the colors a rougher feel.



- Scanned them, mirrored the shading scan, slapped them together, changed some opacity. Now all I have to do is cut the parts of the ink shading I want and adjust the color while coloring. SUPER easy, and SUPER effective. I will absolutely be posting updated on the finished image. I have no idea why I never thought of this before now.

The reason I am in this frenzy to improve my work is because I have been recently picked up by The Art-Dept as my representative/agent. I am putting together an online portfolio as well as a physical portfolio for them, and while looking through old work I felt that there was a lot of stuff lacking in my new work that I had in my old work. When I focused more on contrast and inking was when I feel my work was better...so now I have been just trying to figure out how to hold onto those old inking techniques, while allowing colors to merge well with them.

I am very happy to be with The Art-Dept. I have had a lot of respect for them for years now. I am absolutely a huge fan of a good handful of their artists (especially Autumn Whitehurst), and Stephanie Pesakoff is fantastic. And hell, this means I will be able to work full time as an illustrator...now all I gotta do is have a portfolio that can back it up.

I am unfortunately in a Wii frenzy. I am doing my best to contain it, but really....I cant. My apologies to Rachel in advance for any rash behavior. Sweet mother fucking christ Zelda.... Patience is not one of my good qualities in situations like this.

I also got my hands on tom waits' new collection "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards". I haven't gotten all the way through it yet (three discs), but I believe I have heard most of it...which is kind of a disappointment. And I am never a big fan of compilation albums, especially those covering 30 years of an artist's work. But the big question I have with this...is how much is re-recorded? Either way it's no Blue Valentine, but its certainly not bad by any means.

One Hundred Arrows

After searching for hours and hours on flickr for pictures of wolves for an upcoming project I am doing, I cam across an exhibit by Cai Guo-Qiang consisting of 100 life-sized wolves flying through the air into a glass wall:

Now, if you hadn't already of guessed this kind of thing is right up my alley. While I am not particularity into installation art, or really contemporary art in general, this guy's stuff really smacked me for a good one. Faux taxidermy, suspension, large numbers of dangerous animals, the works. And after looking through his website I came across a piece with life-sized tigers absolutely filled with arrows:

Since I have been trying to really bring brighter colors into my work, I thought that drawing a tiger would be something a little out of the ordinary for me and would give me a chance to experiment a little.

- Not being able to find the sort of reference I wanted, I ended up free-handing the tiger. I find freehanding animals with no ref a little hard sometimes because I tend to make them too muscular. This isn't really a problem with tigers and big cats because really the more muscles the better. I did light ink work, and then shaded and did the striped in graphite...a technique that I had messed around with a little in the last flop of a drawing I did.

- Due to a lengthy conversation with Mike Tucker the other day, instead of attempting to mimic brushtrokes with the white digitally like I normally would have done, I scanned in some dry-brush and laid it into the image as the white highlights.

- And instead of doing shadows and highlights with separate colors like I have in the past, I laid separate layers with different properties and different opacities to bring out a little depth. This worked a lot better than I thought it would have.

- Since the last "coloring test" I had, I have really learned to love many many layers of gradient. I think I added like 20 different gradient layers here, messing with the hue property to push the rear leg and tail into the distance.

- Messing with layers a little more and adding a background gradient. I'm not crazy about the blood, but it seemed to be lacking something when I took it out so I kept it.

- More messing with layers, and overall color saturation and hue. I have been really trying to make things look a little more organic, so I laid in a texture (a scan of powdered graphite on rough bristol).

- Cropped and finished. This image seems to be a little less saturated than the one above it, so I will probably mess around a little more before having the actual final image.

I think this is really what I have been looking for. A good mesh between cell shading and naturalistic "painting". Other than it being a kind of goofy drawing to begin with, I'm pretty pleased and will basically be doing things in this way from now on. The only thing I am going to try and do differently is do the inks and graphite shading on separate paper. Extracting the graphite shading digitally was way too time consuming. Who would have known that all this experimentation would have actually gotten me to a point where I am happy.

The other day I also bought a tutorial book on Illustrator. I have never really learned how to use Illustrator, and have stuck entirely to Photoshop. I'm hoping to pick it up pretty quickly, there are a lot of ideas I have that I just can't pull off with photoshop. I guess we'll just wait and see.

And now after looking at the amazing work of Josh Cochran, I have convinced myself that there is a better way to do my website. Pop-ups just aren't doing it for me anymore.

Aquaman Tattoos

Alright, so I basically figured out how to do the coloring style I wanted to do. Hours and hours of work, and well...in my opinion (and a few others) I just don't think I like it. The drawing wasn't all that good to begin with for starters....though, I am very happy with how the closer arms turned out, but that isn't enough incentive to turn my whole world upside down and start working like this. The techniques I learned from this that I am fond of could easily work with my older coloring style, I might even just re-color this in my old style. I am by no means saying that this was all for nothing...I think I will definitely be incorporating some of this into my every day, but ill never do a whole image like this again.

In the end, I am sad to say that my favorite part of this whole fucking thing is the shirt, which is just a gradient with a noise filter. Pretty lame, and no the maintenance guy didn't stop by.

Brush Stroke Opacity and a Huge Fucking Hole

So after messing around with the inks I posted last time, I came to the conclusion that that was not the best image to start off with. Getting this new coloring technique to fit into small details is not an easy task, and something I need to work on. Another problem I was having was picking the color/s for the darker shading. In the "test" image I posted a few days ago, the darker color was just black, and the lighter white. I think that this is the way I need to go about it. I am also having a huge problem making things TOO dark (per usual). I'll work with it more today and post what I get. I have nothing else to do today, other than wait around for our maintenance guy to fix the huge fucking hole he put in our dining room ceiling.

Figure A; huge fucking hole,

Figure B; huge fucking hole detail,

I also messed with the design here a bit and added links to other blogs I read, as well as a new album.

U.N.K.L.E.'s Psyence Fiction is one of those albums that has stuck with me for years. No matter what the changes in my taste for music have been or what personal things I have been experiencing, this album is always right up there on top and very few other albums have I been that emotionally dedicated to. I haven't really downloaded a lot of music recently. I figured after filling up a 250G ext hardrive with mp3s on top of having over 5000 albums combined between Rachel and I, that I basically had enough music for a long long time. But I did end up hunting down an U.N.K.L.E torrent that was a 5 CD remix boxset, including Leonard Cohen (what the fuck?) remixes...so I couldn't really pass that up. I basically haven't listened to this much electronica/triphop/drum&bass/dubtone/non-ambient music since back in the "what do you mean Moby used to be punk?" days of highschool, going to SamGoody and Borders with Joey Weiser to buy (what we thought at the time to be) rare Aphex Twin and Death in Vegas.

In other news, I drove our car from Forest Park to our house (even turning into our death defying driveway) last night. For those of you who don't know, I don't have a driver's license and never have learned to drive (and yes, that means i purchased and own a car that i have never driven). So this is a monumental experience for me. And while it was pretty slow traffic due to it being Sunday night, it was still down fucking Delmar which is no picnic for anyone. Soon enough the planets will align and I will be getting a license, and the universe will be at peace once again. Hopefully this time I wont look like a child molester in my I.D. photo.

The Asp of Vanity

I was asked a while ago to illustrate for an editorial on new world constructs such as vanity (among many other things) being forced onto the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin through tourism and expansion. It was a really weird assignment and straight up my alley, but unfortunately because of time restraints I wasn't able to do it (something like a 16 hour turn around). The art direction was pretty loose, but they did want the "new world constructs" to be in a serpentine form. I didn't go through with it enough to even get to a sketching stage, but I had a pretty solid image in my head. I decided that since I have a little free time that I would draw out what I was thinking, and try to color it with this new technique I have been messing around with. I do not think I have been this light on ink in years, and at this point I should have probably just done it all digitally. One of these days I am going to have to get a tabloid scanner. This quick little drawing took almost half an hour to scan in pieces. Pretty lame. Either way, I am going to post my progress in actually coloring this, we will see how it goes.

And as a side note, my apologies to everyone I have ripped off in drawing this. Don't worry, its just for fun.

And as another side note, after running this through spell check I was absolutely amazed to find that I had indeed spelled "indigenous" correctly. I am a miserable speller, if you hadn't noticed by this point.

One Giant Step

Thanks to the help of old friend Mike Tucker I was able to figure out how to do this on multiple layers. Of course this is pretty obvious Sam Weber rip-off, but now the trick is to work this into my own style. This is exactly the push I needed.

Self-Promotion Through Tits and Murders

This was finished, but I cant say I am happy with the final result. Threw some textures in there to try and roughen up the colors a little, and even did some photoshop brush work (which I never have done, and chances are I wont do it again). This was intended to be for a self-promotional postcard I will be sending out around the holidays to marketing agencies...But to tell you the truth, I don't think its going to happen at least not with this image.

The texture thing has been something I have been trying to pull off for a while now, rather unsuccessfully. I am also growing more and more displeased with coloring through "cell shading", it just doesn't work for everything. I am trying to take a more painterly approach to colors (you can see it a little in the hyena's fur above) but that just doesn't work for non-textures surfaces (like the faces). Here are some artist's that are pulling off textures and painterly colors beautifully: James Jean, Sam Weber, and sometimes Tomer Hanuka.

It might just be my approach in general. I know James does a lot of work in acrylic and graphite before coloring digitally...But who knows. I sent him an email with a plea for some tips, I guess what will see what comes out of it.

I just ran into Sam Weber's website and was immediately enthralled. Rachel has her complaints, but I am really impressed. He is able to mix ink and digital beautifully, and I am quite envious. He also has a certain whimsy to his pieces which is somewhat along the lines of what I am trying to push with my work (as complained about in previous post/s). I have found myself saying many times "man, I wish Dave McKean drew better", Sam Weber is your answer.

So here is a list of things to work on:

- Brighten up the colors a bit. Bleak is fine, but I am tired of DARK and bleak.

- Work on fazing cell shading out...This is just going to take practice. I am so used to working at a desk and not an easel, that working on a stationary wacom makes things tricky when it comes to line direction.

- Figure out this whole paper texture thing. Scanning paper with powdered-graphite worked alright...But jesus its a bitch to clean up.

- Have a little more fun in themes for christ's sake.

And for those that may find this useful overnightprints.com is the best online printing place I have ever found. They are super cheap, and super fast. Unfortunately there file uploading is a little goofy, and they only do RGB files, but the finished product makes up for it.

Baby Steps

This is for a personal promotional postcard I will be sending out over the holidays. This is the first thing I have done in a very long time where I am actually happy with the line work. I guess the wacom hurtle wasn't as high as I thought it was going to be.

Also, this is more of what I was talking about with visually handling my ideas differently. Instead of just drawing two people making out and making it somehow creepy like I would have in the past, I tried to just juxtapose two opposing images next to each other. Sort of the horror movie school of thought, where you show tits for the first half, and brutal murders the last half. This is my version of tits and murders I guess.

Note to self : wait for splattered ink to dry before scanning picture. I am tired of cleaning off my scanner everyday.

For those interested, Rachel aka the notorious Mickey Buntz has created a flickr account, and filled the thing up faster than lightening. Lots of pictures of yahtzee, angry dogs, shitting dogs, gay men, and me looking dumpy. I don't think anyone could ever expect anything else from a Rachel flickr account.

Cancer, zodiac of the sea

I was asked by my friends over at threadless to do a "select" design. "select" meaning an 8 color design of whatever I wanted. Now, I have had my qualms about threadless in the past, but nothing to stop me from taking a crack at it. Initially the design I had wanted to do was of basically a bouquet of hands and fore-arms supporting the jawbone of a horse. This seemed way too Matthew, a little too threadless, and basically pretty uninteresting by the time I had finished the initial sketch. So I decided to go with something different.



I really wanted something that stood out, was somewhat originally, and more importantly something that would be a real task for me to draw. I have heard a little bit of response from the guys over there, but nothing too convincing. We will see. None the less, I am pleased with the fact that I was actually able to pull off drawing a bunch of crabs.

so, after talking with a huge amount of artist reps, friends, and debating with myself I have decided that there needs to be a change with my art. The main problem I have personally been having is that I am sick and tired of doing line work with a tablet, and miss using a brush terribly. I have basically stopped using the wacom for anything but coloring and am back to my old friends brush and ink. It is a semi-sweet reunion, but I definitely think I am pushing my work back to where I want it. The other change I have been trying to make is to take the ideas behind my work but handle them a little differently. The threadless drawing is a bad example, but the last few pieces I have posted on the website show a little bit of the progress. Baby-steps, but at least its something. Expect this blog to be about these baby-steps for a good long while.