Rotary Amps & Boar's Heads

- Ended up taking a lot less time than i expected on the cover for Skallander. And after a brief freak out, got it over to John, who basically lined me up immediately with another cover job. Man i love all those guys over at Type. With the Skallander cover, the colors weren't quite advanced as how i normally would do them...many many less layers of gradients and fades. This was partly due to time restraints, but also aesthetically. Since the whole thing was muted colors and odd shapes, i didn't want to mud it up too much. Still looking at it here, i would prefer if it weren't quite so dark...but they loved it, so whatever.

- I whipped this up in a couple of hours last night for Rachel's ebay auctions. Feel free to take a look at her auctions. Tons of vintage paper goods and labels, enough to make an old-timey print freak like me weep with happiness.

For some reason i have been absolutely loving doing web design. Part of it is because my coding skills has finally caught up with 2001, making everything a lot easier for me. Since deciding to redesign Ghostco, i have done like 4 designs so far....not out of irritation, but more out of "hey wait! i could totally do this too!" which is a huge change in comparison the past nearly 10 years of my designing "career".

On top of all of this i was asked by the guys over at Cheap TRX yesterday to work out a web design for them. This makes me a bit nervous, because other than the thing i did for Rachel last night i haven't designed a website for anyone other than myself in a very very very long time. The last attempt was for Joey Weiser when we were sophomores in high school, which went downhill very quickly. Either way, i am excited to do it...and hell, maybe I'll get some free tattoo work out of it.

Speaking of design work, the work i posted the other day done for TFA was paid for by Claude with a very very nice boar's head mount. If i could be paid through taxidermy alone, i don't know if i would even stop working to sleep. A impala shoulder mount is also on its way to my house as we speak. Rachel and i decided to not move out of our place at the end of the lease (for once in my adult life i am living in a house for more than a year). We have decided to freshen stuff up by painting and redesigning....this of course just means more taxidermy to me.

On Tuesday, Rachel and i went to see Andrew Bird at the Pageant. Now, i have always liked Andrew Bird, but haven't really LOVED him since "Oh! The Grandeur" came out back in 1999. Now, i have never ever enjoyed going to shows...there is just something about them that gets on my nerves. And on top of the fact that i hadn't heard Andrew Bird's new album, i cant say i was looking forward to the show. I was very very quickly proved wrong. To start off with, it was a seated show, and since i am such a fucking fat ass i of course prefer that. Andrew's set started with a guy on a drum set, loop station and synth that i quickly recognized as Martin Dosh who i am a big fan of. The show progressed quickly with amazing whistling, rotary amps, dueling loop stations, ridiculously good violin, singing like the ghost of Jeff Buckley, and songs about great things like chickens and snacks. Needless to say, Andrew Bird has won me back as a fan....and while his latest album doesn't quite compare to his live performance, it is absolutely my favorite in years.

Also at that show we ran into my old friend Pete Schreiner from Bloomington, and his always entertaining girlfriend Amy. Pete is an amazing musician who has played with some of my favorite bands ever like Magnolia Electric Company and Songs: Ohia, not to mention tons of other stuff including his own solo work. He totally reminded me that Magnolia Electric Company is playing with Son Volt here on Saturday, which i will absolutely be there to see. Pete mentioned that he was looking around at labels for some work he is doing, and i of course mentioned Type....so maybe something might come out of that. It is amazing how many connections i have to Secretly Canadian, outside of being raised in Bloomington.

Eyes Without A Face

- After probably twenty hours of inking i finally finished the line work for the new Skallander album with Type Records. This is what i meant in an earlier post when i said i was making things harder on myself then they had to be. This would have been no problem if it weren't for the fact that its about 26 inches long. And at the moment i cant really say if i am happy with it or not, because i am fully aware of the long hard road ahead of me with coloring this thing. The plan is to have it finished by the end of the weekend...i can only hope.

I somehow managed to fix my site feed for this blog, thanks to the help of Matt Hellige. I still however am not able to get it to work through thunderbird, and i am hoping this is only a problem i am having and not everyone else:

http://www.ghostco.org/blog/atom.xml

Something i forgot to mention in the last post i made was an absolutely remarkable movie we watched the other night called "Eyes Without A Face". It's a French horror film from 1960, about a doctor trying to replace the face of his terribly disfigured daughter. Incredibly groundbreaking, considering that doctors are just now doing facial transplant surgeries. Almost as prophetic as the twilight zone episode about plastic surgery. All horror aspects aside, the movie is absolutely gorgeous....full of that noir crispness that just overloads my mind. Incredibly moody, long scenes of silence, mid-century France, futuristic dog cages, beautiful music, eerily beautiful women, terrifying masks, and well....homicidal plastic surgeons. There really isn't anything about this movie that i don't absolutely love, not to even mention the fact that the package and DVD menu design is spot on awesome. but thanks to blockbuster online it skipped for the last 20 minutes, so i have no idea how it ends! And no, this movie is nothing like Face/Off.

I learned today that i have stupidly and unfortunately missed the deadline for the next Meathaus book. Incredibly disappointingly. I had some strong ideas cooking. But i am hoping to get a chance in the near future to put some stuff together for myself, and hopefully submit it to whatever the next anthology that comes up is. All this talk about hating comics and now when i finally suck it up and actually have an idea to produce, i fuck it up.

The Tooth of the Mare

I do a lot of side work that i don't put on my website. For the most part it is quick concept jobs, or design jobs. 90 percent of the time i am not very pleased with what i do, but today it was a different story. Ole' boy Claude over at TFA tricked me into doing some more designs for the shop (you may remember the mid-century furniture design postcards i did a while back). Claude and i have very differing opinions when it comes to design, but after being persuaded on both sides by both Rachel and myself he decided that he did like both of these...enough in fact that he is going to print both.

- The grey outlines above are just to show where the bleed is for the printers. The background of the first design is a logo i had done for TFA a while back, and the photo on the second design is compliments of Adam who had taken a ton of gorgeous photos for TFA. The wonders of Century Gothic will never cease to amaze me.

Rachel and i had another weekend of going to antique malls. She really scored in the amount of things she found. I on the other hand only bought two things, both of which have made my month. The first of which being a horse skull, jaw bone and all. I have bid on these on ebay for years now, and never won any of the auctions. And to boot, i only paid 20 bucks for it....needless to say i was extremely pleased. The other item i bought was a vintage raccoon tail key chain...this may not mean much to anyone else, but to me it is fantastic. I decided to take a picture of the horse skull (which is absolutely massive by the way...probably 24" long, if not bigger) and while i was at it i took a few shots of our living room:



This isn't all the taxidermy/dead things we have....to the right of the mantel is a shadow box full of skulls (fox,raccoon,badger) and antique/vintage toys. But displayed here are 2 mule deer, a whitetail deer, 2 musk deer (maybe? i don't really know what they are), a whitetail antler rack, red fox, black bear, the ever loved porcupine (which by the way is just a northern porcupine with a summer coat), a wood duck, a mystery duck, a mallard wing, cow skull, elk skull, goat skull, wolverine skull, and there is probably more but i cant think of it right now. Also displayed are some of Rachel's glass work, my original Winsor McCay, one of my MANY vintage radio alarm clocks, and part of Rachel's very modest toy horse collection.

When Rachel and i first moved in together, we had many conversations about how the hell our styles were going to mix. But somehow modern furniture and dead animals mesh well together. Simplicity balancing complexity...or some shit like that.

I have this desire to close down Ghostco until i get the time to redesign it, because i am so truly displeased with how it works now. Though, this seems like a very bad idea. Hopefully by next week i will get some time to switch things around...including the design of this blog, which is half way done as it is.

Though i did not buy Paper Mario because release dates don't mean shit (or a larger mini sd for my phone), i did get Prince of Persia: Rival Swords for the wii. And while it is apparently just a port of an older game, i don't care because i never played that game. I find this thing absolutely addictive, a well as aggravating as hell. I recommend it to anyone even slightly interested in playing video games. My biggest complain is the transition into the "dark prince" where you only have a certain amount of time to complete a task before dropping dead. I find games where you transform into something "dark" absolutely infuriating....but uh, apparently the spider-man 3 game enables you to have the black costume at will....so maybe i will change my mind then.

Hopefully by the end of the day i will have a very very very late Type cover finished...id probably have a much likelier chance of doing so if i hadn't written such a long blog post.

And by the way, if anyone out there would have any idea of how i fix my RSS for this blog so that it actually works...any tips would be greatly appreciated. Apparently the rss feed sources some random file on my server, and not my blog index.

FedEx

Mid last week i was contacted by my rep about a quick editorial job for Forbes Magazine. Officially being my first job through my rep, i was really excited to get to work.

The job was off an article about FedEx. After talking to the art director, a section of the article was outlined for me to illustrate. Basically it was about how many FedEx employees and other outside parties are involved in delivering flowers from one side of the country to the other. The art director and i agreed on something pretty simple, but also dynamic...and any job that involves drawing flowers and hands i am all up for. The main stipulations were that the flower somehow stood out color-wise, and that the hands were a bit translucent. It was nice to talk to a client that actually wants me to use the color palette i would naturally use, instead of trying to brighten it up.
- The first major problem here, was i didn't want to do everything digitally...so that would mean that i would have to draw and scan each hand element individually for it to be transparent in the end. I tried to switch the hand positions up as much as possible while still making them look natural, as well as "dressing" the arms/hands differently while not making it look chaotic.

- I laid the main color separations out by doing my ink trick on the back of the paper and then scanning those in as well. After laying the flat colors in, i was getting worried that this would not end up very well. I have enough trouble figuring out a skin color for one form, let alone eight.

- I then blended the flat color separations by laying in separate gradients. Sometimes i go a little overboard on this, so i was trying hard to keep the gradients light. I also added a little more color to the flower, feeling that a bright red rose was just a little too much.

- I then laid in gradient washes to show light source and shadow. I really had to work with this because some of the highlights were getting super blown out. And considering each hand was colored entirely, and that i was working with basically nine different images at the same time...this wasn't an easy task.

- After setting different levels of transparency for each hand, i then went into the background. I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do with the background, so just decided to layer in different textures and then mess with gradients and opacity....this ended up working pretty well. after laying in the final wash that washed out everything but the flower, i felt that the image just looked too heavy and went in and added some red/purple tones to warm it up a bit.

Unfortunately due to the fact that i have like 4-5 jobs going on at once right now i have fallen behind on a few that i was really excited to work on. The next few days is going to be catch up time. It seems like i have been setting myself up for projects to take a long time, due to the work and detail entailed in the stuff i have been doing. Hopefully all of this will even itself out eventually.

And to top it all off after my own severe irritation and the complaint emails i have gotten over the last few weeks, i have decided to attempt and redo my website. I plan is to basically make it look the same, but function differently. There are some aspects of what i have up there that i absolutely love, and some i completely despise. I am also going to try and work out a new main image, considering what i have now is not going to work for what i am planning....and that just might mean the skeleton costumes are coming back. I have also been somewhat rethinking the design for this blog, so maybe there will be a change here too.

After a year of having my trusty Sidekick II by my side and never ever ever being able to actually hold a conversation on it due to terrible reception and poor receiver/speaker quality, i decided it was about time to suck it up and buy the Sidekick III. Since Rachel is the primary on our account, she unfortunately was invited to join the hellish phone party that is T-Mobile costumer service. After being patient for almost two hours and then yelling for another half an hour at unsuspecting phone support, i received my phone in the mail two days later for cheaper then either of us could have imagined. So far i am extremely happy with it...the reception is great, and the added bonuses of a memory card and an mp3 player is fantastic. The battery life is still shit, but i didn't really expect that to be any different.

As of about 3 weeks ago, i am now a licensed driver for the first time in my life. This is both fantastic and terrifying, though i have not taken much advantage of it (so far i have only driven alone twice...once to the gas station for soda, and once to pick up Derek in north county). But Rachel has a four day weekend this week, so i am hoping to go and pick up a new mini sd for my phone and hopefully grab the new Paper Mario for the Wii (and maybe Prince of Persia too).

I have been told in the past by clients that it is rather dissuading to read my blog and hear about how much i love playing video games, but don't worry guys...work always comes first.