Penthouse and The Devil's Tail

Finished two pieces for Penthouse magazine this week, a full page and a spot. Both of which were for an article about being a "moral man-whore". The full page really hit home with me...not because of the subject matter of the article, but the image itself was extremely hard to emotionally handle once i realized exactly what it is i was drawing. I loved this job, and look forward to possibly doing more in the future. And i finally feel like i have really gotten a handle on mixing the digital with the analogue and not making it look too forced.

I saw "Across the Universe" this evening. Not particularly being a Beatles fan nor a Julie Taymor fan i was a bit skeptical, but ended up truly surprised. The whole move was done absolutely beautifully. And my aversion to The Beatles for their omnipotent following, but love of their songs was ever increased by a good handful of the song versions in the movie. Not to even mention the fact that ever since "Down In The Valley" i could stare Evan Rachel Wood until the day i die.

My life has fallen apart again to some degree, but at this point i am pretty content with it...hell, at least i am getting used to the ebb and flow. And their are certainly upsides to all of this...now everything even close to fabric related in my house has been cleaned, and i have always been able to draw better while being emotionally disjointed. i keep telling myself things will get better, i just have yet to convince myself of it.

Tonight i had the overwhelming feeling of yanking on the devil's tail, but thankfully the fucker didn't look over his shoulder to see who was razzin' him.

In other news, it is a very probable chance that i will be adopting a greyhound in the near future. This will be a good change.

Also Pascal Blanchet's work is some of the most surprisingly fresh while still classic illustration i have seen in a long time.

The Boston Globe And Edible iPods

The other day i got a call about a job for The Boston Globe. It was a job i really couldn't pass up, but there was a problem...they needed a finished piece in 24 hours basically. Normally i would avoid this sort of situation due to stress, but i figured one illustration wouldn't hurt. Oh, and how wrong was i when i figured out they wanted an 8 paneled comic. 24 hours and 30 cups of green tea later i want from this:
To this:
(You'll probably want to enlarge this thing) Needless to say, i impressed myself. I decided to go all digital with this, which is something that i promised myself i wouldn't do a while ago...but considering time restraints and the look they wanted, i figured it was my best bet. I also didn't do all the shadow separations on different layers, the shadows are just one multiplied layer...which gave everything a very unified look, as well as saved me about an hour of work.

I have a lot of exciting jobs on my plate right now. the sorts of jobs i have really needed for a long time. and remember how i was so stoked about drawing nipples a while ago? yeah, well i get to draw a lot more of them...my mother would be so ashamed.

- I caved in and bought a new iPod. Ended up getting the new 8 gig Nano...which is quite a step down from my old junker 40 gig, but at least now i can keep check on what the hell is on the thing - if i had a dime for every time i skipped a Leonard Cohen song that i thought would make me keel over.... Anyway, the future is in my pocket, and it terrifies me. Apparently i can put video on there too, though god knows why i would want to do that. The thing is so ridiculously small i keep worrying that i am going to swallow it.

- I met a girl. she makes me feel like i should have felt a long long time ago

Put On Your Work Boots Mama, And Your Mournin' Dress

I've been drawing a lot, well at least a lot for recent times. it just seems that everything comes out half-assed and uninteresting. I rarely get passed doing pencils, and even then it seems like i am wasting ink. Of course, i am still doing work work...which has basically been forcing me to finish stuff in the last few weeks. My attempts at taking control of Photoshop to make it feel more hands on and manual have placed me in a rut, where really i just keep doing the same thing over and over. Seems like every image has the same palette, the same emotions, the same everything. I've been trying to work on some new techniques, and some of them work...most don't. but all of them don't really make too much of a change in the final outcome of the work.
Though, i did end up pretty pleased with the final on this piece i did for Unicef. the colors ended up working pretty well, and some of the technical attempts i have been making seem to be more pronounced in this....i want my colors to be grittier, i want everything to be aged and roughed, and i don't want to be doing it through some Photoshop bullshit magic either. Also, i can't really remember the last time i drew nipples...which was gratifying to say the least.

All in all i need to just get my shit together, and draw and draw and draw. too many long lunches at The Winds, and late nights in the bathtub.

after 4 years of daily play, good friend Mr. 4th Generation iPod finally said goodbye (or at least goodnight). All it will do is show me an icon of a sad iPod...cant put it in disk mode, cant mount it onto my computer, cant charge it, cant do anything. Guess he just got tired of being in my back pocket while my fat ass crushed him against CTA seats...can't say i really blame him. You will be sadly missed.

In other news of electronic meltdown, my automated cat box of the future decided that it wasn't so automated anymore. 2 months of trusted use, and no more. I have to wait until the end of the weekend to call customer service....which will be a long long weekend with my neurotic cat who demands a clean cat box every 5 minutes. and the last thing i want to do with fresh tattoos is dig through cat shit.

so in overview it has been a few weeks of personal meltdowns, financial meltdowns, technological meltdowns, and getting the shit scared out of me by playing Metroid drunk in the middle of the night with all the lights out. Hopefully next post I'll at least have something to show for all this emotional skewing.