Angelina Jolie Speed Sketch

Now that I've got my fancy new Cintiq Tablet (very cool check it out here) I decided it would be fun to start doing some "speed sketches" You see them all over YouTube. Some really good, some really bad. My first crack at it is just a VERY quick sketch of Angelina Jolie. I had the photo on hand for reference thanks to the image I used in the Sin City Poster which you can check out a few posts down. Anyway, like I said this one was just for practice. I needed to figure out how the capturing software worked and how to put music in, speed it up, all that stuff. Didn't want to draw something great and find out it didn't record or something. So enjoy for what this little 5 minute doodle is worth and look forward to more detailed and committed efforts soon :)

Fight the Devil

I love making propaganda posters. So much that I think this is the third one I've posted so far on this blog. Anyway, my good buddy Torrance Reed, (check out his sick work here as well as his version of the poster) did the awesome illustration of the preacher that I used. It was very cool collaborating with him on this piece and I had a good time with it. Hope you all like it. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Edgy Christian Designs

Here are a few of my more recent Christian themed designs I've done. I tried to make them a little more edgy than most Chistian designs turn out to be. I figure enough people in the world are making Jesus Loves You t-shirts already. I like these cause I think they reach out to a more teenage audience which can be difficult to reach. ( Whipper Snappers always listening to there loud rap music, LOL ) Anyway, hope you like them. I'm sure there will be more designs like these to come as the company who hired me to do these ( Stuph Clothing ) likes to keep me busy. Which I am of course grateful for. Enjoy!

Sin City Posters (Children close yours eyes)

My last post was a cute frog. So now the universe must be balanced by some edgy stuff. Okay, maybe not. But If there's one thing I pride myself on, its trying out new styles and growing my versatility as an artist. So here we have a couple Sin City posters I did for the next couple of planned movies. Now if you've seen the original Sin City, you either hate it or love it. There's no middle ground. I've always liked the comics due to Frank Millers amazing writing and stark black and white images. The stories are classic film noir with a new age spin which I liked alot. And they captured that in the movie perfectly. Are the stories bloody? Yes. Morally Corrupt? With the exception of a few noble characters.... Yes. But you can't deny its good writing and some really cool stylized visuals. The movie helped pave the way for another one of my favorite Frank Miller stories. (300) And so I felt like experimenting with that style a bit. So here we go. 2 Sin City Poster designs, One with Angelina Jolie as Ava Lord in A Dame To Kill For. The other is Johnny Depp as Wallace in To Hell and back. These are my dream castings for the parts that have yet to be cast. Plus, as a bonus... one old sketch of Nancy Callahan I did a good while back emulating Frank Millers style of hard black and whites with splashes of color. And now back to your regularly scheduled wholesome stuff....

Nekkid Frog Time!!

Soon, I'll be working on illustrating my first Children's book. It centers around a frog and his journey meeting other animal friends. It's a christian themed story that I'm excited to be a part of. I don't know much on the story yet, but I know there's a frog in it and that's enough for me to start drawing. Here's my first concept. I'm going to try to do the whole book in a pencil/watercolor style. Not sure if this will be the final design of the frog but I like it okay for my first crack at drawing something cute in a long while. I was inspired by the illustrations in the movie Lilo and Stitch. (My personal favorite non Pixar Disney movie) Now, my only real concern is whether he should wear frog clothes or not. LOL. Generally I consider any animal that walks on two feet to be human enough to be modest. Its a good rule when drawing cartoon animals. If they walk on all fours, they can be nekkid, If they walk upright, they should have some clothes on. But It just didn't seem right to put clothes on this frog. Ahhhh, the many difficult decisions an artist must face! It's a quick sketch but expect a more refined look when I start pumping out pages later this year.

Annivesary Art.... AwwwWWwww

Well, I've officially been married for 3 years. WOO-HOO! What you see below is one of the anniversary presents I gave to my beautiful wife Valerie. Cue the "AwwwWWwws" No more mushy stuff... on to the art!!! I did this with a combination of techniques. Traditional watercolor, Pen and Ink, and painting in photoshop with my trusting Wacom pen tablet. I wanted to do this piece completely traditional but it came down to a couple things.

When you're painting someones likeness you have to be pretty dead on, a slip of the brush and suddenly your subject has a uni-brow and looks nothing like they're suppose to. You counter this by working big so you have more room for detail. But this means more time, and time was not on my side. Besides, digital painting is cheaper, faster, less messy, and you can simply zoom in for you're detail work. But like I said, I did do some of it traditional with the black lines being inked (of course) and the background being watercolor. You can't really make it out, but in my original wash you can see some cool "sparkles" that I achieved by throwing some salt on my watercolor wash. It's a cool trick to add some detail or texture to your piece. (because the salt absorbs the pigment) give it a try sometime. You can finally mix the culinary arts with your paintings! Also your painting becomes edible so even if the picture stinks at least it'll be delicious :)

Everybodys Gone Surfin....

I was recently challenged to do a design that was at least 75% illustrated. Now as a graphic Designer, that's quite a bit. But It turned out to be a fun project. The final result is more like 98% illustrated. The only things that weren't done from scratch was the text and the circle at the bottom. Even the text is really more of a placeholder as it is intended to be a template design that will be changed out down the line many times. This was a great project that helped push me out of my comfort zone and force me to throw out the "bag of tricks" and just do it the old fashioned way. It was nice to spend more time in front of the drawing board than the computer screen for a change. The only thing I would alter on this piece is the text. I'd like to do completely custom text. I'll get around to that one day... maybe. In the meantime, enjoy!

Microbursts Book Cover

Here is a project I just completed for a Christian book publisher. I'm now officially their "artist" and have many projects lined up with them this year including my first full blown Children's book. But for now, check out my first book cover for them. Its not really anything fancy but I think it works well. The main thing I'm proud of on this one is the illustration. I took a picture of my wife for reference and then tried to create an illustration that had some movement in it, not in the image per say, but in the actual line work and painting. The whole idea is about bursts of wind so I tried to carry over that theme to the painting. Check out the image below or view it on Amazon HERE.

Gears of War Propaganda Posters: UPDATED

UPDATE: Added some wallpapers of one of these images since I get asked for them alot. Enjoy :)

Today at the GDC conference Microsoft and Epic games announced the sequel to a little game that came out almost 2 years ago by the name of Gears of War. Well I was a big fan of the first and this announcment of Gears of War 2 got me thinking about some old propaganda posters I did for the first game. They became very popular on Epic Games forums and I ended up making wallpapers of them and sending them to a BUNCH of fans who wanted them. So here they are for you to enjoy now. I had a great time making these as I had wanted to do a "propaganda" style poster for quite some time. Maybe I'll do some more for Ggears 2 as we get closer to its November release. WOO-HOO!

Wallpapers

I WANT TO EAT YOUR BRAINS!

I'm a big fan of Zombie Movies, not sure why exactly. I'm not into blood and gore. I'm against canabalisim. And I'm all for smelling nice and being polite to others. So why then do I have such a fascination with them? My best guess is I like stories about surviving. (Or perhaps I'm just sick) So just for fun I took my interest and made a Zombie themed shirt design. You can check it out below and even buy one HERE if you feel so inclined. I really like a book written by the author Max Brooks (son of the hilarious Mel Brooks who brought us Spaceballs) It's called "The Zombie Survival Guide" It's a comical approach on how to survive the undead attacking. It's all illustrated in that horrible style you see in boy scout books and those emergency plane procedure guides. Thats the inspiration for this piece. I'd like to do more and actually make a line of "Zombie Survival 101" T-Shirts offering up different lessons for each shirt. I get a lot of compliments wherever I wear it. Apparently I'm not the only one into zombie movies. Well, enjoy, and feel free to strike back with those comments. And as a bonus I also included a quick sketch I did of myself as a zombie. Nothing great but still related to this post and fun to draw thanks to having to actually draw every layer of the human body.

Rotoscope Technique

For these illustrations I was asked to showcase people modeling apparel. But it was to be done in an artistic manner. (as opposed to some photos of people standing there) It was a challenge because I was going for a very realistic yet highly stylized look. If you've seen the Movie "A Scanner Darkly" or are at all familiar with the animation term of rotoscoping. Well then you know the look I wanted. I did some research online to find a tutorial on how this might be achieved. There are a lot out there but none that I would say is the definitive way of doing it. In the end I used a combination of techniques. Some borrowed, some made up. Starting with an inked line art version, and then using the photo as a basis for the colors. Throw in a bunch of hours in photoshop and what you see below are the results. Note that the beautiful girl in the white visor is my wife and the guy hiding in the hoodie trying to look cool is me. The rest belong to google's image search :) Enjoy!

Old School Art

So this is a piece I did a while back for my former employer Stuph Clothing. As a matter of fact I do a lot of work for them, and have done a lot for them in the past. Ergo..... this won't be the last post with art done for them. They're a great company with some amazing artists. They've also recouped pretty well after suffering the loss of such an amazing artist such as myself ;) Anyway, it was for one of their preprint T-Shirt lines which you can see here. The goal here was to achieve a trendy design that a teenage girl would want to wear. I tried the approach of actually painting the majority of the design as opposed to the usual photoshop or illustrator work. I wanted it to have a more natural free flowing feel. And to me that’s a style easier to pull off in the traditional way with paint and brushes. Designs all done in the computer can have a very synthetic and symmetrical feel. Every now and then it's nice to do something the old fashioned way and resist the urge to rely on the computers tool sets. Although I'm still reasonably happy with this piece, its an area I would like to explore further in the future.