I’ve spent a fair amount of time the last three or so days working on my portfolio. My linework has gotten a lot better and my color sensibilities have matured a good measure over the last three years. Adding older pieces to round out my portfolio really kills me. I figured, what the hell, I ought to revisit some of these pieces and bring them more in line with my current capabilities. A sort of George Lucas-ing of my old pieces. I redid small bits of linework and updated the colors a tad on the following images (And a few more on my Flickr stream, but I’ll spare you all of them).

In the above recolor, I’m attempting to work some texture and soft shading in with my linework. It’s got a ways to go, but I like the results of the experiment.

While doing this, however, I got stuck in a bit of a rut. Being bombarded by all your foibles over the last few years can hit a guy in his ego! Sometimes, when I need to shake off the cobwebs and get my head back into a creative space, I do something outside of my comfort zone. In this instance, I made a set of “watercolor” tools in Manga Studio and did some portraits of friends. Here’s one such attempt:

I really like the result. I’m just not sure what to do with it. I’ve worked as an art director in the past and I know that if I saw this sitting with the rest of the pieces in my portfolio, I’d be a bit confused. I think consistency of style is important in the way an illustrator markets themselves. I’m a brand, more or less, and there are certain expectations of me. Perhaps I can use it in one of my comics that I’m working on? Maybe I need a pseudonym, eh? Hah.

Well, nothing, really. Except, perhaps, that I drew them both and am making a post about it. It’s a two-fer Tuesday!

I’d wanted to make a tee out of the above image for quite a while. The opportunity presented itself when I was contacted by Shirt.Woot to offer some designs. I used to partcipate in the Woot community Photoshop challenges back in the day. I know and like how Woot conduct business. It seemed a no brainer, really, to start with my Murder in Roost image. I updated the colors on it and redid a lot of the inking. It’s more consistent with my current skill level and style and I couldn’t be happier to see it for sale.

You can get your hands on it at Shirt.Woot.com.

The second image I’m posting today is one that I seem to redraw annually. I really am a tad obsessed with the obsessed, modern-day ferryman of the river Styx, Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. It’s become a yearly rite of passage for me to redraw this image, charting my progress on likeness, my color work, and my ability with line. With that in mind, here’s the current image:

And the process:

Blogged with Flock

Well, here are the two pieces I mentioned late last week. The name, and theme, of the show was The Other Work. What would you do if monetary concerns weren’t in the way of your creativity? Well, I answered that by using a few characters from sequential works that I haven’t had time to take beyond the thumbnailing phase.

The first is Robothead Nikolai Sodorov. He’s just your average, vodka-imbibing Russian living in a dystopian future with half a robot for the top of his head!

The second piece was meant to be a vague-semi sequential work. Its overall narrative is pretty disjointed and rendered purposely obtuse by the lack of dialog and awkward use of sound effect text. I really like some of the hand-lettered-type in this one. It succeeds in its original intent, I think.

If there’s one aspect of art shows I don’t like, it’s that the art is often very costly. As a result, only a select few are able to purchase it which flies in the face of my ideals on a number of levels.

Willfully contributing to this system gnaws on my conscience a little. The circumstances make me wish there was something I could do to change the way people consume my work. I’ve been toying with the notion of releasing my personal, uncommissioned works under a Creative Commons license.

Unfortunately, a large portion of my income is to be derived from print sales and, now that I’m working as a freelancer full time, I can’t really risk that money. Last time I checked, my wife and I like to eat!

A good compromise, I think, is to do everything I can to support other people who have the same goals. I’d like to announce my services free of charge for any band releasing their music under a forgiving Creative Commons license. The artwork I create for the bands in question will also be released under a non-commercial, no derivatives license.

I may not be a good fit for every project and I suspect the amount of people asking for help will be daunting. With that in mind, I hope to help as many bands as possible. I thought it appropriate to start with my friend’s band, Soul Pollution, and the above flyer shows a hand lettered logotype and a bonafied-original illustration I created for him.

Leave a link to your Creative Commons licensed album download in the comments (and a contact address in the comment form) and I’ll promise to help in whatever capacity my time allows! Flyers, album art, hand lettering – all the things I usually charge for.

I look forward to hearing from you!

I’ve got another video ready to share. It’s about an hour of exposition and drawing done at the same time. The audio is a bit loud, so I’d suggest turning your speakers down – I’m still getting used to this whole Brightcove video distribution system thing. I’d have just used a .mov file and hosted it myself, but my server rejects uploads over 100mb in size. See, you can host files of any size, but the upload limit is 100mb. If you had a splitter and server side rejoiner, it’d work fine. I don’t want to drop $100 on the program that does it, however. If anyone has another way around this, let me know.

I find listening to myself talk on tape embarrassing. Hopefully there are a few tidbits of interest between the awkward pauses and lame jokes. Let me know what you think!

Special thanks to Matt, Jer, Dick and Jim for their feedback.

My take on Frankenstein’s monster for a friend’s band. Hand lettered type at top. Gonna hand letter the show info in the area of negative space to the left, too. So far, so good.

Gonna try to gore it up a little, though!

I’ve been doing a bunch more hand lettering. It’s a lot of fun. My piece in the aforementioned show even incorporates it a bit. Here’s another recent example:

I think that getting better at hand lettering will only increase the abilities I can market for and get work doing. The other biggie that I want to get better at is 3D work.

So, I’m in a show set for this Saturday. Yay! Details here.

The concept behind the show is this: the participants offer personal works with little or incidental commercial value. In other words, do what you want to do, not what pays your bills!

At first, I was a little stymied. I mean, I DO what I want to do for a living, right? A little reflection left me with a clear idea, though. Comics. I love comics, but never have the time to make them. I made a little vignette. Half comic, half piece of art, and that’s what I’m printing and bringing along.

I just finished my piece last night at 4:00 AM. Whew. I’m not posting it till after the show, though. If you want to see it, you’ll have to show! Well, at least till Monday.

My ISP is down, so I won’t be able to respond to questions or comments for a day or two.

Well, the Threadless submission cleared. Go ahead and vote if you like!

Here’s a mess of process on this image:

Whew! Even I’m sick of looking at this one!

There’ll be more exposition with my next post. I’m smack dab in a host of client and personal work. I’m going to be in a group show on Saturday in Chicago and I’ll post details on that tonight or tomorrow morning.

Mammoth is going to be a clothing brand with a demographic that largely consists of Mixed Martial Arts fans. I was commissioned to work on the logo and it served as a perfect opportunity to do some more hand lettering.

I’m working on getting better with my hand lettering. In addition to the lettering in the logo above, this was all done by hand:

It’s a lot of fun to not be restrained by what fonts you have installed and, rather, to rely on your own ability. I’ve got a way to go, but it should prove fun to get better.

As is usual, I encourage you to click on the images and get whisked away to my Flickr page. Larger versions are available and the linework looks better in the non-resized, uncompressed version. Hey, what can I say? I’m vain about my linework!

I know that a decent crowd of individuals reads these posts. I’d like to interact more with you guys. What part of my process do you guys have questions about? What would you like to see more of? Less of?

Thanks for feedback, it’s always appreciated.