L.A. Weekly and Paste Magazine

What do they have in common? Me! They were a couple of semi-recent commercial gigs. I haven’t been posting / blogging a lot of commercial work. I’m growing a bit disenchanted with it. All I want to do is find the time to work on comics and video games (the latter being where I worked before becoming a freelance illustrator; before that I was a print designer). I think it’s easier to make a living making product based on my original works than through billable hours for clients. Budgets are shrinking ever smaller and there aren’t enough hours in the day.

I’ve convinced myself to start a few comics after I get back from a trip to Prague in the next few weeks and embark on the latter path. We’ll see! But I digress…

For the Paste illo, I managed to feature my friends as ghosts haunting Jim Carroll (Known, musically at least, for “People Who Died.” He’s a great prose writer; author of The Basketball Diaries). Who better to haunt him than the people I interact with on forums? They’re kind of etherial friends. They exist on the tubes and nowhere else from my perspective. That’s sort of eerie.

I got a bunch of them to submit photos of themselves and proceeded to place them into the illustration in a paint by number fashion.

I used the same method to make my BRAINS Threadless tee. That image featured ~40 unique heads and is the current tiled background for my blog. It’s an easy way to make a crapload of people happy, har.

After roughing in the approximate locations of all their faces, I started in on the loose pencils, seen here in green.

Here it is inked and colored:

I’m not too wild about it. It was one of my last fully digital pieces and the sterility of the medium seems more obvious to me now than it did then.

Same goes for this guy, the LA Weekly cover. It was a bit of a rush job, time-wise, as a prior commitment for the cover didn’t work out and I batted clean-up. I’m happy with what I was able to accomplish, but I wish I could’ve done more in hindsight. They liked it a bunch from what I gathered, so I guess I should stop being so critical of myself. No one is a bigger heckler about my work than I am, that’s for sure!

Here’re the pencils for the first version of cover before their input:

And here are the pencils after their input:

The beginning of the inks:

And the final product:

Two things: there is a ton of bleed in that image. Her hands are cropped and there’s a ton taken in from the sides in the final. I wasn’t responsible for -and this isn’t the final- text. They dropped that in for the finished image. A friend in LA was good enough to take a photo of it: