There’s something about the imagery of Jason Voorhees that really grabs me. I always saw him as a tragic figure and, as a pudgy, nerdy, sci-fi lovin’, comic readin’ kid, infinitely relatable. I was the sort of kid that cried when Godzilla died, so it’s not too much of a stretch to sympathize with Mr. Voorhees. I guess I have my parent’s lack of editorial oversight (as it pertained to the movies and books that I read and the culture I consumed) to thank for my tastes as an adult.

Process:

The final design, one I like a heap more (that actually strays more from the brief, leaving me more wiggle room to make an engaging image), is seen here:

Detail:

Process:

Six-color:

Three-color:

Single-color:

See a heap of tee placements and color options after the jump!

Six-color placements:

Three-color placements:

A lonely single-color placment:

The text is still a bit placeholder, but I have the inks just about completed. Some exposition and gushy personal stuff after the jump.

The brief called for a design that could be colored or printed as lineart. I’m happy with the level of detail on this one and can think of a few ways to color it. I’m waiting for client feedback and will post the finished image after that.

Sorry for the infrequency of updates. It’s been a trying couple of months. My dog, Moose, was diagnosed with lung cancer and I am taking him for radiation and chemo. My house was hit by two storms, frying my work iMac (new MacPro, though!) and flooding with 14″ of water. Berlin, one of my other dogs, had an auto-immune disorder crop up (her body is attacking her toenails as if they were a virus and she is sloughing them off, ouch). We lost a cat (well, the vet lost the cat - literally, they let the cat out of their front door while transporting it from place to place) and my wife and I spent the better part of six weeks lying in wait at night with traps and food hoping to get him back to no avail.

So, yeah, the blog has suffered. Between the lack of free time, NDA-laden work, and personal setbacks, I haven’t much felt like blogging. I’m getting back into the swing of things now, though. I have a heap of work on my Flickr account that hasn’t made the voyage to the main blog. Additionally, I added a Twitter update to my sidebar and am trying to frequently update there as well.

Farm Sanctuary is an organization devoted to sparing the lives of (and rehabilitating and fostering) farm animals. They hold a yearly walk on World Farm Animals Day and my wife and I will be participating for the second time.

PAWS is Chicago’s largest no-kill, cageless shelter. They also operate the Lurie Family Spay-Neuter Clinic, the nation’s busiest low cost/free surgical clinic. Since PAWS began in 1997, they have reduced Chicago’s euthanasia rate by over 50% and are putting Chicago on the path to be the largest no-kill city in the US. This annual event is extremely important to raising funds for PAWS Chicago’s life-saving programs.

If you’ve read this far, you can probably guess what’s coming. I know that not everyone has the opportunity to give. In the current economy (read: viking effigy of the “free” market!), that’s to be expected. If anyone does pledge to support either charity, I will send them along a small sketch as a gift. Just make sure to include your address and other details when making your pledge at one of, or both of, the links below.

My Paws Chicago donation page.

Both charities have been awarded the highest 4 star rating by Charity Navigator - so no worries about misappropriation of funds or any of the malarky.

I’ll be getting back to my regularly blogging schedule pretty soon here. It’s been a busy few weeks!

(Photos courtesy Threadless.)

I wouldn’t have bothered, but, after one day, it is close to selling out in a few sizes! You can pick it up for $12 during Threadless’ annual sale, on now.

Here’s an uncolored detail shot depicting the more than 30 unique faces that repeat across the shirt in a seamless pattern:

Update: Threadless sold out of a few sizes and is reprinting them. Apparently, during the first week or so, it is their policy to immediately reprint sizes that go the way of the dodo. With that in mind, a few more sizes are closing out. It’s fun to see the design received so positively!

Additionally, there is an interview with me up on their site now.

I’m happy to say that I’ll have two canvases hanging in the I AM 8-Bit show this year. Further, I was really, ridiculously humbled and happy to see my name appear in the billing on the press releases. I’m lucky enough to be sitting next to a heap of names I really admire. If you’re going to be in Los Angeles on August 14th, I’d like to see you! It’s supposed to be a crazily packed, awesome show.

I don’t want to show my piece beforehand (unless they use it to promote the show, which I guess is a possibility and would be fine with me). So, with that in mind, here’s a detail shot as a teaser.

Finally, here are the details on the show:

I AM 8-Bit Opening Night Extravaganza
August 14, 2008
8 p.m. to Midnight

Performances by:
Computer Jay
DJ R-Rated

World of Wonder Storefront Gallery
6650 Hollywood Blvd
Hollywood, Cali.

This happens a lot. I always send along a crash report to Apple. Today, well, I decided to spice it up a bit by adding some exposition to the comments area of the bug report form.

Dear Apple,

If there is anything you can do to make Painter more stable, please, I beg of you, do it. You see, all the way back to version six or so, I’ve been using it. No matter the operating system, amount of raw computing power, or patience you throw at Painter, it still crashes sometimes. And, often, those crashes occur during saves (like right now, during the save of a file I worked on for eight hours)!

I realize it’s not your job to make Painter less buggy, but maybe you can yell at Corel a bit? A stern talking to, maybe?

Thanks!

I get bored with my blog theme once in a while. I really like it, but I am the sort who likes to swap stuff out in an OCD way. Note the new lettering for my name up there!

Being silent makes them shorter. I’m not distracted by talking, so I actually finish this one at my normal speed. Apple TV quality video on Vimeo. Flash stuff here:

Bad Rabbits Part 01 from Ray Frenden on Vimeo.

Bad Rabbits 02 from Ray Frenden on Vimeo.

Completed image after the jump.

I’ve been working sixteen to twenty hour days for a couple of weeks. Multiple snow, skate, surf, and clothing lines. Band merch. Logos. Lettering. An art book for Comicon.

Almost all of it is NDA, though. I’ve posted a few things to Flickr that are public and a ton more set to private. I really wish I could show the work. Whenever I have a slew of jobs strung together with little reprieve, I feel I do some of my best work. It’s the singular focus on work that helps me make better stuff. It can be a detriment to my personal life, though, as my overly patient wife can attest.

In the meantime, though, let me ask you guys. Would you rather have Twitter like updates, with anything and everything that hits my Flickr feed coming over here, or more well rounded, almost narrative, posts such as this one?

I’ve been trying to post only when I can show the beginning, middle, and end of a piece. Something with meat to it. But, I can see the counter argument. “Give it to us as it comes. Just update something!” That sort of thing.

Anyhow, how about some illustrations?

Family Force 5 decided to make some changes to the final art from my last post. They wanted some text added to the image. Not a problem. Well, not a problem except for the fact that I took down my notes incorrectly. I wrote down a song title instead of the album title. So, for your viewing pleasure, here are both versions. This is the song title version:

And here is the corrected version:

Luckily, this isn’t a common occurrence, har!

Lastly, here’s my next tee in progress for them:

I think I’m on board for one or two more.

I’m trying out a few new things with my work. Focusing on bolder line variances more akin to traditional work is the main impetus for change here.

Christian was super easy to work with. Aside from one or two minor changes, my original vision was left almost entirely intact. Essentially, the original brief hadn’t mentioned a need for the company’s name to appear on the shirt and that was added in. The composition didn’t even need a tweaking; everything worked out swimmingly! The final design is five spot colors and the shirt color and can be seen here:

All in all, I completed this tee in one full business day. I wish all jobs went as clean and satisfying! There are detail shots and some process after the jump.

Details:

Some textless process:

Here are my sketches and finished images:

And here you can see my Tastees ice cream sketches being improperly used and altered by Adolf for his Rebel Clothing line:

Swell! It’s times like these that I question the validity of being incredibly open about my process and techniques. I feel like privatizing my whole Flickr feed. Lame.

Update: I privatized my Flickr feed last night. I decided against that by this morning. Apparently, re-enabling your photos changes the URL. Brilliant, Flickr.

All the posts on my blog are now hosed. I’m going to fix a few posts a day. Le sigh.

Click the above image to enlarge.

Click the above image to enlarge.

Cover detail.

Back cover detail.

Inside detail.

Read about this job, creating for the music industry, and see some progress after the jump.

Brian Morrissey, a band member and my primary contact on the job, wanted a cover that incorporated various thematic elements from the songs on the album. Naturally, my first request was for a copy of the songs. Even without a specific call to incorporate the themes of the songs into the art, it’s absolutely necessary to hear a band’s music and get a feel for them. By proxy, you can make inferences about the type of people listening to the album and what sort of art might ring true with them. I think my background as a print designer makes me see all jobs as branding jobs on some level which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Staying true to the band and their audience while giving things my own unique spin makes album art a pretty collaborative process. Managers, band members, and, depending on the label or the agency handling things for the label, art directors all bring something to the table.

The music industry is a bit of a different animal than most my work. Pay rates seem to be down across the board and a lot of the managers, specifically, just want merch and they want it yesterday. I sometimes get a sideways look when I ask to hear the band’s music and voice my intention to send over multiple roughs and concepts. IE, “Just draw something, eh!”

If I get that sort of vibe, I respond accordingly and do the best I can with the materials and time provided. Ideally, I’d pass on all such jobs, but, hey, we all have bills to pay and a few sneak in. Luckily, this job had more in common with the vast majority of commercial illustration that I do. I did some initial thumbnails which I didn’t think to upload, but otherwise have a shot of each step below.

Getting the colors done right was a little tougher. You see, I have a bit of a case of the neons. I love bold, saturated, secondary colors that really have no conventional right to sit next to each other. They’re not right for every instance by any means, but my natural inclination is to pursue them and at least try them on for size.

With some back and forth with the band, I settled on something with a more limited palette. Using fewer colors and highlighting only the important bits of the characters and props strengthened things quite a bit. In the end, I’m really happy with how it turned out. I can’t wait to see it printed!

I’ve been spending more time reading the horror comics which inspired me and have remembered what it was about their line-work that so entranced me in the first place.

Some more recent tinkering with real brushes has been leaving me frustrated with digital.

It’s a challenge to achieve ink-like results digitally. You really have to be conscious of how things would look if they were done analog.

The width of your lines should first and foremost denote the weight of the form they depict. Secondarily, they ought to take the light sources present into account.

Constantly try to go from whisper thin, to thick and back again, even with many flip-flops in a single line. Do so with the above tenets in mind. Be a slave to those tasks. Style and the flashier aspects of inking come as a result, I think. They’re byproduct, not the goal.

One last thing, I’ve got a crap-ton of new updates on my Flickr page. If you want Twitter like art updates, head over there. If you want meatier stuff, I will be active as ever over here. Perhaps more so in the coming weeks.

“Open, damn you! Too. Many. Boxes!”

Finally. There it was. Covered in cellophane, styrofoam, and other earth-threating materials. The monetary investment wasn’t the only regrettable accompaniment to this guilty pleasure. It’s petroleum produced silhouette was beautiful. “I can just devote more time to pro bono charity work to, er, offset it,” I thought.

I setup my workspace to accomodate it’s 20 plus inches of horizontal width. I plugged it into the DVI port on the back of my work PC and installed the requisite software.

“Hurry. Up.”

I started to make my first strokes. “What’s this? Lag? Horrible, terrible, noticeable lag between my stylus and the cursor?”

“Surely, this must be some sort of mistake!,” I thought. “Perhaps I need to turn off pointer precision or some other archaic inclusion in my operating system? Where is the setting to un-fuck this thing?!”

No setting was to be found. My Nintendo DS running a homebrew, pressure sensitive drawing app named Colors was more responsive, or perhaps more instinctively easy to pick up on, than the new cornerstone of my workflow. Despair! Two thousand plus dollars down the toilet! Sixteen percent restocking fees! Shame and ridicule from my peers! Clearly the end days were near.

I decided to persevere. I started to notice a trend. My instinct was to focus on the cursor and not the tip of the stylus. I’d conditioned myself to watch the screen cursor with steely dedication when drawing with my old Intuos3 9″x12″ tablet. Having taught myself to draw with it, I feared that drawing with a direct input device such as this was more of a hurdle for me than most. I had to rewire my focus. The damn cursor was throwing me off.

“Be the pen, Ray. Be the pen.”

Doing my best to ignore the cursor, I trudged forward. I’d have to forcibly separate myself from the old tablet. I had to ween myself away from it and the habits I’d cultivated. I spent all day and night drawing with the new device, doing my best to achieve a zen-like calm.

Drawing was getting easier. The lag became almost entirely unnoticeable. Soon, I was hitting lines on my first attempt that would’ve taken a half dozen with my old tablet. The weight of buyer’s remorse was lifting off my shoulders.

By the next morning, not only was I used to the way it worked, but I’d noticed my work-flow was orders of magnitude faster with it. My accuracy was much improved. Drawing was effortless. Maybe most importantly, creating with it was far more fun than with my old tablet.

The Cintiq 20WSX was at home on my desk and I couldn’t imagine working without it. Down with tablets! Up with, er, Cintiqs!

The above video explores inking in Painter and how to trace your inked output. Albeit, very, very briefly! The resource files and links I mention in the video can be seen after the jump.

For those of you allergic to Flash, here’s a higher quality, 1280 x 720 Mov file.

Here are the brush settings for my digital Inking Brush in Painter X:

These pressure settings have a large margin for variance based on the speed of your strokes and the pressure you typically apply with your stylus.

CocoaPotrace is the tracing application I refer to in the video. Sleeker, faster, and better than LiveTrace, it’s a must have piece of freeware. Based on the little known, opensource tracing application Potrace this version is a must have for turning raster lineart into usable vectors. I originally learned of the Windows-based, command line version from my friend and fellow Illustrator Teemu Matinlauri.

Lastly, here’s a shot of the image I was working on in the video for those of you without Flash or who’d rather not listen to me yammer on:

In the meantime, I’ll be doing most of my linework in Painter X. I have a ways to go before finding a brush that mimics the Manga Studio offering closely, but at least the full color painting tools are swell to noodle with. If only Painter could handle 1200 dpi files half as well!

I appreciate that Mark took the time to contact me. It was swell of him.

You see, about a year and a half or so ago I purchased Manga Studio EX 3.0. In Japan it is just called Comic Studio. Oddly, were it named Comic Studio here, I think it would sell a lot better. Or, hell, even calling it Better Brush Algorithms than Photoshop would be a better title. It takes a leap of faith from a professed Manga skeptic like me to give the software a shot.

CelSys is the name of the company that sells Manga Studio in Japan. In Japan, version 4 has been available for quite a long spell. Those of us who don’t speak Japanese, or use Macs, have to wait till it is localized and ported.

Up until a few months ago, it was eFrontier who sold the software stateside and who ported it for the Mac, though not as a Universal Binary. Recently, Smith Micro bought Poser, Manga Studio, and Anime Studio from eFrontier at a time which just about coincided with the release of Mac OSX Leopard.

Herein lies the crux of the matter. Read about the problems this causes and my proposed solution after the jump.

Manga Studio EX is broken on Leopard. Not only does it run slower than dog manure because it isn’t a Universal Binary (which was a problem I dealt with in Tiger, too), but it simply won’t work. The only fix relies upon Smith Micro picking up where eFrontier left off. They would need to localize Manga Studio 4.0 and then port it to the Mac.

Despite Japan having released a number of updates to version 3 that we haven’t seen AND releasing version 4, those of us who use Leopard are left out in the cold. The buzz around the Content Paradise forums, a gathering place of Manga Studio users, is that it might be a gooooood long spell before, or even if, either of those two things happen. Smith Micro doesn’t seem too interested in dealing with the growing throngs of unhappy users.

I tried to fix the problem myself. After reading up, I determined that my best option was to create a Boot Camp install and drop Manga Studio and XP onto it. Needless to say, with Manga Studio being a dominant facet of my production pipeline, I started to spend my whole computing life in XP. I had to forget about my iTunes library on my Mac install, my favorite programs that were Mac only, and even had to deal with XP’s inability to read all my RAM and a host of other problems.

I thought I might install Vista x64 to solve the latter issue, but apparently Manga Studio EX doesn’t work on Vista either. Lots of people buying Manga Studio are unable to use it in nearly any capacity! Excellent.

After a really long period of using a nearly decade old OS to pander to the Manga Studio gods, I’ve had enough.

I’m ditching Manga Studio for my first love, Painter. I’ve started to export all my old files as PSDs and am not looking back. MS does one thing really well. Lineart. It does almost everything else very, very poorly. Unhitching my wagon from the burning viking effigy that was Manga Studio felt really cathartic. I’m happy to be able to use a modern operating system and leave XP behind, too.

The worst part is, I’ve personally evangelized to hundreds of illustrators, in person, about how great Manga Studio was for lineart. I’ve produced videos that have cumulatively been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. I feel like a straight up patsy. So, long story short, adios Manga Studio, hello Painter.

For comparison’s sake, here’s some pencil work from Manga Studio I did for a client recently:

This is some of my first pencil work in Painter from earlier this week:

With some art direction from a friend, I tackled an age old concept: Make a black panther ripping through stuff! So, with the concept suggested, I went to work trying to capture all the awesome that such an image should drip in. Really, if it doesn’t look like Lisa Frank mated with the dude from Trapper Keeper (Mad Balls!) and gave birth to a Garbage Pail Kid, I failed. This tee may be up on Woot’s shirt site. If not, My friend and I will likely shop it around. I did create it with the Woot demographic in mind, though.

See a heap of process and a gaggle more designs after the jump.

I just finished two (more direct) collaborations with Kyle, the art director from Electric Zombie. He and I hit it off pretty quickly. One or two Robocop quotes, a mutually professed love for the horror comics of days past, and a love for all things Voorhees and I’m sold. He did the original, blue pencils for this piece “Hatchet Job” which I inked and he colored.

Additionally, I did the coloring and he did the inking and placement/embellishment on “Rot Mouth:”

If you want to see the final designs, he’s trying something novel for his summer line of clothing. He’s already bought all the designs, but he wants the community at large to pick which he’ll print first. Go and vote for eight of these tees now!

I also did the springboard panel for a new collaborative comic at my art collective, Stylus:

And this character for a collaborative skate deck design:

Man. This doesn’t even touch on the two CD booklet/album art jobs, six or so lettering gigs, two branding jobs, or sixteen character designs that are due this week. Or the three tee designs I had due each day since the 9th of last month. Non disclosure agreements, ahoy! Come to think of it, I should probably stop writing this post and…

The newest submission, however, might be a bit of a tough sell to the wider Threadless demographic:

It’s got gore - albeit toned-down gore. Regardless, gore is historically about as limp as a wet noodle voting wise.

I’d been practicing my ability to draw a likeness by asking Threadless’rs for photos of themselves. I decided to turn that idea into a tee shirt and solicited 30 people for new photos and for their permission to use their likeness on a shirt. The tricky part was getting everyone zombified (for lack of a better term) while still leaving enough features intact to make them discernible.

Now, I realize that their likenesses being recognizable was not necessary for the design to be successful. I thought doing so was the least I could do to repay them for use of their image as a point of reference. Mind you, I didn’t trace their photos or anything. I know some guys include tracing reference as a portion of their workflow. I’m just not comfortable doing that. Seems cheaty.

The interesting thing about this tee design is that it features a seamlessly tiled image. It repeats endlessly in all directions. Over 30 heads repeated in a 5 across, 6 down table.

Uncolored, reduced, still mostly tileable version suitable for putting in a blog post:

See the image on a tee and a whole lot of process after the jump.

The finished piece mocked up on a tee:

A whole mess of process:

Last, but certainly not least, the 30 intrepid volunteers:

For the record, number thirty was me. Oh, vanity!

We went through a few revisions (in nailing down the look of the cone, mostly). They were worth it, though. The final is something I’m proud of and, paired with the Fox and Crow illustration from the last post, is clearly more cartoonish than most my work.

I spent a few years as a project manager and art director at a print design mud hut and another as an art director in the games industry. When necessary, I can break out of my “house” style. Frankly, if it’s lineart I want in on it. I love making pretty lines. And this job wasn’t that much of a departure. Well, except for this sheet of roughs. This one was a bit out there:

Ultimately, it veered back to a more comfortable place and both the client and I dig the results.

Before the video, however, come the pretty pictures!

Now for the good stuff!

Electric Zombie Tee Creation from Ray Frenden on Vimeo.

As usual, your feedback is really appreciated!