Retro halftones & you. The musical.

Detail of Metalman Project submission. Full image here.

While compiling a few prominent pieces for inclusion in my portfolio (I’ve only got about half the eventual work I want to be displayed up at the moment), it became pretty obvious that I have a penchant for super-saturated, retina searing hues layered with volumetric lines as halftones (the stuff that conjures images of Charles Burns - I swear, I hadn’t seen his stuff before a friend sent a copy of Black Hole to me).

That being said, I still want to try and distance myself, a bit, or at least get a few more tools under my belt, so I’m not a one trick pony (or labeled derivative, not that there haven’t been tons of examples of this sort of shading in the halls of history, ’cause there are). I’ve done some digital painting and, while it doesn’t turn out bad, linework is still my first love, so it was natural to try some hatching instead of some mixing.

The first attempts at something like this come in the forms of a colored version of the Metalman piece in my portfolio (see above) and a cheesy, joke “seal” I slap on friend request approvals on the popular social networking sites (see below).

In the former, rather than stack patches of halftoned colors, I used solids inside of the linework and then applied a Photoshop filter to achieve the old, newsprint comic look. In the latter, I used a basket-weave-like hatch that I’ve seen used elsewhere but can’t place the name of and the most common forms of crosshatching and feathering.

That’s the giant, cheesy self-portrait ripe for use on social networking sites. I’ve got an account with most the usual suspects: Virb, MySpace, Livejournal, Flickr.

While I like the outcome, it feels a little more sterile than my other work. What do y’all think? This’ll definitely require more tinkering.