Two Arts Related To the Moon

I can't say what directly inspired me to do these, other than idea I had been floating around in my head. Also, I will take any opportunity to use Moon related imagery.

Christmas Card

Maggie and I decided to go a little nuts with our christmas card this year. The result:

See the back and inside and read about the process after the jump.

Sasquatch!

I made this fella for my friend  Bill's birthday. It's my first ever attempt at sculpture. I've always wanted to try it out, ever since I first started reading Toyfare magazine and they had the little tutorials on how to customize action figures.

I sculpted it with Super Sculpey, then used wire for the teeth and claws. I painted it with basic acrylics, then used a Liquitex glaze.  Other fun fact! I've read about it for year, but never had an excuse to do a paint wipe. I mixed a bit of black and brown paint with water then slathered it all over the Sasquatch, using a paper towel I wiped away the excess leaving the paint/water behind in the little notches and crevices. It worked pretty well for my first time.

Bill named him Bobby, and he is now at his home among his menagerie of faux-pets. And special thanks to my beautiful wife for the awesome pictures, more after the jump.

Rock The Inauguration Part 2

I posted the logo I used in this a while ago. I wanted to show you a companion piece to see the logo in use. This concept didn't make it to production, but I liked it alot. I tried to create something that engaged our audience to not only look at the ad, but participate in the event.

Five on Five

I was asked to design new ads for the RedEye's famous "Five on Five" where 5 people are asked 5 questions about sports. I took this as an opportunity to go for a nice vintage Boxing poster look. They immediately loved it.
The initial design and layout was done in InDesign, then I exported that to a PDF and mucked it up in Photoshop.
Its pretty straight forward, I'd always wanted to do something in this look and I think I did a pretty good job.

Chip Tunes

I made this poster for my friend Kiel's class on Chip Tunes. My inspiration was both the 80's title aesthetic (Tron-esque) but with a modern flair, and circuit boards. Which oddly enough, tie directly to the subject matter of the class.  His class turned out really well, and these were handed out afterwards as a take home.

American Hardcore

I made this poster for the first in a series of classes at Harper College called "Tower Records Goes To College" my good friend Scott organized classes taught by a bunch of us former Tower Records employees. One of my best friends, Tom Joniak, was going to do a class about American Hardcore music. Unfortunately, his class didn't meet the registration minimum and was cancelled, but the rest of the classes are still on track. Since this idea was pretty last minute, I haven't had the time to do them for all of the other classes yet. I won't be able to for the Fall courses, but with more lead time I'll do my damndest to get a poster made for each class in the spring.

I did this entirely in illustrator. I dig it alot. It was pretty heavil inspired by the posters Olly Moss did for A Life Well Wasted. I absolutely love Olly's work and I hope it doesn't feel like I'm ripping him off, because that wasn't what I intended. I just dig his style alot and its a look I've always wanted to try my hand at.

I'm for sure going to do two more of these, one for my class (about Star Wars) and one for my friend Kiel's class about Chiptunes.

More information about the classes can be found here.

Quick and Dirty

I created this really quick, based on an idea I had floating in my head for a little bit. I was directly inspired by some work I was doing at the tribune involving diagonal lines, and the letter treatment was developed from basically messing around in illustrator for a long, long time, and is similar to another treament I did for something at work (i'll show you eventually). This is just a quick and dirty concept, no real direction, just something I thought was fun.

What does this make you feel?

I've had this idea for close to 2 years. This is me seeing if my idea works. I think it does.

Breaking News

This ended up not being used, but i thought the concept was there. The idea was that it would work well across multiple platforms. I created an entire style guide to maintain the brand but this is gist of it.

Scaredy Ghost

Apparently this has become a ghost-centric blog. I guess I just really like drawing ghosts, and I would like to actually post some more legitimate works. I don't just draw ghosts, I do have a for reals job. Anyways, I thought this idea was adorable, and I think I was right.

Golden Oldies

I was digging around the interwebs and came across KhangKhong.com, a website that one of my teacher in college ran. They held art jams, someone would suggest a topic, gather reference material, and package it up. Then anyone could download the zip file and create an image based on the theme. The theme for this particular jam was Spock. So i made a pair of images that I thought would look neat on a t-shirt, albeit a girls t-shirt. I made these half in photoshop and illustrator, a long long time ago. I'm gonna guess 2003, but could be sooner.

Future Ghost

Commander Dutch "Howie" Dorough of The 87th Future Ghost Brigade is a veteran of the Ghost-Bot Conflict, not to be confused with The Robot-Ghost Wars of the early 23rd Century.

I made this

Not sure why. If you know, tell me. Thanks.

Rock The Inauguration

Haha! I told you i'd post some real design work! I did this for an event in Chicago to celebrate Barack Obama's inauguration in January. It was feature on posters, banners, flyers, print, web and television advertisements. I drew inspiration from Obama's immaculate creative direction from his campaign using the Gotham typeface as well has the established PMS colors. I wanted there to be definate "Obama" visual cues without aping his style entirely.

Let The Right Ghost In

Okay, i said I wouldn't do many more, but i had to. This was suggested by my wife. I added arms to these ones, I just thought it gave them more character.

Ghost Doom

I don't want this to become a an all ghost blog, but when I get ideas. I have to do them. Otherwise i will forget. I will probably start posting some for reals design work soon. Also, i started a new technique with this one, so i'm adding a higher res version of it than i normally would because you wouldn't notice the newness on the smaller file. Enjoy!

Ghost-Chewie

Another day, another idea for a ghost. I had intended this to look much different and a bit more detailed, but it didn't work out that way i intended and i went for a much more simple approach, which i rather like.

Ambigrams

I've always wanted to draw an ambigram. I was never confident enough in my drawing skills to try it out but I am extremely confident in my arranging of blocks into geometric patterns. So I came up with this one, if you can't read it, it's my name:


After that, I figured I'd try and be a little less narcissistic and maybe do one for my wife, this time with a little color and rounded edges:

SPIDER-GHOST

After I created The Ghost of Sparta, I thought of other people I could turn into ghosts and I wanted to see if I could do spider-man. So i did. This is spider-ghost.

Ghost of Sparta

I rocked through God of War for the PS2 and I'm currently working my way through God of War 2 in preparation for God of War 3 this fall. As a result, I've had Kratos on the mind as of late so I made this image for him. Because I'm a nerd.

Space is the place

I'm a pretty big fan of space, so I made these space posters for fun.

Recent Work

This is some recent stuff that i've been messing around with, all done in illustrator. These are all for fun, becuase I like sloths, robots, and reading.