Dragon Logo

A while ago a co-worker of mine asked me to do a dragon logo for him.

He wanted a Asian style dragon head breathing fire and with a 3rd eye. This is what I created for him, it went through a couple of iterations which I won't bore you with, But I am pretty happy with how it came out, I wish I could do some cooler things with the flames but outlines on flames are kinds boring, flames are cool when you add color. I really love working in Illustrator I get such clean work out of it and there is so much control I need to do more work in it for fun.

Good Bye Gluten

Laura has recently become sensitive/ allergic to gluten, to say good bye to gluten she asked me to make her this.

R2 Valentine by Laura and C3P0 Valentine (work in progress) by Me

Laura made me an awesome Valentine this year!

On the back it says "You R2 good to me"
This is a picture of it hanging at my work station

She put much love and care into the R2 and it turned out beautifully I absolutely love it. I want to get it framed.

I felt really bad that I hadn't got around to finishing my Valentine for her (which I will finish and post later, always later).

In response I made this while I was at work.
I want to add some texture and change some parts into hearts and make it feel more Valentinesi.

Only One EP

My best friend in Kindergarten John Yuen approached me about doing a project with him. He wanted an album cover for the rapper Only One self titled album. I was more then happy to take up the project, I really enjoy getting to do album art and working with other creative people.
Logo
I started by making a logo for John in Illustrator he wanted the logo to look similar to the Alfred E. Newmen style logo from the Soundpeople Music, except he wanted it to look like him. I really like getting to make logos and working in Illustrator though the really cool part is he will probably keep using it and I think he has talked about making shirts with the design on it and I am a total sucker for that.Single
I probably should have posted this a couple of months ago when it came out but here is the single for the album. But it didn't really show off too many of my skills beyond some graphic design, figured it would be best to just wait until everything was going out.
Cover
Back
The back cover was a bit of a bastard for me. I had to make some revisions on it later and I had lost all of the original work files, my old computer died and then my back up hard drive fell off a table and doesn't work. So I had to take an old Jpeg and do some edits on the back titles. This led to me having to erase some of the back bridge, which turned out to look kinda cool so not the worst revision. Though it was just frustrating having to deal with the memory of all my lost data.
Check out the promotional video for Duet.
You can get the album here.

Fan Art Friday: Bossk on a Segway

Here is the first installment in my Fan Art Fridays (which shall be here after refered to as FAF in the titles). This is something that I am hoping that I will be able to do every Friday for the whole year (fingers crossed). For my birthday I received the Clone Wars Season 2 DVDs and there were a couple episodes with Bossk, Aura Sing and Young Boba Fett, this inspired me to work on my first piece. I am a huge MC Chris fan, and he has a couple of songs about the Star Wars bounty hunters including Bossk on a Segway.

Social Gaming Viking 02

OK this has now turned into a Red vs. Blue thing. I'm looking forward to trying to get two done a week.

Social Gaming Viking 01

I am working on creating some new material for my portfolio in the hopes of getting a job. This is the first in a series of Vikings I am working on that will be done in a Faceb0ok game kind of style.

Sun Burn

After posting Drunk Stab I started working on another sketch from the same page that I really liked, that of a young girl who had been sitting in the sun too long. I have been wanting to do a sun tan lines piece all summer and now that the summer is over I got it done. Originally I was going to give her a bathing suit and then i realized you wouldn't be able to see the tan lines, so it had to go.

Drunk Stab Part 1

This is from when I was just doodling all night because I couldn't sleep or my computer had a virus. I don't really remember. Though I started drawing things in a kind of new style, really pushing the cartoony look. I came up with the guy running around with a knife and an open bottle of booze and it looks like his night isn't quite over yet.

I think next I will be working on the girl on the right, I have been want to do something with a sun burnt girl with really bad tan lines, I think it will look fun and sexy.
First I work with the default pen tool with the white fill and the black out line so that I can capture what the sketch looks like. I started blocking out shading on the jacket and on the boots.
The idea was to get rid of most of the outlines and just let the blocks of color make the image. I'm really happy with with where it is at. What I want to add is a little more shading, some little details like buttons and adding a background. This was really fun and I'm excited to work on it some more.

Sea Creatures for Science!

Laura is doing an internship for the Lawrence Hall of Science where she is helping with children education programming for their summer fun day program. The activity that she is planning is designed to help children see that the CO2 levels in the ocean are rising and how it is raising the acidity of the sea and effecting the sea creatures that live there from growing their exoskeletons. These were designed to have a social gaming (i.e. facebook and Myspace games) kind of feel.

Lobster
I had to do a revision on this one because my good friend Chris Vear, a native of Maine informed me I didn't give the lobster enough legs. They have 8. I was really happy with how this one came out.

Sea Urchin

Brain Coral

Chitinous Bivalve or a Clam

Sea Star

Where Stars are Born

This piece was born out of an argument over how awesome my beard is.
Laura and I were at the Bee Show earlier this year, where I exhibited a painting of skull with a bee beard called The Skull and the Bees where I had decided to hang out to discuss my piece. Being shy I instead sat on a stone wall and started sketching, and I soon sketched a self portrait where I was a skull with a beard much like the piece I posted earlier this year. Laura pointed out that the beard I drew was way too long and that my beard wasn't that "Awesome". WHAT!?! So in response I made a doodle of how awesome my beard really is, since you know, it gives birth to stars. Yes, it is that awesome.
This was meant to just be another little joke self portrait for fun that I did because I wanted to do another piece in illustrator. But Laura and I have been talking about updating my website so we took this illustration and made my new under construction page as a place holder of sorts until I can get my new website up!

She Bags logo: Tea Cup Skull

Some of my lady friends have started a social club, where they drink tea, discuss books and talk about their alternative life styles and they have decided to name themselves the She Bags. The idea that they liked was one with a kind of sugar skull and a tea cup.
Skull and tea cup/ tea bag sketches
They liked the one on the upper right. Which wasn't really surprising because they had sent me some reference pictures on what they wanted and that one was the closest to the reference.

The skull and the Tea Cup.
I got rid of a lot of the filigree that I did in the sketch and replaced it with flowers, for some reason when ever i try to do filigree kinda stuff in illustrator it comes out looking very sloppy. I added flowers that were in a Kalocsa Embroidery style instead which I thought would work better. I haven't heard back from them yet. One lady said she loved it and then another said that there were too many flowers. I'm waiting on hearing what kinds of changes they want before I do anything else.

She Bags logo: She Bag Bombshell

Some of my lady friends have started a social club, where they drink tea, discuss books and talk about their alternative life styles and they have decided to name themselves the She Bags. They had asked me to do a logo and one of the ideas that I had was to make a pinup girl with a teabag head.

This is my preliminary drawing. I really liked how it turned out, I think I will keep working on it and refine it. They however, picked a different one for me to work on.

Viking Skull

I was working on a Consensual Tentacle comic the last night (or early this morning) and I came up with a design for Gilda's shirt and I really liked it so I made an Illustrator version of it just for fun. It's a viking skull. WITH A BEARD.

IRDRIVR

I only learned how to drive last October, and after I passed my driving test I sketched an Ed "Big Daddy" Roth style version of me driving a hot rod for my sketch blog.














Here is the final version that I created in Illustrator. A friend of mine recently contacted me about doing some Illustrator work and now I'm all gung ho about working with the program. This project was something that I have been wanting to work on for a while so I decided to just do it. I got this done in 16 hours or so. I haven't decided if I want to do more with the image, like shading. I want to do a little more with the background but right now I can't think of anything specific that would add to the piece.






















Close up of my head. I based my head mostly off of Rat Fink, thus the bug eyes, tongue and drool.






















Here is a detail shot of my Kappa Tattoo. I decided to show a detail of it because it turned out really cute which I hadn't really expected.





















Detail shot of Laura riding on the back of my hot rod in a bikini with her parasol.






















Detail shot of the snake tattoo that I designed for Laura's arm. She doesn't really have this tattoo but we've discussed the concept before.






















Details shot of a Jellyfish tattoo I made up on Laura's leg. She doesn't really have this tattoo but she has talked about getting one like it for her mother.

A Boy and His Pig

I spend a good chunk of time every day looking for jobs; when I run across postings that want an art test, that always stimulates me to create something different then I usually would. Here is one Laura found in Portland craigs list for a a children's book illustrator. They wanted a test drawing of a boy kissing his pet pig.
Here are the sketches that I did.



































After I showed Laura the first page of sketches she said that the kid had to have a stripey shirt. The guy didn't express if this was a city kid or a country kid so I tried to keep it pretty neutral with his clothes.















With the last page of sketches I started to play with shapes and I also started looking for reference of kids kissing other animals like dogs.




















I took some of those sketches and I drew them onto water color paper and inked the drawing and painted it. I only painted 2 because the guy wanted just one example of the boy and his pig. I picked the two pieces that I felt represented two different takes on the same idea. I decided to not add any back grounds because I felt that they would take too long and that there wasn't a setting to put them in so I thought these would work well as like a little corner illustration of the boy and his pig.


















I really liked this one I liked the relationship of the boy and his pig where the pig was bigger then the boy. This is the one that I sent in, and I also sent in the one I made in Illustrator.


















Here is the version that I did in illustrator, I think the way that I did the shadows gives the whole piece and really soft edge to it and makes it feel very warm and inviting. I like how all of these came out. I have yet to hear back but you never know.

Drunken Rabbit Sees a Pink Elephant

Here is a little doodle I did a long time ago to make Laura laugh. This prompted me to look into the origin of the "seeing pink elephants" which comes from Jack London in 1913, who describes one sort of alcoholic in the autobiographical John Barleycorn as "the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers."




















One day I decided to developed it into a full illustration. I originally wanted to turn it into a paper texture piece, but I think it works better like this. I might go back into it and add some lighting effects though (mostly highlights on the rabbit and the pink elephant and then perhaps add a moon beam). I wanted to play with color and have a complete background, which I usually neglect because I find them difficult and I usually just muddy up my illustration with backgrounds. Though I think due to my color choices and the changing levels of details I was able to create a cohesive illustration.

Christmas Card 2009

This year I ended up making two Christmas cards. My mom just asked for something funny. So in October I came up with theses sketches (previously seen on my sketch blog), they all had to do with global warming or the bad economy, things that are on my mind. Plus one about Santa being tattooed which was just fun. (If you are having trouble reading the dialogue on my sketch blog I wrote out the dialogue for clarification)










































My parents weren't too crazy about the ideas that I came up with but I guess it started my Dad's mind a turnin' and he came up with "Things may be a little tight this holiday season what with the recession and all. But there is a barrel of love and good wishes from the Royals." So with that in mind I just started working in Photoshop.























Here is what I came up with. I got it done pretty quickly for one of my Christmas cards (which usually take forever for one reason or another) I finished it in about a day. Yes I know "recession" is misspelled, I based it off of my Dad's spelling which is also not very good. My mom liked it when I showed it to her, but then I showed this to Laura and she didn't like it and thought I could do better. That the elves were ugly and they should be cute, so then I decided to show it to my friend Chris Vear, who felt that the back ground could be more detailed and that I could incorporate the text elements better. So I decided to just redo it to incorporate their suggestions.










Here are the new elf sketches that I did trying to keep them simple cute and homeless looking.













I compiled all of the sketches along with some of the roughs I had done fro the older version and I created a new back ground sketches adding more posters on the walls. This is the sketch that I took into illustrator and made into the card.






















Here is side A
I wanted to try and not do heavy black outlines and to not shade it so that they looked like little cut out characters. I took the finished Illustrator version into Photoshop and added paper texture to everything and added some blues to make the elves look more somber. Some of the lines got a little washed out; I should have paid a little more attention to my contrasts. There are a lot of things that I like about this piece and a lot of things that I think could have been better. I learned a couple of things and I think the second one definitely looks better then the first one. Though it took me way more time so we got off to a late start and I never got around to sending out my cards to my friends. Sorry guys, I still love you.


















Here is side B
We based the idea of doing a post card off of this weird troll post card my mom found, on the back of that post card there was an illustration of the troll kids just sitting there so I wanted to do a similar thing. So here is the back of the post card with my homeless elves dumpster diving.