Life Goals 1

Chris "Stink Lines" Vear

This is Chris Vear, a good friend of mine who shares the same birthday as I do (the exact same day, same year, similar time) and in many ways is very similar to me. With the exception that he stinks. Seriously dude, take a shower.


Actually Chris doesn't stink (much) - this is an old joke from college that he decided to bring back with my link on his blog being Eric "Stink Lines" Royal, so I decided I would remind him who was the original stink lines. Him, he was!
This was one of my first attempts at adding layers of texture to the piece and Chris was a big help with helping me refine and improve the piece. Thanks dude.

Wormwood Fan art

Here is my rendition of Ben Templesmith's character Wormwood from the comic of the same name. I tried to copy how he describes his process which is something that I used to do but not to the degree that he does.





















I took a hand inked drawing and scanned it into photo shop where I added layers of color underneath the line drawing and then added shading and highlights where needed.






















Here's how far I got.
I like this process I was able to work much faster then I have been lately and finish something that looks nice and similar to my reference point. The only thing that I still need to do that Templesmith does is I need to add layers of texture and a cooler back ground.

EDITED TO ADD :



The finished result with added textures and textured background.

Art Jumble Submission 1 (Snow Monster)

I joined The Art Jumble, or more to say they finally let me join. I tried joining earlier in the year with this blog and never heard from them again, then I heard that a couple of my friends were on it and I thought, "hey I'm just as good these guys, they should let me join." So I submitted to join again using my sketch blog instead of this blog and they let me join (whoo hoo! Go trickery!) Now I hope to get one of these done every week, it will probably not turn out that way but I though the same thing about my sketch blog and I seem to be doing pretty good with that one so who knows.

If you don't know what The Art Jumble is then I will explain it is a blog where there is a theme each week and artists who are part of Art Jumble post art work based off of the theme. Pretty Simple.


Here is the first one
The theme was "Snow Monster"


















Here is the sketch which I did for my sketch blog last week



















Here is the final version that I created all in Photoshop.

Auto Outfits

Here is something that I worked on that you can buy at Amazon.com

The product is accessories for your car to make them look like different holiday animals, such as a Christmas Reindeer, a Halloween Bat, and an Easter Bunny. These are called Auto Outfits and they are sold by AbsolutelyNew where i currently work. My friend Amaya, who was a graphic designer here at the time (she has moved on to bigger and better things at Sony now), absolutely hated the old package design for the Auto outfits, it looked poorly designed and had even worst execution. I forget if this was a project that Amaya got or if this was something we took upon our selves because we had extra time (I used to have a lot of that here at this job, not so much any more) but the packaging needed to be redesigned. So Amaya asked me if i wanted to help her redesign the packaging and i said yes. At first we were planning to do these big complicated illustrations for each design














Christmas Sketch

















Halloween Sketch















Easter Sketch
















AOF Halloween














AOF Easter














AOF Christmas

However, in the end the Retail guys didn't think that these overly illustrated ones would be the best direction for the product. So I asked (and insisted) that they at least let me change the car, because I didn't like the car. So I inked the Easter Car in Illustrator because they thought that the mini was a cute and slightly generic looking car. I then gave the mini all the different Auto Outfits and then Amaya placed them on to new back grounds and New Packaging was born.

Here are the links to the Auto Outfits that you can purchase online at amazon
Christmas Auto Outfit
Halloween Auto Outfit

T-shirt Fail

Unicorn Skull (A T-shirt)

A while back my friend Erik Guiterrez told me about this website Threadless (www.threadless.com) which is a web site that sells t-shirts designed by any one with an internet connection and the free time to do so. The shirt designs are selected by the members of the site by voting on the pieces, and as long as more then 50% likes them threadless will print the shirt. The winning designer gets 1500 US dollars and 500 Threadless dollars, plus an additional 500 dollars any time that their design is reprinted. This sounded like a fun away to get my art out there and potentially make some money.

Coming off of my Peter Thomas T-shirt creating high, I decided to create some shirt design (this being the only one that I have finished or developed in the last 3 or 4 months). So I did some sketches and based off of a suggestion made by Laura to do a unicorn skull.

















Here is the unicorn skull sketch.

























Here is the finalized version that I did in illustrator.
I didn't do the little star sparks because I thought it was too silly and whimsical plus i though it didn't make sense with the rest of the piece.





















Here is what i submitted for review on Threadless
See next Blog for how i did

VOTE OR DIE

Mario Pumpkin Painting (PART I)

Last year I painted a portrait on a pumpkin and it sparked my new interest I have with acrylic painting. I like the idea of painting things on non traditional canvases and things that are temporary. It is also more fun to paint a pumpkin as apposed to gutting it and carving it, though I don't get any kick ass roasted pumpkin seeds so there is a trade off.

A while ago Laura and I went to the San Jose Art Museum to see a show about Robots (which had some great pieces but we both thought it wasn't laid out that well in the space the museum had). When we were there we went to the gift shop we found this book "I Am 8-Bit" (which Jason is borrowing at the moment, i wonder if he knows he still has it?) which was filled with fine art based off of old arcade and Nintendo games which Laura and I found to be really fascinating, and sparked an interest in me to create my own video game based art work.

So I painted Mario and a boo on the pumpkin figuring it seemed more Halloweeny then simply having Mario on the pumpkin alone.





































































If I can find the time i want to paint Princess Peach with a Boo looking up her skirt on the other side.

Samurai Tattoo Drawings PART I

I went to Maui back at the end of June with Laura and her family. Aside from the part where she tossed an entire pack of cards in my general direction after a game of BS, I’d say it was pretty amazing. While I was there her uncle Chris approached me about doing a drawing of a samurai for a tattoo he had been considering getting for some time. He wanted to get a samurai on his back and he was having trouble finding reference for what he wanted, so knowing that I was an artist he asked if I drew samurai. Now it might not be apparent from reading this blog, but I do love to draw samurai (vikings too, I will have to start posting more of them) so I was excited to work on this for him. Though without my numerous reference books and the glorious internet (all praise the giver of knowledge) I didn’t think I was quite prepared to start working on this right away, as I thought it needed to be slightly historically accurate because after all, I do love samurai and I respect the history. So in Maui I came up with a couple of rough sketches.






















































When we got back to the main land and good ole California I had the intention of creating a finalized version of the sketches I was working on in Hawaii using all of my samurai books and reference that I had at home. I eventually got around to making the drawing below.






















Here is the inked version that I gave Chris. He liked it, but he wanted the samurai in a different position, so it's back to the drawing board, or more like my couch while I watch cartoons and draw some more samurais.

To be continued...