I was fortunate enough to be awarded the Award of Excellence for my second year in a row.  The illustration is a digital aerial of a Tucson Arena/convention center concept I did while working for HOK Sport.  The exhibition will be in Madison, WI, in October.

So, recently I did these characters for a guy out in Cali, CakeStar.  Not my usual bag, but pretty fun.  The idea is for them to be applicable as die-cut stickers, or even t-shirt designs.  Above you have the fat cop, who originally was to be a puppet, but wouldn’t have worked so well die-cut with strings and all.

And below we have the S.W.A.T. team monkey.

The monkey originally was holding a banana, but I thought he would be better off with the smoke grenade.

Below, the homicidal tree followed by its original concept sketch…

And finally, Teddy.

Not much going on with this guy, just a little scarred and torn, and of course has vampire fangs.  What teddy wouldn’t?

Though it does not make up for my gross irresponsibility, it may have worked out the best for her, as I most surely am better now than I was then.  Also, he now has a son, and so I was able to include him in the drawing.  Also, I guess it does say something for my follow through, that even though it may take up to a decade, I will eventually get around to it.  Anyway, here it is:

They seem satisfied with the result.  I’ll post an image of the shirts made when they’re produced.  I also sketched out this quick logo design, which they weren’t so fond of, but I thought might have merit.

Can’t win em all.  I try and go for at least half of them though.

I decided to keep it simple, gray shades of charcoal, one warm pastel.  There was a good strong light source, which made the clarity of the shadows crisp.

Above was the long pose, 2 hours.  Below are warm up poses, 1-5 min.

The class is held every Saturday night, at the Red Door Studio, in KCK.

The Human CropCircles is a local (KC) hip hop group, formed by producer Joker70.  I joined as the group’s emcee about four years ago.  We just finished our first full length project, titled “Project: Lucid”.  Its the group’s sixth release.

Listen here:

http://humancropcircles.bandcamp.com/

While the music is the feature, and overall point of the project, I couldn’t help but put my best foot forward in developing the artwork for it.  I decided to represent myself and Joker70 with cartoon characters, placing them in scenarios of similar vibe or that could be found in the music.

The album comes with stickers and a poster…

Visit us @:

www.humancropcircles.net

Thanks to everyone who has picked up a copy.  And whoever hasn’t please do.  Much love!

So, though no one might ever have known any different, I am finally now back up and running.  My ‘old’ (’05) computer crashed a couple of weeks ago.  And man, is it crippling?  No Wacom, no image archive, and I had to remember all my passwords.

I am now running smooth with a Quad core, 6 GB mem, 3GHZ RAM, and a TB hard drive.  Luxury, compared to my last machine, which wasn’t too shabby itself.  Ahhhh, back to work.

I have a number of acquisitions I hope to come by in the next few months.  But for the most part this office set up suits me fine for the work that’s been coming my way.

He had designed to manufacture two custom sliding door panels for a couple’s condo downtown.  They provided for a lot of space to fill.  The panels were approximately 8′x8′, and the material did not lend to paint application.  I had to do the design digitally.  Which is fine, except that I work in Photoshop, not Illustrator, and that sort of size and resolution pushed my dual core dell to its processing limits.  Regardless, the final product was exciting.

Above is the door in the bedroom, dividing it from the main bathroom.  You can see the kitchen to the left.  It provides  an idea of the openness of the unit, thus the need for dividers.

So, the design ended up being sort of photo, texture, image collages, with very little hand rendered.  However, I approached them with somewhat a painterly aesthetic that I believe made them really work.

Above is bad photo of the guest room door.  I can’t express how well these are constructed.  The sliding function is incredibly fluid.  Kudos to good design.

And careful installation.

Here are the final image designs…

Above: guest room

Below: master bedroom

I’m really pleased how they turned out.  More importantly, so is the client.

Here are some of the initial designs, not nearly so well thought out…

Much thanks to Stephen, Sarah and Joe.