Dangerous Animals Club

The Tobolowsky Files is one of my favorite podcasts on the web.  Actor Stephen Tobolowsky (aka Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day and a bazillion other characters) tells entertaining, heartbreaking, and hilarious stories from his life.  He covers everything from childhood to overcoming difficult college professors to stories from film sets to loss of a parent.  He does so honestly and with love.  One of favorites was titled the Dangerous Animals Club.

He tells of he and his childhood friend spending their days collecting dangerous animals from the nearby forests and overgrown fields.  This reminded me of my own childhood when my best friend and I would do the exact same thing.  One summer we amassed a rather impressive collection of snakes found under our porch, spiders, toads, ants, and any other creepy crawly that we weren’t afraid to poke a stick at.

Today, I feel awful about keeping these wild animals in little cages on a shelf behind our garage and performing “experiments” on them that could only be considered torture.  But as they say; boys will be boys.

This illustration is an tribute to the Tobolowsky Files and my own childhood.  I’ve also submitted it to Threadless for voting so please take a moment and vote for my design to be printed as a T-shirt!!!

Published!

A while back I did this illustration for a Roosevelt University publication. The article is about the educational and social difficulties children of migrant workers face. Today I got the printed magazine and it looks great! It’s always a good feeling when you see your work in a professionally printed magazine. The smell of the press still on the pages is better than the new car smell if you ask me.

I also wanted to give a quick shout out to Josh Kemble’s new Podcast The Examined Life of an Illustrator. Josh used to co-host the excellent but now “podfaded” Big Illustration Party Time. His new podcast is incredibly personal and chock full of great information for young professional illustrators and inspiring stories for those of us toiling in our illustration dungeons. Check it out!

John Locke vs. the Wild Boar.

I LOVE Lost. The mysteries, the characters, the fandom, the mythology they’ve built up… everything. And, with the final season currently being aired I am fully engrossed in the world that Damon and Carlton have created. I read blogs, listen to podcasts, and I am currently re-watching the entire series with my fiance. While watching the first season, and having seen how far the characters have come since, I really appreciate John Locke and his conflict and was inspired to do this illustration.

As you can see from the sketches, it took me a while to come to the final concept. The original concept would have been much more violent and scary. I wanted to show a John Locke that you never got to see – the moment he kills the boar. Which, I think, would have been a defining moment for first the character of first-season-Locke. But, I struggled with the concept and realized that it was being contrived. I naturally try to infuse a sense of humor into my work and was avoiding that at the start of this project. Once I let my personality out, the drawing flowed much easier. Locke is ultimately a pathetic character and is often scared and frustrated when no one’s looking. I pictured him stalking the boar as a deadly hunter…that is until the boar sees him and then it turns into a Road Runner-esque chase sequence through the jungle… that is the moment I tried to capture.

Grocery Shopping

“Frozen”

I’m gonna eat your brains and gain your knowledge.

I attempted to make some Zombie artwork with traditional media (oils) and failed miserably. So, I did this one in Photoshop in about an hour.

And now, here’s some fun facts about Night of the Living Dead I got from IMDB:

• When the zombies are eating the bodies in the burnt-out truck they were actually eating roast ham covered in chocolate sauce. The filmmakers joked that it was so nausea inducing that it was almost a waste of time putting the makeup on the zombies, as they ended up looking pale and sick anyway.
• In the scene where Ben is nailing wooden boards to the door, small numbers can be seen on them. These were written on the backs of the boards so they could be removed and replaced in between shots, preserving continuity. Some numbers are visible because some of the boards were nailed on backwards.
• S. William Hinzman and Karl Hardman, two of the original $300 investors had small roles due to a shortage of available talent. Another investor was a butcher, who provided some blood and guts.
• The film’s world premiere was at the Fulton Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 1 October 1968 (At 8PM, admission by invitation only). The film was met with a standing ovation.
• Some of the groans made by S. William Hinzman when he’s wrestling with Russell Streiner in the cemetery are authentic. During the struggle, Streiner accidentally kneed Hinzman in the groin

Hot Coffee

These are some illustrations I did at my “real” job and they technically do not belong to me (hence the clever watermark). They are for a coffee related gift if you can imagine that. They were done in Photoshop and took approximately 90 minutes to 2 hours each.

Here goes…

Here is my first entry into Illustration Friday…a day late and my first post as one of them art bloggers. The theme was “Save”. I did this in about an hour just to get brain juices flowin’. The pig, the money, and Dubya’s face were just some photos “borrowed” from the internet. The background effects were created with a bunch of fancy brushes I downloaded from Brusheezy.