Finally had some time to do up the new batch of thank you cards for my clients. Will send them out tomorrow, hopefully.

Did this recently for Lucid Media. It’s the cover for the issue featuring Canadian director Atom Egoyan. The illustration is  portrait of him, with characters from his various movies woven into his hair. the watermark background is based off Armenian patterns in recognition of his heritage.

Here’s the work as it appeared (the inner black and white spot was another cover concept that we decided to use for the article instead):

Here were the roughs I did. I normally don’t do color roughs, but decided to for this one:

Finally had some time yesterday to work on something not work related. Since God of War 3 is out today, I thought this was a suitable celebration.  Technically the image should be flipped to accommodate Kratos’ (the dude in the white circle) red tattoos on the other arm. I decided to make the color scheme orange instead of red, since  a lot of art based off the game features red and black. Orange seemed like something high energy which is something I wanted to emphasize over the violence and blood apparent in the game.

Top is final color work, bottom is the sketch on 8.5×11 paper.

I decided that this year, I was going to send clients something to thank them for their business once projects were wrapped. I was thinking about doing a printed card, but the idea of sending the same card to a client more than once didn’t seem nice, and I didn’t want to have several different designs lying about the house. I was also thinking of a Print Gocco thing but it’s an expensive little thing that is also pretty tedious if you’re just making one card.

Then I remembered that they sold little DIY cards at the art store and thought ‘why don’t I just paint cards for them?’. It’s great – my clients will get a little piece of real art, and I don’t have to worry about anyone getting a repeat design. And I’ve been meaning to paint more anyway, so it’s a nice way to sneak in a bit of painting now and then!

So here are the first two I’ve done that will be going out soon. The inks were done with a brush pen, with watercolors for color.

Did this for the band Ideosphere for their album Black Hole Transmissions. The image is based on the idea of the ideosphere (look it up on Wikipedia).  The album, which has some fantastic sounding nu-metal progressive rock licks, is currently available for download on Bandcamp.

This was done for an art book collecting various artists’ impressions of their favorite video game. My piece is derived from Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne (or Lucifer’s Call as it was known in the UK). The premise of the game is that the world has ended and the sole survivors, a group of teens, are left to deal with the demons that now walk the Earth.  Your main character, one of the teens who himself has inherited some esoteric power, wades through the confusion of the game, battling and collecting monsters as he goes. It’s a bit like Pokemon as interpreted by Lars von Trier…

This started off as a sketch I did some time back when watching an episode of Blue Planet (I love that series, and Planet Earth). I was just doodling the various animals that were featured on the episode – gotta love those marine iguanas. Finally had the time to finish coloring it. Thought the cross in the background added a little more meaning to the piece.

princess

Finally colored her up over the weekend. Brush pen with colors in Photoshop.

Interesting story behind the piece, originally she had a face but while I was inking her I realized that the piece had a lot more meaning for me if I removed it. The idea of ‘princess’ is floating around in my head and I may or may not do something with it – depends if and when I get the time to work on anything of my own again. Alas, these days I’m lucky to be able to do an ink drawing or two before I have to get back to work-work.

Quick sweet feature on Ape on the Moon highlighting my brush pen and ink illustrations. Thanks Alex!

Did this a couple of months ago for Hyphen magazine. It was a fun piece to work on, about hipster scam artists – basically people who seem really cool and ‘alternative’ who really are just scammers who ‘borrow’ money from their likewise trendy (or wannabe-trendy) friends to pay off their debts or else fund their lifestyle.