Skadonna

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Here's a T-shirt I just designed for Skadonna, an all ska Madonna tribute band. For the figure, I once again borrowed from the iconic Betty Beat/Rude Girl logo. I figured I could combine that with an equally iconic version of Madonna. In my opinion, that would be her "Blond Ambition" days (circa 1990). The layout was borrowed from the seminal ska compilation "This Are Two Tone".

Here's the logo isolated from the T-shirt design. I think the band may use it on flyers or stickers.

"Good golly, I'm brooding!"

I've been lucky enough to do another illustration for Podhouse 90.

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Podhouse 90 is a scripted anthology series of radio plays by Frank Conniff (Mystery Science Theater 3000, Cinematic Titanic, Invader ZIM) This is for Episode 03 - "Dracula Has Risen In the Polls", another musical comedy extravaganza! As a lifelong Mystery Science Theater fan, it's always an honor when Frank asks me to illustrate for him. This one however was an especially big thrill as it stars one of Frank's fellow MST3K alumni, Trace Beaulieu who played Crow and Dr Forrester. cThis episode also features the spectacular comedy talents of Eddie Pepitone, Julie Klausner, Dana Gould, Laraine Newman, Emily Maya Mills,Joe Keyes, Leite Preto, Rachel Lichtman, Olana DiGirolamo, J. Elvis Weinstein and Mark Thompson, plus vocals from Karen Lloyd and stellar guitar work from Larry Saltzman. 

For this illustration, I looked to the old pre-code EC comics for inspiration. Those things were just the best. 

I even spoofed the EC logo by changing it to Frank's initials.

I made an alternate version that had a bit more of a worn "distressed look". I grabbed the folds and textures from an old worn copy of Mad Magazine. Frank decided not to go with this one since all teh texture doesn't read when the image is scaled down small in iTunes and I'd have to agree. Check out the image full size to see all of the texture. 

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As with all of my illustrations, I always notice what I did wrong or what I could have improved on after the fact. I'm not too happy with Dracula's proportions. I think his head is a bit too big here. Oh well, I'll just try to keep that in mind next time.

His backpack's got jets

Here's a T-shirt/tour poster illustration I just did for mc chris.

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I met Chris back Adult Swim days at Williams Street in Atlanta and I had been a fan of his work before that, so it was nice to get to do some design work for him. Here are a few of the earlier versions. Chris wanted me to steer it in more of a 1930s Max Fleischer direction.

These are a few of the original concepts.

Rubber? I barely know her?

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This is a piece I made for "Cinch Me", a corset fetish group art show at Antebellum curated by my friend Simone Williams. I want to thank Simone for pushing me to do something new with my work. I was worried I wouldn't have time to create a piece since I tend to over-think all of my work and fixate on minute details to the point where I take forever to get a piece done. This is one of the reasons I'm not as productive as I'd like, because each piece seem to take too long or I'll end up getting frustrated and give up before I even begin. Simone saw some of my more loose, rough concepts for other pieces and convinced me that my work even in that state still looks good and that I should just go for it. I think she was right. Instead of spending weeks on a large scale canvas painting with a paint brush smaller than my pinky nail, I just went for it with markers and paint on a large sheet of paper and I was able to knock it out in one afternoon. I should really paint like this more often. The color choices were inspired by my friend Xanthia.

 (in the upper right, from left to right: Dominique D'vita, Simone Williams, Xanthia Pink)

"Awfully unsporting of me, I know, but what the hey, I gotta have some fun!"

Here are my pieces for the 4th Annual Red Dot Auction at The Chuck Jones Center for Creativity.

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I wanted to keep Bugs and Daffy somewhat traditional, but still manage to put a bit of my own style on it. The backgrounds are copied from original Maurice Noble layouts.

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Celebrate the life, don't memorialize the death

Yesterday it was announced that actor Bob Hoskins had passed away, and on my Facebook account I had made the following comment "I wonder how long it will be til shitty fan art of Roger Rabbit or Mario looking sad floods my news feed". Some people thought this meant I didn't like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or that I didn't care about Bob Hoskins. Now neither of those are true. Obviously Roger Rabbit was a tremendously influential movie for me and to this day remains one of my favorite films of all time. My problem was that this will be yet another situation where all of the dumb-dumbs of my generation will remember an actor for only one single role despite a lifetime of work and achievement. Also regardless of the fact that they never bothered to see his any of his other work, all day long they're gonna act like their freakin' dad died. The same thing happened last month with Harold Ramis ("Who? Oh, you mean Egon!") The man made a tremendous contribution to modern comedy cinema, and all anyone could talk about was Ghostbusters. There was no mention of SCTV, Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation or Animal House! It was nothing but illustrations of Egon as a ghost with the rest of the Ghostbusters looking sad. Just wait til Christopher Lloyd dies and we're inundated with a flood of crappy drawings of Marty McFly in the passenger seat of the DeLorean looking sad at an empty driver seat. I guarantee it will happen and there will be no drawings of Danny DeVito and the rest of the cast of "Taxi" looking sad at a cab, or Jack Nicholson and the rest of the cast of "One Flew Over The CooCoo's Nest" looking sad at an empty straight jacket or something equally as dumb. 

But beyond the fact that such fan art focus exclusively on just one single aspect of an artist's lifetime of achievements, I want to point out how phenomenally boring, predicable, formulaic, and depressing these "tributes" are. It's not a new thing. Warner Brothers did a series of these when Mel Blanc and Chuck Jones (my hero) died

Look at how boring and depressing these are! Now to me, this isn't a tribute. This is a commemoration of death and doesn't do any kind of justice to the accomplishments they achieved in their lifetime or the joy they brought to their audiences. Also, these were for sale as high end (and expensive) cels. Would you really want to hang this on your wall? Why would you want a reminder that an artist whose work you've admired and has brought you so much happiness in your lifetime is now dead. Why not something that actually celebrates their life and their work. Take a look at these two tributes that were created when Friz Freleng died. 

To me, the second one seems to do a much better job at celebrating the artist's life rather than going down a tired, predictable route that says "he's dead and we're sad" 

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with being sad, but if you're an an artist, and another artist has really truly influenced you, and you want a way to express that creatively when they pass, then actually show that by doing something genuinely creative and not a tired old cliche.  Create something that celebrates their life and how it affected yours. Make something that that artist could look at and be proud to have had a hand in helping shape the person behind it.

The Animated Adventures of Steve Zissou and Friends

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Here we have "an original production cel and matching layout drawing from 'The Animated Adventures of Steve Zissou and Friends' from 1983". This is my piece for tonight's group tribute show to Wes Anderson at Meltdown Comics curated by Nico Colaleo.

I've always loved animation production art, so I thought this show would be a great chance to make my own cel. The thinking behind this one was that in "The Life Aquatic" Steve Zissou was a huge celebrity in the public eye in the 1970s, so it would be only logical to assume that he would have had his own animated series in the early 80s. When designing this I really wanted to match the look of early 80s Saturday morning cartoons. I realize that for this to make chronological sense I would have had to design it as a younger Bill Muray, but I did't think that would sell. People would want to see him as he appeared throughout the movie. I of course had to add an obnoxious anthropomorphic talking animal sidekick since that was pretty much a requirement for the cartoons of the time. It only stands to reason that if Steve Zissou were real and he were to star in an Saturday morning cartoon, that some dopey network execs would have said "How about a talking dolphin? We'll call him Squeaks. The kids'll love him. He'll open up a whole new area of merchandise possibilities.". I didn't want to just draw the characters in a boring, static pose. To really make this look like an actual production cel, I would have to create an image that looks like it was a still from the middle of the action of a scene, and I wanted the scene to reflect what looks like could have been a story typical of the cartoons of that time and genre. So here Steve is informing the crew that Squeaks has just found the enchanted jewel which will lead them to the mystic cave of the ancients, or something like that. I'll leave it up to the view to write their own story.

To create the cel, I drew the image in Photoshop and had each image printed onto its own acetate transparency sheet. Then, just as with traditional animation cels, I painted the backs of each. I then taped them onto a hand drawn layout sketch.

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Here are a few early concepts. You can see at one point I was considering putting Steve underwater and pairing him with a talking seahorse.