crappy hand of haiku

Hello Everyone.  Merry Christmas.  I've decided to move my illustration blog over here instead of my wordpress page.  Why you ask?  I didn't like the adds.  Who wants adds on their page for god knows what.  I know I don't.  So you'll find my posts and musings here.  Enjoy.  For a Christmas treat, here is the beginning of a Santa I am working on.

Bill Murray Sketch on the intuos.  Haven't tried working from scratch.  Fairly happy with the result.

So I wrote this strip back in 2008 when we all probably had to stand in long lines to cast our ballots.  Hope your voting went well!

Hello everyone.  I thought I'd post another detournment that I worked on at the end of the summer.  I picked this up at a garage sale and it is the biggest piece I've manipulated.  When I saw it, I just knew I had to create 1980's hooded Cobra Commander out of it.  My wife finds this one creepy, but being that she didn't grow up a boy in the 80's, the frame of reference is lost.

This is a piece from sometime last year.  Its another thrift store detournement piece.  When I pulled this off my wall this morning, I totally forgot that I treated it with a layer of modge podge to try and unify my painting with the original.  It kind of worked.  I might try this again on my cobra commander  blue boy painting I finished this summer.  Happy Halloween, everybody!

So this is my quick and dirty illustration for illustration Friday this week.  Onomatopoeia immediately makes me think of Batman.  I drew this out on a post it and decided to finish it off there.  I like the quick and dirty aspect of working with materials that aren't meant to work together like water based paints and office reminders.  I have to give a shout out to Marc Johns since he is the king of post it note art.  If you've never seen his stuff check it out.  It's funny and cerebral.  He also inspired me to ditch the nice leather bound sketch books for the homeade, back pocket, who cares variety.  Thanks Marc!

Here is a sketch I worked on for a book I'm thinking about doing starting ruby & Gertie. And yes, Gertie is wearing a Batman mask.

Here is my submission to Illustration Friday.  It's the underpainting and I wanted to do more but the week caught up to me.  This is my fantasy.  My two girls in harmony of spirit and song.  Maybe someday.  le sigh.

Here is another Maroons comic from a few years back.  Have a great weekend everybody.

AKA Garden of the Gods and Cats. I've been working on this on an off for a few weeks but decided to submit it to illustration friday.  This week's word is hidden so I thought this was appropriate.  One of the things I really like to do is go garage sale-ing for cheap prints that people don't want anymore (for instance, this colored picture of Garden of the Gods cost me $1 with a wonderful gold frame) and then paint something into them.  After I made a few of these, I learned that some artists call this detournement.   I just like making them.

So yesterday I posted my final illustration for Illustration Friday, but I also wanted to share the original sketch I drew for the project.  This is a little, well, alot more realistic version of the final image.  Now why didn't I finish this image as opposed the the more cartoony one?  I think it is because I am trying to get a grasp on a style that is my own.  I think there is an inclination (at least for me) to start off wanting to be realistic to show, at least to myself, that I can do it.  I also have a tendency to want to go in a million directions at once and the harder thing for me to do is buckle down and say this is the path I am walking on now.  Some people call it branding their style and artists and creative types probably don't want to box themselves in in that way.  They can be a photographer, a graphic designer, a film maker, an illustrator ( I write these because these are all skills that I have, yours might be a little different) but to be all of those things ...

Here is my entry for this weeks Illustration Friday .  The word this week was lush, and the first thing I thought of was a mustache and I went with it.  And for further inspiration, I chose to put it on my loose interpretation of Bill Murray.  I hope you enjoy.

I've seen other people do this Flashback Friday bit, so I thought I'd do one of my own.  Years ago, I wrote and drew a comic strip called Maroons.  It followed the lives of Porkpie, Quackmeyer, and Mooseport as they tried their best to live together as roomates.  I only submitted the strip to one publisher and got a response back to try it as a web comic.  I also got the sense from the publisher that the industry was dying and it wasn't a viable career anymore.  Though my childhood dream of becoming Jim Davis didn't come true, I did take a crack at it.

                 One of my many hats that I have here at the University of Cincinnati is module developer.  Last year I was brought on to a team of instructors and instructional designers to come up with a "choose your own adventure" style game for a dual enrollment class that was being taught simultaneously in Mexico and here in Cincinnati.  The topic for the game was about the limited rights and options that women have when trying to cross the border here in the US.  I convinced the instructor that doing hand drawn images instead of cherry picked photos would give the whole piece a harsher and gritter feel to it.  She agreed to the design so I set out to work.  This is what I came up with.

At work, I was assigned to create an illustration of a "one celled dog" based on an illustration a professor gave to me.  While I finished the illustration (which, by the way, was never used because you know, we were copying someone else's work), I thought about what the opposite of the one celled dog would be and came up with the cosmic dog.

Here are a few fun pieces I created that involve my kids.  I love taking photographs and manipulating them can be fun too.

I love seeing people create fan posters now a days.  They are so detailed and so good.  If you want to be jelous of someone's career look at the guys over at mondo.  I'd love for that to be my work.  Alas...Anyway, so I decided to make a poster of my own for the movie I Heart Huckabees (which, btw, is one of my favorite movies).  My hope is that eventually I will create a series of these for each character but for now we start out with Dawn, played by Naomi Watts.

My wife is a school teacher, a blogger , and a seller on Teachers Pay Teachers and so we have been working together on building up different products to use in all these places.  One of the things we try and avoid is using clipart so in turn that means that I have to come up with our own images.  One of her powerpoint presentations called for bees involved in reading and writing so I decided to try and see what I could come up with using Illustrator.  The results are so much better than I imagined!

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/23544812] This is a grapic I created for the Life of the Mind lecture series at the University of Cincinnati.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/24784175]  Here is a video and motion graphic project I created for the UC Alumni Association a few years ago.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/29317214] This is another motion graphic animation I created for UCIT at the University of Cincinnati.  Once again this was totally produced by me (written, directed, edited, animated, voiced).

[youtube=http://youtu.be/sUsVxWRW7Cs] This is a video I helped on for a Chemistry instructor at UC.  I helped shoot the video and created the text graphics as well a provided the voice over.

http://youtu.be/id1Lmygjy8c This is an animated video I created for UCIT at the University of Cincinnati. In true DIY spirit, I wrote most of the script, shot all the video, created all the animations, and provided voice over for the thing.

This is my first ever submission to illustrationfriday.com .  I had never heard of the site but as I've been doing research on becoming an illustrator, I stumbled upon it and thought I'd take a crack at this weeks topic, Rescue.