Woman of the Month!

My first traditional work of the new year. I'm planning on doing one of these every month! Enjoy!

Merry Christmas 2007

Well, another Christmas has come and gone, and I spammed a massive Christmas E-Card out to all of my friends and family. This card was special however in that it employed the style and technique of my very good friend: Steph Laberis. When we both worked at Leap Frog we had both started experimenting with putting scanned textures in our digital artwork, mostly various papers. and over time, she developed a very intricate paper cut-out technique (exemplified by this awesome tutorial) which I've been dying to try out for months and months. And here it is by all means a massive hat-tipping to her and her artistic bad-assery.... My Xmas Card for this past year.

Post-It-Party

So my friend Andy has got me drawing little scribbles and bibbles on post-it notes. It's a great medium for experimentation and just getting those little ideas out of my head. Here are a few I did last week. See more of my post-its at "PIP" by Andy Ristaino.

Jetpacks!

I was commuting to leapfrog the other day, and ran into my coworker and friend, Andy. and whilst delighting in the delays inherent to mass transit, we humored about the possibilities of rocket packs and how simply bad-ass they would make our daily trips to and from work... of course we quickly realized that if we did indeed have jetpacks, leapfrog is likely the last place they'd be taking us... Cheers Andy!

Busy, busy, busy...

Greetings true believers,

So these last few weeks have left me bewildered, what with all the shenanigans and goings on... but either way, I'm tired of art's absence in my life! So it's time to get busy again. Through all the various interviews and what-not that I've been running around for, I have been forced to reunite myself with my portfolio, reel, leave-behinds, website, etcetera... and like getting stuck with the gross, kind of creepy kid with no hygiene sensibility as your lab partner for the rest of the school year, I've become extraordinarily embarrassed with the way my artwork is being presented to potential employers. And more frankly, how it's being seen by other artists. Whilakers! So pretty much all of my presentation outlets are getting overhauled, hardcore.
So here's where it started. A few months ago I redesigned my business card, I needed a card to give to people, and it needed to say something about me as an artist. I love texture, specifically old paper. I also have a love of all things rustic and aged in appearance. so I took that idea and ran with it. The business card gave me my current direction. At the time it was just an embodiment of some of my aesthetic inclinations; However, I came to really like how the design represents me.

My decision to revamp my entire Ident has been welling up in me for a long time, but laziness, among other influences kept it on the back-burner until a few weeks ago when at my last job, I was essentially told that I wasn't worth my hourly rate. While the job itself was somewhat of a nightmare, I respect the people I worked with at that company. When one of the directors told me this, it really got under my skin... So I broke ground on my work by brainstorming, I want my ident to carry an aged, hand-crafted appearance. The generous use of distressed elements and type. Heavy textures and the Violet and creamy ochre colors should be dominant. Conversely to these elements I adore crisp, defined vector art: grids and graphs, charts and maps, contiguous circular patterns, and graphic illustrations of objects.

Earlier in the week these themes were combined to create the backdrops for my new print flatbook. While tentatively complete, save a few minute adjustments, I am going to detour momentarily to applying this design theme to my showreel's keep case, disc labels, and my resume. Once those items are taken care of, I will return to the flatbook and begin layout and printing. Then once that's done, comes the biggest challenge of them all, my website's revamp... I'm glad I live with a web designer.

If you've actually read this... very long blog post, please remember that all of my work is never closed to critique (so I can maybe get better :} )! So if there's something in my design that doesn't do too much for you, let me know why.
Well, dear readers, that's all I have up my sleeves for tonight, and whilakers, what a sleeve-pulling it was. But now I must return to my room and immerse myself in the telling world of my own head... filled with hairy thoughts and miniature equine aficionada... Woosh and woosh.

Our house... in the not middle of the street

yes, yes come on down to our crappy little apartment at the ass-end of Treasure Island...
and while the building might give you some type of cancer... we'll just give laughs and good times...
this is the realization of some animations that my roommates and I plan on doing of no less than

ourselves... these character models are line-tooled and properly rigged in Flash, all that's left for me is to finish the complete turns for each character, mouth-shapes and some more arm and leg shapes... other than that small tiny, infinitesimal detail, they're done! :D heheh this'll take a while.

I draw my roommates and myself too much...

So I watched some awesome cartoons the other day and it got me all inspired. I decided to make my roommates and myself into characters... the next step is to line-tool and rig this stuff in Flash... maybe even animate it?

WHILAKERS!

well what do we have here? I uploaded again.... whilakers!
Here is the other part of my shoulder angel project... the gentle coffee-drinkin' pancake-eatin' larch-choppin' lumberjack... the canuk to be exact.... since a great deal of my heritage is Canadian... and that the people of that lovely country to the north are so much calmer and, for want of a better description, better behaved than us Uhmericans... I think it's highly fitting that the sweeter side
of my conscience
hails from good ol' Canada, eh?

HOLY FREAKN' BALLS!

I've posted again! hell I've done art again! hopefully after a very long artist's block I've returned to the projects and such that I stopped working on oh so very long ago. This is my shoulder devil... my parisian side with the wine, coffee and snobby disposition... an arrogant piece of shit who thinks that the innumerable stereotypes and jokes against his people are something to be proud of. More will come soon!

So I've been working some freelance at night lately, got me up super late... couple that with my 8 hour day job and you get le fatigue, and the other day... boy let me tell you ... I was in pretty rough shape. So, what was my bandaid solution? To imbibe as much caffeine as humanly possible? Yes... er-- well... given the circumstances, of course. Now mind you, I've come a long way since my days of double-fisting a rockstar and a coffee... with a red bull chaser... we don't want to relive those days... so for something with the same kick and no panic attack... I plodded down to the local starbucks and ordered a grande, quad-shot cinnamon cinniamon dolce latte, I guess I should have thought about that before I drank it, maybe about oh, I dunno 10 minutes of all that controlled substance coursing through my bloodstream, my heart began heaving and throbbing within my viscera... the fucker wanted out! and while I bathed in a sweat not unlike being in the shower when the toilet in the floor above you gets flushed and scalding and icy water become betwixt and between... my cube-mate and I discussed what it would be like should my heart actually defenestrate itself from my thoracic cavity... luckily my caffeinated heart attack subsided soon enough to allow me to bring that story to the wacom... eventually I'll paint this one too...