Digitalcasm show poster

"On strange steeples, I stare at the silent square stars and moon.."

My ole creative cohort Abel Steans (aka 'Digitalcasm') will be having a show at a local coffeehouse in Long Beach called Viento y Agua. It's a smaller venue, but a great place for indie artists with a real cozy vibe. I've found musical talents I never would have heard of through the performances they have here. Great ice-blended coffees served in nifty jars too! Makes me want to catch fireflies (if only there were real...)

Aboot the poster:

One of my go-to artistic inspiration bookmarks I have on my browser is for Drawn.ca. I first saw this awesome little animated short on there called "MARS!" by Joe Bichard. I really dug the analog sounds and simple designs they used. 'Digitalcasm' has a decidedly 8-bit influence so I imagined there would be no better fitting shape than a square pixel hanging in the sky. And of course another short, "PIXELS", (which I heard is going to turn into a feature?) has made quite the splash. These are some neat ideas to play with now that our sophisticated machines can produce pretty much any type of graphics, we look backwards to remember fondly our bygone roots~

[EDIT: added the initial sketches!]

I decided not to pretty-up this scan and leave the sketchbook page as is... I've seen a few artists do this and thought it looked neat-- a certain honesty to it. Plus showing these will make me more mindful of composition on an analog page (as opposed to endless tweaking on Photoshop~)

I came up with these at a coffeeshop if you can't tell and the sketch of the guy did start off from an authentic, accidental spill.

The show is Fri. July 9th. Abel will astound with his amazing business card/sample track CDs and I'll have 11x17" prints of the poster available!

2010: a Toy Odyssey

"I'm sorry Buzz. I'm afraid I can't do that..."

So I keep hearing through the Twitters and Facebooks that Toy Story 3 is quite excellent and also a tear jerker. I wondered if anyone had done this mash-up before-- my bad if it has! Here's my version of a toy coming face to face with something so epic and sublime as the origin it's creation... and the HAL 9000.

Plus it's funny how the Pixar director's name rhymes with "Kubrich"..

This was done for the weekly art jam on the Art Jumble blog. Lots of great talent on there to stay inspired and challenged!

Below is a process gif animation of how this came about:

By the looks of that initial scan, apparently I was considering having Buzz say "Que?", as a nod to his newfound language skills in the movie. Seems like I'm keeping in theme with polygot astronauts in my posts :]

Oh and btw this was Post #100 !

Yay.

Siberian Pine and Wine

Calling all Cosmonauts!

#7 in the "Nouveau Robotica" series. This is a slight departure in style from the more organic forms in the previous pieces (though if you look hard enough you can still find them). This became much closer to the Soviet propaganda poster style, but hopefully still fits in the series. It was a bit of an experiment using a limited color palette and a challenge to not render the heck out of it. As mentioned in my post with the Soviet sketches, I ended up taking a short cultural/educational tour working on this piece.

The title is a Romanization of the Russian word for 'Cosmonaut' and "кедр" ('cedar' or 'Siberian Pine'), which was the the callsign for the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. I threw in some Sputnik-inspired satellites in this poster for an alternate history where sentient robots could be national heroes too... maybe one day.

Distress patterns in illustrations remind me of that pre-worn look a lot of new jeans have... I can tear and rough up my clothes all by my clumsy self thanksverymuch~ I can't wait to get these printed without the 'fake distress', throw them around recklessly, and add some genuine character.

Fun factoids, when in space:

Americans= Astronaut.

Russians= Cosmonaut

Chinese= Taikonaut

French= Spationaut

Makaysian= Angkasawan

Vino!

This was a sketch I did in wine... a fine glass of Campo di Borgia, 2008 to be exact (I just read the label, I don't have a sophisticated nose). This was at a place in Fullerton called the 'Twisted Vine', which had just enough candlelight to draw by.

Maybe this could be a start to a series-- an inebriated counterpart to the coffee stain sketches I posted up before.

They would probably be less frenetic, possibly a bit sloppy. We'll see :]

Hey you Kids!

Get off my lawn! ...and go read a Comic!

I can't make it to this event until they perfect teleportation technology, but if you're in the Dearborn, Michigan area, you should really check this out! Running from June 12-13 and supported by the folks at 'Art and Story'. It's a free event and a really great place to foster interest in the comics medium for the next generation ['cause otherwise we'd totally die out :( ]. Cheers to sustainability! There'll be workshops and panels for both patrons and creators/educators alike.

It looks really fun. If you go, take pictures for me won'tcha :]

Shortest Post Ever...

It's been good n' busy, will post up some new works and sketches soon (including a short comic and a new Nouveau Robotica) !