Sneak Peak

Here is a shot of a piece in progress I am thinking about using as a t-shirt design if it turns out OK.
I think I might take this and a few other things and put them up as shirt designs over at redbubble.
Stay tuned, I'll keep you posted.

A Few More Freaks!

Here's a couple more quick Photoshop paintings...

Nothing preconceived, just sit down, think of something and start painting. I kinda like the swamp guy, became bored with the robot and didn't really finish much on him but thought he was worth a show.

What do ya think?

What do space birds dream of?

A quick little Photoshop painting...

Go Vipers!

Just finished this little project up, been doing a lot of vector art lately and thought this might be a nice simple loose step by step.

My good friend Greg McMillin asked me to design a logo for his son Hank's hockey team, Greg had some ideas of what he liked and showed me some other Viper logos that had elements in them that he thought were interesting, but wanted me to do a custom one based on his ideas.

Here are the rough thumbnail sketches, I will usually do a page or two of all sorts of concept directions, but Greg gave pretty good direction on what he wanted to see. After checking these out, he went with option A.





Now that I know he wants this direction, I do a tighter pencil...
by tighter I don't mean finished art line work, tighter meaning overall design, getting all the curves and details of the snake and positions where I like them.

Once I'm OK with the pencil, I scan this and bring it into Illustrator.





Now that it's in Illustrator, I place it on it's own layer and lock it. I also like to make my pencil layer really transparent, about 15%-20% opacity, this way I can still see it but it will not compete visually with the vector lines I am drawing.

I throw a layer over the top of this and start drawing vector lines.





Here is the finished vector logo, hope you like it!

Another Autumn Fairy

Another fairy, different style.... this ones just hanging out on a bird house having a smoke break.

SCAREBRUSHED PUMPKINS

If you are ever in the Michigan / Ohio border area in October,

you have to go see my good buddy Nick "The Schnix" Hartzell

airbrushing pumpkins.
Nick will be appearing live every weekend in October, at Erie Orchard, Erie Michigan.

See his 10 pasche air-guns blazing out pumpkins with creepy faces

and sports logos.

See more of Nick's stuff here

First day of Autumn

Fall is here, and the Autumn Fairies are hard at work changing the leaves in my yard to their beautiful fall colors.
These Fairies are obviously of the yellow persuasion, Hopefully I will see some of the red ones.

Uncle Stanley, slayer of Evil!

I am well known for coming up with stories for cartoons and comics, starting story lines, creating characters and then doing absolutely nothing more with them, maybe this one might actually go
a little further...
Anyways, my son Jake and I started playing around with the idea of a
little old man (Uncle Stanley) who spends his time fighting hoards of evil entities and protecting his neighborhood or subdivision against being taken over by ultimate doom.
Uncle Stanley off course, is highly knowledgeable in this field and is surrounded with tons of magical items and weapons as well as some sort of bizarre mascot and maybe a big oaf nephew or something....haven't gotten that far yet.

On the other side of the spectrum is Uncle Stanley's arch enemy, the destroyer of all that is good, the unholy...well, i don't know yet... but, this entity will stop at nothing to take over the neighborhood because it holds the secret of...well, I don't know yet,
we still need to work a whole lot out. Here is my first pass at very rough concepts, not really even sold on anything, just some beginning thoughts.

Still not sure on a right look for Uncle Stanley, I want him old but how old? I like the idea of him being somewhat funny and eccentric and wearing a lab coat or more of a utility type jump suite with an exposed bow tie.

As for his arch Nemesis, a little dork who is very small in stature but believes he is, next to the Devil, the scariest being alive...is he a vampire? demon? I'm not sure,
like I said, we have a lot to work out yet.

WHAT THE ?

What is this? What is it for? I don't know...been crazy busy with other stuff and with the exception of the beautifully sculpted Mermaid...or...I guess Merman above, I haven't had a chance to do much artwork lately other than this sketch of characters. Anyway other things are brewing and I plan to have some more exciting posts soon!

The Bug

This is a study for a illustration that I hope to get off my butt and finish...

Balance

Balance is a design that was produced in a very limited run of posters. It simply shows some of the simple Yins & Yangs of life.

TRIO OF UGLY MUGS

A small collection of of ugly faces, the ticket holder was for a trade show booth graphics package
the other two were for personal fun stuff. Smile was a poster design that never went to far.