hellboy

Internet,

So Dark Horse announced that there would be a hellboy cover contest last wednesday.  The contest was to recreate a Hellboy cover in the wake of Mignola and Fregredo's ending run of this awesome hellboy saga that has been going since I moved to Minneapolis.  The link to the announcement is here if you want to take a look, but lately the server has been crashing (maybe due to too many hellboy enthusiasts?).

Mike Mignola's Hellboy (and all mignolaverse titles) hold a special place in my heart.  In fifth and sixth grade I really wanted to be a comic book artist.  I created my own little universe that was essentially a rip off of marvel.  I don't know what happened- I lost interest for awhile, and became obsessed with girls, drugs, being gothic, trying to be an actor/director, trying to be a fine artist/ muralist/ tattoo artist/ drunkard.  Hellboy got me back into comics.  In his work I saw this different approach to comic art and storytelling and I was riveted to the sequential form for good this time.  It's been seven years or so making my own comics, starting to attend conventions and recently graduating from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with a comic art degree.

The past couple months I've worked to secure a graphic design internship.  Just like Mignola inspired me to  be a cartoonist, MCAD inspired me to tackled graphic design.  I've made some good contacts in my search for a graphic design position, but over the last week I've received emails complimenting me on my work but telling me they are looking for someone with a different skill set.  Three emails back, not one interview, and then this hellboy cover contest beckoned to me.  Is the comic deity giving me a slap in the face?  I don't know.  I still love design, web and typography.  But I had a hell of a good time re-drawing mignola's hellboy cover.

Here is the cover I chose to recreate from Hellboy The Wild Hunt #4:

Below is my image for the contest.

There is actually only one thing about the image I did that bugs me a little.  But I'm not going to tell you, cause that would be wrong.

Also, I did this hellboy image when Hellboy 2 the Golden Army came out.  They had a competition for hellboy art and the winner would get to go to the LA premiere and meet Mignola and Guillermo del Toro.  I didn't win.  I didn't hear who did, actually.  But, you know, I scanned it and touched it up in photoshop and I do still like it.  Ki Bae said, "Thanks for drawing that, Daddy, good job."

So, yeah, stuff.  peace out.

8']

some experimentation with stuff

Hey Internet.
Design.  Sort of.  I got a hair up... and then.  Poof.

here is a dot i like

so then i made many dots

screwing around with ocr

more screwing around.  pretending i'm a prominent, talented and famous designer

screen shot.  messing the pattern up

blueline it.  print it.  trace it.

photograph at angle.  repeat above.  

stick a white logo over it.

tilt it make it blue.  play with compostion

design quadrants of gradients around it.  have the blue design puke up red dots

tired of the blue.  throw in a brontosaurus for kicks

realize it's over-designed. separate the two elements.

prep for curriculum vitae.

distort and butcher some ocr into barely readable awkward paragraphs

have my designs throw up some more

use the quadrant gradients as an organizational structure for a cv.  throw in a beauty mark.

having the best time ever.  what does this say below?

I decided to push my cover letter and resume into some experimental territory.  I don't know if it worked yet, but looking back it the process two weeks later it was some good times.  Does anyone like my  typographic experiment?  i like it charming/ugly

Anyways.  I have like fifteen fantasy ink illustrations underway and stuff.  they will be epic sci fi anthropomorphic goodness.  word.

8'|

What I've been doing for a couple months:

Hey internet,
Okay, so there's going to be tons of crap in this post.  One is because I think some of this stuff was worth my time to do and share because it just hasn't been seen yet.  Some of it is from school, some of it was for a gig that fell through, some of it was for a website that didn't exactly turn out as planned, and then the last image was something for me.  Something I wanted to see, and I think it's kinda cool, like spaceman Sol cool.

First is a design poster i did in typography for Erik Brandt my last semester at MCAD.  Brandt is all over the place, acclaimed both locally and internationally.  He was a great teacher and I'm sorry that I missed his show that came out a couple weeks ago.  This guy makes graphic design look really really cool.  Anyways, I was directly inspired by one of his well regarded recent works he designed in response to the tragedy in Japan.  I'm going to include it in this post because it's one of the coolest things I've seen all year and I have a copy hanging in my kid's room.

Pretty friggin' awesome right?  I can go off about grids and colors and composition but I don't have to because his design sensibility is so transparent and elegant.  Nothing but wonderful things at Brandt's websites: typografika.com and geotypografika.com.  

So I was inspired by this guy and did the following piece.  It's a poster representing the variety and validity of mcad's design program by listing the names of the guest speakers we've had at mcad.  Below is my version and some details(i had to serious shrink the original version's file size).  See if you notice Brandt's influence.  

I kinda let the piece design itself with this one.  I laid out a grid and started adding names and eventually each guest speaker became a little totem that stood on it's own but also helped define the composition.  I like this.  I wish there had been more guest speakers so I could've filled the entire poster.  This is the one piece that I submitted for the adobe design rewards so we'll see.

This next piece is kinda all over the place.  This was an assignment for my web and screen class.  I attempted to animate a sprite using actionscript in flash but I wasn't able to completely succeed here.  For one, this is an area of actionscript in which my instructor was not specialized as it was not a game design class.  For two, my access to adobe flash has now ended.  It is a cool program, and there were things that I still wanted to do with it, but well, whatever.  Below are the fifteen or so animation cells I designed to make this "Oslox" walk cycle:

Very Chrono Trigger and Swords and Sworcery inspired.  You can click through the walk cycle here or you can sort of kind of move him around with your arrow keys(just make sure you click on the program first) here.  I know, kinda lame, right?  I really wanted to try to make a roleplaying game but I just don't know crap about C++.  I would need like two more years of school just in scripting languages and I just don't have the time.  At about this time in a designer's life, you realize that time is really limited, and, what are the most important projects to spend your life doing.  The storyline would've been cool.  It involved a dystopian society and an omnipotent evil cannibalistic religious world order (totally Andrew Herbst's idea).  This character would have eventually pulled a giant lighting rod out of his power pack and whipped electricity at people.  SO SWEET!  Hopefully I'll have enough money to produce games, but I don't know about making them...

Uhhh, let's see.  Here is some stuff I did for that freelance gig that fell through.  I figure I can post some of the images as long as I don't talk about the project that I didn't do...  So yeah, this will just fill some space:

Yeah, kinda lame, right?  I coulda done better.

Anyways, I also worked on this website for my friend Michael Mauschbaugh, of whom I've known for more than a few years.  He's opening up a restaurant in San Francisco- the Sous Beurre Kitchen.  Small in scale but large in concept.  I designed bunches of stuff for this website using cool plug ins and funny buttons  and stuff.  Eventually we realized there was an updating issue that proved inconvenient, so Michael kinda went off what I originally designed and constructed a site a little more personal to him and  his needs to update it every day.  You can see my version here and Michael's final version here.  If you live in the bay area you should definitely stop by and eat dinner, or have a beer and some of Michael's delicious self-made charcuterie.  This guy has cooked me dinner on a number of occasions and it is consistantly delicious.  I believe he will be sending my a jar of pickles pretty soon.  Really really exciting!

I guess the last thing is this illustration I did just for the hell of it.  I started it on sunday (when I shoulda been at the co-op drawing naked people), and finished it monday night.  I'm pleased with being able to bust ok work out without having to spend weeks on it like I did before I went to school.  Also, I'm finally able to use these amazing books I bought and the Museum of Natural History in NYC:  Animal Life published by Dorling Kindersley (a feast of amazing animal photographs) and the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life(packed full of realistic illustrations) also published by Dorling Kindersley.

What resulted after studying these references is an evolutionary inspired anthropomorphism.  I drew a scythe lizard, a bird of paradise, and anthropomorphized a bird dude out of a Ruff and a Confuscius bird.

Good times.  Stuff and more stuff.  I have ten more illustrations designed and ready to be penciled and inked, but I've hit a roadblock in my process due to my access to MCAD's facilities as a lowly alumni.  I waltzed in there thinking I was going to print a pile of bluelines and then-ACCESS DENIED.  I'm sneaky though.

8']