Monday, December 21, 2009

Mario's Closet Press

My Mario's closet shirt design is popping up all over the internet.

Here are a few of the articles that have been brought to my attention:

digg.com
videogamemm.com
geekologie.com
kotaku.com
tinycartridge.com
otakumag.com
gonintendo.com

joystickdivision.com

gaygamer.net

meneame.net

railgun.newz.dk

blogserius.blogspot.com

agentmlovestacos.tumblr.com

gamememo.com

destructoid.com
mojo-wire-productions.blogspot.com

What's crazy is that I visit a lot of these sites everyday anyway, it's really surreal to see them writing about me! Thanks to all these sites, all the new visitors to my site, everybody who is voting and commenting, and to Dave, Kyle, Randall and John.

Update: I will keep trying to update the list above as I get time, if just for my own records. However, it's reaching the point where (especially with smaller blogs like mine,) there are just too many to post. It turns out this actually crashed Splitreason's site and voting system yesterday. They are swamped with holiday stuff but obviously this is at the top of their list, as they told me they've never had press like this before. Over 1,ooo people have already signed up to be notified when the shirt becomes available. I have been stressing to them how much people want a print/poster, and it seems like it's a given at this point. They are really busy but are trying to get the shirt going as soon as they can, hopefully early January.


Sunday, December 20, 2009

Sans Mutagen



My shirt featuring the unmutated Bebop and Reocksteady is now up for sale, click here to buy it!
Also I'm thrilled that it looks like my Arkham Asylum shirt is a big seller, as a couple of sizes have already sold out.


Saturday, December 19, 2009

Pinball Pinup



I recently started following the blog of Bill Presing, a storyboard artist who draws cartoony pinup girls in his spare time. Bill was interviewed live last night on a site called Chiustream.com, and as part of the interview event artists were asked to submit their own pinup drawings from which Bill would choose a winner. That person would then be awarded an original piece of Bill's art. Above is my entry, which unfortunately didn't win. The piece that did win very much deserved it, however, which made me happy because some of the top voted pieces weren't terribly impressive in my opinion. I had about a days notice to get this done and submitted, and since I had already done an arcade pinup girl I figured one with a pinball theme would be a nice compliment.


Friday, December 18, 2009

Mario's Closet



I have a new T-shirt design up for voting at Splitreason. This one started out as a simple idea and turned into something a little more complex. When my designs go up for voting I always get the inevitable complaints (you just can't make everybody happy) but I sort of feel like I'm throwing myself to the wolves with this one. The reason being that I had to come up with rules for what I should and shouldn't include as part of Mario's wardrobe. I wanted to include as many of his power-ups as possible, but the main rule I had to follow was that I couldn't include things that actually transform Mario himself rather that just changing his wardrobe, like the Boo mushroom from Mario Galaxy that turns him into a ghost. So I've mentally prepared myself for the barage of "OMG WHY DIDNT U INCLUDE THIS 1 ON THERE U R DUM." I don't mind constructive critisicm, but sometimes it feels like people complain just to do it. If only they knew how much thought I actually put into these!

You can vote here.

And thanks to all the people who do vote, and offer well thought out comments.

UPDATE: Wow, it has been brought to my attention that this design is blowing up huge, actually reaching the #3 spot on Digg this morning in all categories! Thanks so much to everybody for your interest, and don't forget to vote! Also I've read all the comments requesting a poster/print and I will pass the sentiment on to Splitreason. They do offer some prints of my work, and as I have officialy submitted this to them it is more in their hands than mine at this point, but I will surely talk to them about it.


Thursday, December 10, 2009

Bullet William Shirt Now Available



One of my favorites of the newer designs I've done, the Bullet William shirt is now available for purchase. You can buy it here.


Monday, December 7, 2009

Under a Bill



Last week I attended the Under A Bill art show where I had some work on display. It was part of a series of shows all happening within close proximity at the same time called the ArtWalk, a regular event in Chraleston, WV where you're ivited to walk from gallery to gallery. You may notice me in the photo playing the role of wide-eyed crazy guy looking right at the camera (something I like to do in photos.)



I forgot my camera and we tried to hurry along from show to show, so I don't have many photos of other people's work, but here is the work I had hanging. A couple of nice girls bought the two pieces on the far right as they were just starting to decorate a new home.



This is work by my friend Staci which was hanging at another location not far away.

I also want to thank Hillary and Kyle who went out of their way in both time and distance to attend the show; it meant a lot.


Sunday, December 6, 2009

New Items For Sale




A couple of new items designed by yours truly are up for sale over at Spiltreason. The Arkham Asylum shirt has made its debut, and the popular Ghostbusters/Pac-man design is now available on a hoody. Click the images to buy!


Saturday, December 5, 2009

Dick Tracy Cubee



This Dick Tracy Cubee designed by me has been posted on Cubeecraft.com
You can download him here!



Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Topless Robot



Topless Robot is on my list of websites I check daily. Despite what you may be thinking based on the name, the site is basically just nerd news. It recently underwent a redesign and not too many people liked the new Topless Robot featured in the banner (it looks kinda like a sexualized transformer, whereas the old robot was a cartoony female C3P0, hence my reference to him in the drawing) so the owner of the site casually mentioned a contest for readers to redesign the robot. This is what I came up with, which I did quickly while I was working on the Hellboy piece. The contest has no official end, so I'll just have to keep checking to see if I made the cut.


Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The Lobster's Claw



This is my entry for the Autumn Society's Hellboy birthday show.

I was so excited when I first got the announcement for this show because I am a huge Hellboy fan. It's actually the only comic I still read (including the spin offs like B.P.RD.) so it was an amazing thrill to get to be a part of this.

Mike Mignola, creator and (until recently) artist of Hellboy is one of my artistic heroes. Aside from just generally liking his style of work, I have always respected the fact that he draws what he loves and has been able to turn it into a engaging story that comic fans enjoy. What I mean is that everything in the Hellboy universe is based on something Mignola likes to draw. He likes to draw big demon guys with mechanical features, so we get Hellboy and his big right hand. He likes to draw cyborg apes and heads in jars, so we get them as villains in a story. To me this seems like the ideal way to create, and the ideal job.

Therefore I wanted to make a piece that had all of my favorite things from the Hellboy comics; all the things that I think are cool or fun to draw. I combined them into a Mignola style cover, but of course keeping my own cartoony sensibilities.

We were limited to one piece in this show, so I went with the most complicated idea I had. I could have easily made two or three more pieces, time permitting. A close second was to have Hellboy fighting Mothman, a creature based in folklore that originated in my home state of WV (we have a yearly festival and statue dedicated to him, and you may have had the misfortune of seeing The Mothman Prophecies staring Richard Gere.) Hellboy even says he would "dearly love to see a mothman" at the end of one of the comics.


Tuesday, November 10, 2009

IGN Clothing Guide Features My Shirt



Brian tipped me off that gaming mega site IGN has featured my Mighty Kong shirt in a recent clothing buyers guide. Not only that, but they have nothing but nice things to say about it:

"Genius isn't a word we throw around lightly (well, OUTSIDE the IGN offices anyway), but the Mighty Kong T-Shirt in our opinion is nothing short of Einsteinian."

That's pretty amazing, so thanks to IGN and Splitreason!

IGN Clothing Buyers Guide



Thursday, November 5, 2009

Code Red at Arkham



A shirt design I just finished is now up for voting. This one is a little different than my usual fare; I managed to depict 16 Batman villains with only two colors! The image above links to a bigger verson than what's available on Splitreason so that all the details would be easier to see.


Monday, November 2, 2009

ArtMares Show



This weekend I attended the closing reception and party for the ArtMares show and it was a great success. There was a large crowd, I got a lot of compliments, saw some familiar faces that I hadn't seen in a while, and sold one piece that I know of. Above is my work on display, and below are photos of some of my favorite pieces by other artists.




Sunday, November 1, 2009

New Mario Art Homage to Old Mario Art

Recently Nintendo released some official press artwork for the upcoming game New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Being the Nintendo nerd that I am I noticed that some of the art looked familiar. Below are comparison images I made showing similarities between the newly released CG art and older illustrations from past Mario games. These are the only ones I noticed but there may be more.





Thursday, October 29, 2009

Charleston Daily Mail writeup



One of the local papers has written an article about ArtMares, the Halloween show in Charleston that I'm participating in. I'm glad to see it's getting some press! And the opening night sounds like it was a great success. I will going to the reception on Saturday and I'll be sure to post photos afterward. The show is going on every night this week so if you are in the Charleston, WV area please stop by!

You can read the article here.




Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Fall



A fall drawing just for fun. The pose and theme were in my head for a while, and I ultimately decided to use my original character Oly. I also drew inspiration from some hippie girls I saw at an environmental rally earlier this week.

Also thanks to Randall for the kind words on the Autumn Society Blog about this piece.


Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Back to Pac



My newest shirt design, up for voting now!

It's a simple idea that I personally have never seen done before. I think I may have finally come up with something that will make other shirt designers say "why didn't I think of that?" Which is nice, since I'm usually the one saying that.


Saturday, October 24, 2009

Monster Cereal Blog



The Monster Cereal Blog that I mentioned in yesterday's post was nice enough to feature my monster cereal piece! Check out the blog for lots of other great art and all the spooky cereal info you could ever need.


Friday, October 23, 2009

Part of a Balanced Breakfast



This is the second piece I created for the ArtMares show in Charleston, WV. I've wanted to draw the cereal monsters for a while, but they seemed like a pretty common subject among pop culture artists lately. To differentiate my piece from most I've seen I wanted to draw them doing something rather than just rendering them in my style and leaving it at that. I kept with a theme I use quite a bit, which is to take something outlandish and ask "what if that really happened?" In this case, what if monsters actually wanted you to eat a healthy breakfast?

For inspiration I started following the Monsters Cereal Blog, which has a ton of great original art based on the characters.



Thursday, October 22, 2009

Dig Those Stripes



I submitted a new shirt design last week, you can vote on it here!
It's based on the video game Dig Dug, one of my personal favorites. Some older arcade games are fun to play for a little while just because of the nostalgia factor, but for me Dig Dig is one of those games that actually holds up as a solid and fun experience.


Friday, October 16, 2009

Lightsaber shirt & Change Chomp sticker



Two new items up for sale over at Splitreason, the Lightsaber Glove Holster shirt and the Change Chomp sticker. Click the images to buy!

I don't think I've explained the Change Chomp idea yet on my blog, so allow me to do that now. There is a famous photo, seen below, of president Obama with a "Pac-man" sticker on his laptop. Geeks and nerds everywhere took this as evidence that not only was Obama a pretty cool guy, he was a nerd too! The thing is, I took one look at the photo and said "That's not Pac-man...it looks more like a chain chomp from the Mario Bros Series." I was surprised that nerds as a whole were calling the sticker a Pac-man, since we're usually pretty quick to call out any inaccurate obseravtions that non-nerds may make about our geeky obsessions. They are even selling replicas on a website devoted entirely to the sticker, obamapacman.com


famous photo


Pac-man


Chain Chomp


So why hadn't anyone said anything yet, especially nerds? I managed to find a few instances online of random blog commenters pointing it out here and there, so I knew at least a few people were on my side, but it was still quite perplexing to me. So I decided to do a more accurate, if somewhat embellished sticker. A friend then asked the question, if Obama has a Chain Chomp sticker shouldn't it be called a "Change Chomp?" So I combined the design of the Mario enemy with Obama's official "O" logo that resembles a sun rising over a field. Please buy the sticker and slap it on your own computer to show that you are a true nerd and patriot who knows your video game characters!


Thursday, October 15, 2009

Trick or Treat



This is a piece I created for a Halloween themed exhibition being put on in Charleston, WV by East End Main Street at the end of this month. My idea for this was to pay tribute to those old smock costumes we used to wear as kids; the ones that inexplicably featured the name and picture of the character you were supposed to be right on the chest.


Sunday, October 11, 2009

Some games I'm looking forward to

If you know me or have looked through my site at all you'll likely know I'm a video game nut, especially classic games. I go though phases, though, where I either have no interest in actually sitting and playing a game or I'll be dying to play something new. Here are a few games I'm looking forward to:



This game is a remake/sequel of an NES game that holds special childhood memories for me. The original was a screen-by-screen game like the 2D Legend of Zelda games (only from a side view) which allowed me and my dad to actually draw a huge grid and map out the entire game world together. The gimmick of the game is very cool, as you have a blob that follows you around and can change into different objects to help you out. The game design of the original left something to be desired, though, because if you knew what you were doing you could bypass some 80% of the game and just head straight to the last level, which was very odd. But it looks like they've taken this clever concept and remade it into a more solid game, not to mention with hand drawn animation.




If you know me at all this one is a no-brainer. As much as I should probably not want to mention this to the general public outside of my friends, this one will require a midnight launch day purchase. Classic Mario Bros gameplay including a comeback from Yoshi and the Koopa kids who haven't been seen since '91? Count me in.




And finally a game called Epic Mickey which is still in the development stages. Details about this game were just released earlier this week and already have the game community abuzz. The premise of the game is that Mickey Mouse has been taken to a world inhabited by all the lesser-known Disney characters who have fallen by the wayside over the years, and they're none to happy about being written into obscurity forever while characters like Mickey get all the glory. This is an amazing idea to me and greatly appeals to my love of obscure characters. To be fair I think it would have made a great movie too, but a video game works. The games main villain in Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who was actually the first prominent cartoon character created by Walt Disney. Ownership issues led Disney to disassociate himself from Oswald cartoons, so he created Mickey Mouse instead. You can see then how his roll in the game is quite genius.

You can read more about Oswald here.


Saturday, October 10, 2009

Star Wars: Uncut



I came across this site the other day and was sort of blown away by how cool the idea is. Basically this site has taken the original Star Wars film and cut it into fifteen second clips, then asked people to claim a particular clip and remake it. Once all the clips have been remade the movie will be cut back together to form a giant collaborative fan tribute.

The beauty of this project is that there are no limits on how you want to interpret your clip. For example, you could do a really nice job with perfect lighting and costumes, or you could just use lego figures in stop motion or traditional hand drawn animation. One clip has a person crudely using their own car in place of a spaceship, and another has characters made from paper bags being pushed around on boards.

The interface of the site is set up brilliantly as well, with a grid displaying all the separate clips. If a clip is simply "taken" you can click on it to watch the original footage from the movie, but if it has already been completed and uploaded you can enjoy the fan-made version.

Check it out here: starwarsuncut.com


Friday, October 9, 2009

Wild Things



The Autumn Society Blog challenged its members to create a Where the Wild Things Are illustration, so I created and posted the piece above.

I'll say here basically what I said over on the AS Blog:

I wanted to play with scale in this piece to emphasize the fact that Max, this little kid, is playing with full blown monsters. I wanted the monster to look hulking and scary but at the same time friendly. Basically, if you know nothing of the book you'd assume that the big guy is in for a quick snack, save maybe for the characters' expressions.

Luckily Kyle gave me the The Art of Maurice Sendak a few years ago as a gift, which served as a great source. It's an enormous book with startlingly little pages dedicated to the wild things.

There is also a blog called Terrible Yellow Eyes that solely features Where the Wild Things Are tribure art, though I didn't check it out until after I drew the above piece. I'm sort of glad for that as all the pieces featured there are amazing and may have discouraged me from actually attempting this, haha.


Thursday, October 8, 2009

Pin-up girl merchandise for sale!




Prints and girly Tees of my pinup girl design are now available at Splitreason. Click the images to buy them!


Wednesday, October 7, 2009

West Virginia Filmmakers Festival

I was able to attend the West Virginia Filmmakers Festival last weekend In Sutton, WV with fellow Brainwrap crew and friends Mike and Seth. We entered two movies: our two minute horror movie Morning Blood (click to watch) and Seth Martin and Friends which was basically a repackaging of my Gremlin short film only as a segment on a children's show parody that we're working on.

I'm happy to say that Morning Blood won in its category! Gremlin seems to have been shafted again, though it was apparently the only movie in its category to get any laughs, so go figure.

Last year was my first time attending the festival and I knew I had to go back this time around. I could have sworn I made a post about it, but a quick look back through the blog archives says otherwise. I think I may have just told the story photographically on Facebook.

Especially now that I've been getting more visitors to the site and becoming part of online art communities I've been trying to keep personal blog posts to a minimum, saving that stuff for Facebook and using this as more of a place for info about my art. Visiting Sutton, however, is always a story I can't help but tell.



Sutton is a very, very weird place. It's also full of very weird people. Going there is kind of like stepping into an episode of the Twilight Zone, for several reasons. One is that it's so small; basically just one street with very few functioning businesses. Where do these people buy food? Go to school? Get medical services? I have no idea. The buildings that line both sides of Main street are all dilapidated. One side has the Elk Hotel and Elk Theater, both of which are enterable buildings that house operating businesses, to an extent. The other side of the street has several side by side store fronts...but none of them ever seem to be open. There are displays in the windows, but the doors are all padlocked shut. Mike joked that this entire side of the street was just a painted set, which seemed funny until we peeked through a crack in one of the locked doors to see only sky and rubble on the other side! We tried for a while to get behind the buildings to see just how fake they were, but the brush and trees were too thick.

You also see the same people there over and over. From year to year even, it's the same characters hanging out in the same spots. You get the feeling that maybe 40 people live there, tops. Between this and the small set-like nature of the town's geography, it truly is like being in a TV show. The reason I say it's like the Twilight Zone in particular is because all the people seem to have something wrong with them. They all have little ticks that range from being "a little off" to not being able to hold a coherent conversation. I'm very tempted to list specific examples, but I don't think I can do so without making it quite obvious who I'm referring to. I'm not trying to bad-mouth specific people or even the town as a whole really, just trying to describe how strikingly eerie this place is.

There is one person from this years visit, however, who I can't help but mention. After Mike, Seth and I spent the night in the Elk Hotel (which is part of why we go in the first place, as it's this extra creepy dilapidated old hotel with common bathrooms, doors that don't lock, and rooms that look like a horror movie set, as you can see in the photo above) we awoke and decided to attend a pancake breakfast at a local church. I knew that there was a pancake breakfast because I had heard a woman yelling about it in the room next to us the night before as I was trying hopelessly to fall asleep. (She also accused whoever she was yelling at of being "an uptight Jew.") We headed to the church and sat down at a table in the basement. A guy came over and asked to join us. He seemed relatively normal compared to the rest of the folks, and we soon found out it was because he was from out of town. We talked for a while about film making and festivals, and once he felt comfortable enough he started asking if we had, like many other budding filmmakers according to him, ever made a porno. We said no, but he then started to give us tips and pointers for if we ever did decided to make one. His advice suggested that not only had he filmed pornos, but that he had used hidden cameras for that purpose and even stared in them too. At one point he even told us that he had known a guy who died from having sex with a horse. Now keep in mind we've known this guy for all of ten minutes and we're at a church pancake breakfast. Having been to Sutton before, though, we very much expected this level of creepy and crazy and mostly just laughed it off.

After the breakfast we went to a meeting of the Filmmakers guild, where typically not much gets accomplished. They have pretty good ideas sometimes, but always decide to tackle them "later." There was definitely a sense in this meeting that some of the guild members were trying to distance themselves from their elected offices. It was decided that a new president needed to be elected, and the porno guy spoke up. He made a short speech about his experience in running film festivals and whatnot, and did it with a level of enthusiasm and normalcy that is just unheard of to these people. So of course...they elect him president of the guild. They don't know anything about him, have only known him for five minutes tops, and they elect him president. The guy who just an hour ago was telling us about his friend being killed by a horse penis. It reminded me so much of the episode of the Simpsons where the fast-talking salesman rolls into town and tricks all the rubes of Springfield into buying a monorail from him.

Amazing.

There are so many stories I can tell about this place just from the short time I've spent there, and I'm sure there will be plenty more in the future, but this was the main event from this year's festival so I'll stop here for now. Needless to say it was a fun and creepy experience for the Halloween season; more authentic than any set-up haunted house can ever be.