The story begins with me making a trip to Stockton to visit my good friend Nick. He attends school there at The University of the Pacific. The reason for the trip was to spend a few days in the dorms, meet some people, and make a few recordings. So I packed my portable studio into the trunk of my car and made the hour drive to Stockton.

Once there, we set up my things and got right to work. After a few takes, however, hunger set in and we stopped and headed for the store. Along the way we ran into a few of Nick’s friends who happened to be planning some sort of outdoor festival at the school that weekend. Turned out, Nick was going to play in his band the very next day. I thought nothing much of it and proceeded to follow Nick out to the parking lot and drive to get some food.

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The next day we awoke and went to breakfast. He found a way to sneak me into the cafeteria and so we ate breakfast. As we were walking back to the dorms we came across what was starting to resemble the stage for the festival. I meet some people and before I realized I had offered up my services to do the sound engineering for the show.

When Nick’s band, Avon Union, came on I was immediately impressed with their enthusiasm for playing and offered to record the band at a home studio in Fremont. We made the necessary arrangements and the recording took place in mid-December. The songs were then mixed a month later when they returned from their winter break from school.

What you have here is one finished song from their EP and the artwork. The later was a collaborative work between Deadlymarxist and I. I felt the band had to be illustrated as larger than regular size and suffering from carrying all their instruments. It was an attempt to show the amount of hard work that is involved in producing music and the size difference was to say they have the necessary ego to be professional musicians.

A big thanks goes out Deadlymarxist, Fabian for engineering this putaso of a project, thee Frognuts for his input / opinion, and of course the musicians involved for actually finishing. The process from inspiration and creativity to a finished product is truly about interdependence.

You can find further recordings of Avon Union by clicking HERE.

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Clowns used to be about the funny. Big shoes, crazy colors, and flying pies.
But now they about serial killers, nightmares and poison pies. What happened? I don’t know, maybe the trend toward clowns being poorly disguised evil started with that serial killer that dressed up like a clown.

Well clowns can still be funny. Or ironic, or whatever the hell the line drawing I’m posting implies them to be.

Originally titled “Pie-Slaughter”, this black and white drawing turned out better than I thought. Good enough to garner a spot at the Academy of Art spring show back at the beginning of 2007. Oh and I sold a print of it too.

My inspiration was the desire to illustrate an emotionally heavy post-man-slaughter situation, but replace the key players with clowns and weapons with pies.

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I’m wondering, now that I have the ability, whether or not to devote some time to coloring this piece on the computer. No wait, I know I should devote time to coloring this piece, but time is the problem right now.
Also, for your benefit, here is the preliminary perspective study for said drawing.

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Today I post a digital painting called, ‘What Now?’. This painting was done as a final for my Illustration class this last semester.

It’s an important painting for me, because after one year of Art School, it’s the first of my works that I am happy with. Oh sure, I can still see the flaws, places where I could go back and improve things. But overall, I managed to use composition, color and perspective to paint the picture I wanted. Please Enjoy.

The original size for this piece is 15″x 20.” It was created with Photoshop CS2. It took me about 40 hours, spread over three weeks, to complete. I haven’t named the characters or explained their present situation. I mean, I know that the child in the painting dreams he awakens in very real and dangerous worlds, where his only friends are the his toys come to life. But how old is he? What are his toys names? Why does this keep happening? These are questions I have not answered but should have.

My excuse is that I was pressed for time, and was focused on coming up with a compelling composition and not a back story. I realize now that it was wrong of me to side-step coming up with character and story descriptions. Why? Well, making a story to go with your illustration, or to inspire it, enriches the final piece. It also makes me look like less of a thoughtless bonehead when people ask about the painting.

In other news I’m back in school. My schedule is rough. Five days of workin’ from dawn till dusk. Three days of school and two days of work. Nevertheless I have a collaborative project in the works with ThirdSPUD and another with Thee Dynamic Effect.
The first project is cover art for a CD, and the second is production art for an animation short. Good times.

Bonus: Also, my friend Gabe was inspired by our threadless t-shirt design submission, from the inspiration was born an artwork serving as promotional art for his daughter’s b-day bash. I got a kick out of it. The theme for the party was Pinata mayhem. I went. And there was. We named the pinatas Paco and Chuey. Click here to check it out.