Inspiration!

I have decided that this blog shall be from this point forward a more faithful recounting of my life. I was going through some old photos from several years ago that I didn't even know I had on my computer and was shocked at having forgotten entirely about ever having lived through the times that they clearly captured. Now, as my physical memory isn't entirely up to snuff this isn't entirely inconceivable. However, I feel it is my own civic duty to myself to keep a better record of my life so that, at the very least, I might remember it.

...but I will start doing that later, because right now I am still sort of sick.

Yatta!

New shirt design for Shirt.Woot. The theme is "Japan", and I tried to make something as stereotypical and gaudy as possible. However, I ran out of colors to work with (you only get 6, besides the shirt you print on) so it ended up being fairly flat looking.

Flowery Goodness

New Woot shirt this week for the derby theme "Flora". I decided to ditch being clever and just draw something pretty. Not sure if it matches Woot's standards of involving enough baby bunnies, but I like how this one turned out.

Zombies and Vampires and Me - oh my

Dream last night:

The world was taken over by zombies, much like in the comic series I've been binge-reading, "The Walking Dead". Myself and a handful of friends had taken shelter on a gated farm with ever-growing legions of the undead just outside. All I had for self-defense was a riot-guard-brand nightstick to bash in zombie heads. At one point someone was an idiot and left the gate open and in they came, shambling after us. Now these were slow zombies so they could be easily outrun but if they surrounded you you were dead. I just ran and ran.

In an odd turn of events, a small clan of underground vampires was discovered. Much of my compatriots had decided that it was better to become a vampire than a mindless zombie so they all got bitten and joined the ranks of the more fashionable undead. Then the vampires kicked all the zombies' asses.

So now I'm one of the few remaining humans in a world ruled by an elite class of vampires. There are still hundreds of thousands of zombies shambling around but the vampires pay them no heed as they can strike them down easily and are immune to the zombie plague. Cut to me performing an A Different Spin show at some college in the middle of a zombie city. Jeremy, Tim, and Mooch are there, but I think Tim is a vampire and he wants me dead. Luckily I have super evasion powers and can scale buildings by leaping up twenty feet and grabbing onto the walls. Let it be known that vampires in this world can also do this.

Somehow I avoid being bitten for some time. We A Different Spinners set out to find a place that is truly safe from zombies. This leads us down a dirt road to a large labyrinthine apartment complex full of abandoned rooms and kitchens that endlessly lead to hallways and living rooms. Somewhere along the way we found a couple of girls and a guy who we took to be survivors living in one of the apartments. We befriended them and they offered us supplies and a place to stay for the night. However, as the sun set I could see their glistening fangs. We were in a house of vampires.



AND THEN I WOKE UP!

T-shirts again

I have once again entered the Shirt.Woot fray. This time the theme is "school" and for some reason my mind went to fairy tales. It's a bit silly. That said, it would be super-cool to win $1000 (which is the prize for being one of the top three shirts after everyone votes) so I think I'm gonna try honing my Illustrator chops by working on one of these each week. Let's go self-productivity!

Brains.

WHAT HO, GOOD CHAP. FANCY A SPOT OF BRAINS?

...I MEAN TEA.


Bear with me for a minute while I wax poetic on computer games for a minute. I have decided that one viable goal of mine is to work for PopCap Games. I like their style. They are silly and snarky bastards who I am sure that I would get along with. What mostly won me over to their court was their brilliant counter-ad campaign parodying those God-awful Evony banner ads. You know, the ones that started out as scantily clad women asking you to "Play Now, My Lord" but have now just devolved into a giant pair of breasts? PopCap started advertising their game "Plants Vs. Zombies" with a near-identical set of ads replete with zombie breasts asking you "Brains Now, My Lord?" It doesn't get much better than that.

Prophecy?

So last night I had a dream about a lunar eclipse, and as I wake up today I check CNN.com and it turns out Asia just had a solar eclipse while I was asleep. Weird (and backwards).

1 second of fame!

Mooch and I were on TV! America's Got Talent put us in a flash "backstage" montage last night. You can see us after the fourth commercial break, right after a team of dancers, a green witch woman and some weird guy with a moustache and glasses.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/82929/americas-got-talent-week-4-night-1

Mooch is wearing red and I am wearing black. And a hat made of clubs!

Of puns and superheroes

I overheard Tim working on a few submissions for the Woot photoshopping contest again, so I decided to throw my lot in as well. The theme is "classic films remade into superhero movies".

New Sample

I just spent all evening making a new "graphic design" sample graphic so that I have something to send to craigslist posts and assorted interested clients wanting a freelance artist. How does it look?

Welcome to the Rock!

Playing with photoshop. Wee!

Fire Swords!

Another peek at what we flaming fancy lads have been up to. This was filmed at MassArt's spring Iron Pour the other night, which was loads of fun, amidst a 3-hour block of Boston's finest fire performers.

Art Deco?

New shirt this week... it was hugely last-minute due to Atlanta. More on Atlanta later, but first my shirt design:


It's supposed to be Art Deco, and I never really learned what that is so I just drew a sky captainish guy with goggles that I thought looked neat. Geometrical lightning bolts for extra effect. Booyah!

Another week, another shirt design

This week's theme is "remix the title of any TV show", and I of course went back to my days obsessing with afterschool Disney channel shows. Brooklyn was the coolest one, if I remember correctly.

"Gargoyles" was one of those shows that never quite fit the company that produced it. There was fighting and magic and medieval intrigue, not to mention the main characters were essentially demons. If Disney still made shows like that I'd be much less inclined to turn them a blind eye. Maybe if Hannah Montana just grows a pair of bat wings and travels to Avalon I'll reconsider.

Graphic Design, yo

I designed a t-shirt! If you happen to have Woot t-shirt voting privileges, you should vote for it so that I can further entertain the fleeting dream of living off of my graphic design skillz.

The best part about it is that this week's contest theme is "the circus". It would seem that sometimes the stars all just align like that.

Baroque Music

...leads to fun sketches. People who are concentrating hard on playing an instrument make good models, since they don't move around very much and don't mind if you are staring at them.

Creativity

So I drew my bad-ass D&D character. He's a half-elf ranger named "Gad" and dispenses justice in the form of flaming arrows to your FACE because he is THAT COOL.

...and master of none.

In the past 24 hours I have proven myself in two random and completely un-lucrative ways:

1) Performing with A Different Spin, along with Tim, Jeremy and Mooch at the Arisia sci-fi convention in Cambridge, which included a solo 5-minute ball and club juggling routine which apparently went really well.

2) Doing sound and lights for Peter and Lily for their two-man comedy show (called "The Tango", at Improv Boston). The funny part about that was that I was also tagged by the stand-up rapper act before them to run his music and lights. No difficulties = great success!

So I suppose I can start making the most schizophrenic bohemian artist resume ever. If only there were jobs out there looking for "generally competant people with varied interesting skills".