No updates for a while. Slack! Anyway, I'll post a bunch of new stuff, starting with the most recent.
This is an illustration for Metro Magazine. An article about noisy neighbours. I'm pretty stoked with this actually. It came together fairly quickly. When I was colouring this the first time, photoshop died and I had to start over, which ended up working out a hell of a lot better than the first colour scheme I was working with. The same can't be said for the next one.


Time was pretty tight on this one, and while I quite like it, even now there's things I'm not that happy with. I can't draw hands! Amongst other things.

With the above drawings, I started them off in pencil with the intention of inking them. Due to time constraints this wasn't really possible, mainly because at this stage my inking is a terribly slow, frustrating experience. . Either way, the one directly above, the paper was pretty much destroyed in the area where the woman is, as well as a few other places that were just drawn and erased so many times the paper became useless. This image was pretty much drawn from scratch trying to work out how it was all going to work. I was using a 2H (I think) mechanical pencil. which is pretty forgiving in terms of sketching things out, but pretty rough on the crappy ZETA pad I swiped from work. They seem really nice to draw on until you try to go detailed. I actually find drawing on pretty generic laser printer paper to be the best. Not exactly archival quality, but it's easy. Oh yeah, it's also worth nothing that with both these two images, I made more of an attempt to draw things bigger on the page. I find it takes me a little longer to get the composition right, but once it's sorted the rest of the drawing process is pretty fun. Having more room to put in detail and what not. Basically I'm trying to get off the computer as much as possible for the actual drawing of stuff. Mainly because it's way faster/easier than with my tablet. Poor Intuous 1, so old, so imprecise.
ramble.

Pretty basic poster this... There was a tone of type so I laid it all out first, and, pressed for time , grabbed a bunch of photos from this years camp, from Partyphoto.com, put a halftone over them and yeah... there ya. Disappointed I didn't have more time, or less text. Still.. interested to see these up and about. I put a photo of me in there from camp, doing probably the best 'mouth open wooo yeaaah party!' PartyPhoto.



This poster is the first time I've really recycled quite this blatantly. See the posters below. Regardless, I quite like this layout.


Again, shitloads of text. I layed it all out first, then figured out what to draw in the gaps. In this case a vaguely Cheshire-ish cat. and a mouse flipping him the bird. I have copies of the Chch poster for sale, and should have copies of the Wellington one soon. It's worth (?) noting that I drew the characters for this in Flash, mainly because I had no idea what I was going to draw (I'd toyed around with a sailor with a spyglass but still don't have enough confidence in my human characters to go through with it). I dropped a screengrab of the text layout into flash and then scribbled around until something came out. Oh yeah, these posters are the first time I translated my halftone texture technique to Photoshop. Much less system intensive. Just as fiddly though.

I'm pretty sure there's more stuff, but I'm really tired. That'll do for now!

forgot about this one... the street posters were 1/2 an A1 each.. so, in an ingenious move, they're printing both on one sheet and then somehow, perhaps using a cutting implement and agonising hours of surgery, separating them, much like a doctor separate siamese twins.
at a guess.
(time for bed)

The Shins

Here are two pictures of the Shins NZ tour artwork.... the first is the 1/2 A1 sized street posters. Solid orange so, when you see 'em on the street the band name stands out from far off, but if you get up closer, there's something to look at. The version below is for the web/print/retail/tv advertising.. basically the same, just with a bit more tone in it.
I'll post a process thread if anyone's interested in seeing how this one came together?

To anyone who actually read this blog, sorry about the delay in updates! I got ridiculously busy and somewhat loss the blogging bug. Rather than ramble on, I'll give you a quick update on what's been going on...
over the last month or so things have been really busy with my band, Fighting the Shakes. We played Auckland three weekends in a row, which was awesome fun, but hard work, travelwise.
Besides that, getting back, going to work, going to practices and then going back on the road again. madness!
the other big news is I was asked to design the gigposter for The Shins upcoming New Zealand shows!@%@$^ I'll post it up soon, and a process blog.

excuse the blah update, just feeling kinda jaded

something new, finally!

I know it's been ages, and there's not a lot of excuses really... some personal stuff to deal with completely drained my inspiration. This poster was a major major struggle.. I felt like I'd totally lost my mojo. It all came together eventually though.

Anyway, my band Fighting the Shakes are playing a lot in May.... it happens to also be New Zealand Music Month, but I'd like to think that that's not the reason for all the gigs. But whatever... we're playing three weekends in a row in Auckland, which is going to be pretty brutal, travel-wise.

We're heading up next weekend (may 11th) to play with The Tutts and Motocade at the Kings Arms, and maybe a house party the night after, although that's all still being jacked up. Hopefully it happens though, as house parties are really really fun... with the added bonus of, if I get a bit drunker than I should before we play, odds on everyone else at the party is in much the same state and won't notice!

The weekend after we're doing the tour detailed on the poster above. This one I'm *really* looking forward to. We'll be travelling with some really great bands and some great friends. Sam and Pads who are behind the Mole Music label are awesome guys and a lot of fun to hang out with. White Birds and Lemons and the Vacants are excellent too... we've played with both bands in the past and I'm looking forward to seeing them on a nightly basis. Thankfully the last show of the mini-tour in Wellington, so we/I can party hard and not have to dread an 8+ hour drive the next day. Although all I have to do is sit there. I don't have my drivers license so it's up to Chet and Jayesh to do all the driving. I really should get my license...

The weekend after THAT one, we're back up to Auckland again, this time playing at an industry showcase thing that 95bFM are putting on called Fancy New Band. I'm not sure who else is on the lineup at this stage, but I'm sure there'll be tons of cool bands. A little nervy about this one as it's gonna be in front of a bunch of music industry folks... but it should give us a good indication of where the band stands in terms of anyone giving a crap. Actually, the two weekends prior should give us a fair idea on that front. Who knows... either way it's exciting to be asked to play all these things.

In other band related news, our EP is really really close to being finished. All the vocals are down now, barring a couple of retakes and overdubs, and might re-record bass for one of the songs, but other than that.... so nearly done! I need to get cranking on the artwork. We should have unmastered promo copies of it ready before we go away thoughee, so if by some chance you're reading this and will be at a show, hit me up and I'll fling you one.

One of the final tracks from the recording, People Would Say, is up on our myspace page. Check it out if you are so inclined.

I'll try to keep updating with a little more frequency now that things feel a little more stable and on track!

The Sneaks poster - process thread

This is the final poster, in jpg form. I started this on Sunday 25th of Feb and worked on it all night and almost all the next day. It was quite hardout and tiring. I enjoyed it though.
This is the initial concept. The sketch is actually about 3 years old. I remembered it really vividly and had to trawl through my sketchbooks to find it after I was having major trouble drawing pretty much the same thing. There's about 3 pages of awful crappy sketches trying to capture something along those lines.
Started drawing it up, throwing in the text and general dickery, trying to figure out the layout of the laser beams.

A bit more playing around. I dropped the lines out while I worked on the character. The left hand took aaaaaaages to get right. Many many revisions.

Not exactly an indepth process thread, as we didn't take photos as we went, but here's a pile of the prints after we'd laid down the grey.

There's our vacuum table

Final prints. These were completed on Saturday afternoon. I had so little sleep during the week due to working on this and my own work that it blew me away a little think that it'd gone from not existing at all, to being a 3 colour print in under a week.

One of the final prints. It's not perfect (we had big problems exposing the screens, I think the emulsion was nearing expiration) and lost a bit of a detail in the text at the bottom. We patched it up with a small stencil afterwards. Some registration errors, but there were only about 2 prints that were so wildy out that they were trash. I'd worked a bit of mess and chum into the original design so anything that happened during printing wouldn't be too detrimental to the overall image. phew!

All up, this is our first successful print run, and I'm pretty stoked with how it turned out. They're up around town and the uni's now apparently. I'll have to go check it out before they're inevitably postered over with crappy A3 black and white xeroxed WordArt pieces of shit. I'm such a hater.

Either way, I'm really looking forward to playing this show. The Sneaks are awesome, and it's going to be Universe's first ever show. Should be a lot of fun!

Another fauxposter for that magazine in Melbourne. I have enough saved images as this one evolved that I could probably post some sort of process thread about it if anyone is interested.
Might retrofit this for a Fighting the Shakes poster one day.

I've got a couple of *real* gigposter jobs coming up very shortly, finally. It's been a while.
Started a new job this week too, which is good cuz being poor suuuucks (no really).

GigPosters.com Playing Cards: Deck #3

Earlier in the year I was stoked to be selected to do a card for the new GigPosters.com card deck. The last two have had some incredible artists involved.. as has this one. Anyway, here's my card. I decided to run with a variation of the poster that earned me Poster of the Week on the site last year. Seemed fitting.

this is a companion graphic for a magazine interview of said band. The mag asked me to do faux gigposters for each of the interviews. This is the first. I like it a lot.. it's quite different from any other stuff I've done, as I'm usually resistant to using outside elements like photos or clipart or whatever. But I was digging around trying to scratch up some inspiration for this poster and stumbled across a photo of a young Joseph Stalin and it 'spoke' to me.
I like this image a lot and I'll rework it into either a proper gigposter or an art print. Kinda tempted to track down childhood images of other genocidal psychopaths through history and make a series.

kinda random...

a friend of mine linked me to a site tonight that featured a photo of a stencil on Symonds St in auckland circa 2005 as seen here:


looks like someone liked the poster below enough to make stencil of it. Pretty weird and oddly flattering in a "why?" kind of way....... it looks kinda naff out of context of the rest of the poster...


incidentally, I have copies of this poster available for sale (a3 2 colour screen prints), as well as very limited art prints of it that look like this: