French puns: the height of comedy

Translation: "History often details the insanity of Don Quixote, but almost never speaks of his wife, the Lady Quichette."
Quixote, which is pronounced kee-shut in French, is similar to Quichette (pronounced kee-shet), which of course is a tiny quiche.

Hosewater Brewing Co.

Here are two beer labels I concocted for the beer-brewing crew I joined last year. Each is a simple pen sketch taped over a collage of ripped magazine paper. Both still need text placed on them in Photoshop, but that will likely happen when I produce more of these so that I can do it consistently all at once. Stay tuned for more! (Bitter Ex Amber Ale, Poacher's Pale Ale, Rye for an Eye, Johnny Pumpkinseed, Bitch-Tits Cream Ale, etc.)

Dapper Cactus IPA (India Pale Ale)

Wily Czar (Russian Imperial Stout)

Pelican beach (the one in my head)

This is an image salvaged from the chaff of fading dreams; that point when you're about to wake up and the oneiric weirdness comes flying thick and fast. I was standing on a beach watching this pelican serve bill-pouch-soup to a line of chameleons who changed their levels of transparency rather than their hue:

I have yet to be able to capture the method of transportation by which I arrived at this scene: inside the 6-seater rib cage of a 12-foot skeletal horse. It's a lot harder to draw.

Research themed tats FTW!

This is a draft of a sleeve design commissioned by one of the faculty from my M.S. program, Dr. Matt Gifford. He had seen a tattoo design I drew for my roommate Jonathan and asked for a drawing that he could comment on, direct, and then bring to a tattoo artist. The (obviously not-to-scale) salamander is one of his study organisms, Plethodon jordani, and the tree is a hemlock with his daughter's name carved into it.

He really liked the design, but I have yet to hear if he's followed through and gotten it. My favorite part was seeing how excited his wife was with the idea of him getting a bicep half-sleeve: actually 100% super-stoked.

Cop-out

I'm slowly running out of material again, and school is picking up so I may be a little less fastidious about posting in the weeks to come. I'll try to keep spans between posts under two years. In the mean time, here's a thing:

Skulls: 3/4 angle

Not 100% anatomically proportioned, but a fun shape to reproduce none the less.
-A pencil drawing                                   -A paper puzzle

School:

. . . the ideal place to hide from the real world.
Today marks the end of the first week of grad school at the University of Utah. So, to commemorate the occasion with a blend of art and scientific education, here are some of the chalkboard drawings I did for the zoology lab I taught during my M.S.

They're in no particular order

Lazy doodles

I'm in a bit of a rush today so I'll leave you all with some doodles, most of which were penciled while I should have been doing something more important or paying attention to something else.

Don't try to make too much sense of these:

These two are ant heads with their genus names above.

This one's an Alice in Wonderland homage.

A letter home.

Today's piece is a Father's day card I "wrote" for my dad last year. It's an image of my parents' Victorian home in California where I grew up and was inked using an old typewriter. It was inspired by other works of typewriter created art, though I must say my finished product looks quite primitive compared to what other people are able to accomplish with the same tools. However, this was my first attempt at such things, I didn't sketch it out before hand which I should have, and I had limited control over where I could put characters. The page could be set to any position on the vertical axis but not the horizontal so, as you may note, the image is separated into delimited columns.

All critique (and typos) aside, I was quite proud of the result. I learned a lot in the process about positioning, character choice, and how much pressure to apply to yield the desired level of "shading."
If you have experience with other forms of 2D art and have access to a typewriter, I would highly recommend trying to draw with one; it's a wonderful exercise.

Two years later. . .

. . . I'm finally posting again! Not that it really matters seeing as this is more a personal endeavor than something to please a fanbase. I went to Panama, attended two weddings (one of which I officiated), got a Master's degree, got a tattoo, and moved to Salt Lake City. I have a stash of new art that I'm going to post, and though it's tempting to dump it here all at once, I'm going to spread it out like before.

I'll start with the tattoo.

This is a line drawing I did last April of Paraponera clavata, colloquially known as the bullet ant. It's purported to have the most painful insect sting so, not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to better know my study organism, I had my advisor sting me with one. If you want to know more about that experience you can ask me in person.

I wanted to go for a style that was realistic but used solid lines in place of true shading. It's based off of several of Alex Wild's photographs (http://www.alexanderwild.com), and the specimen that I kept.
In order to commemorate the finishing of my degree and the experience of the sting itself, I brought my design to Golden Lotus Tattoos in North Little Rock and had it cover the location of the sting:

The design had to be enlarged and simplified due to the intricacy of the lines, and the shading (that I didn't ask for) doesn't follow the pattern of any particular light source, but all in all I was quite pleased with the outcome.

Self-explanatory

. . .

Running Low

My well of previous works is slowly but surely drying up, and soon I'll no longer be able to maintain the pace at which I've been posting. I'm still producing art but only a little bit at a time seeing as it's a hobby and not a career. I will keep this site for as long as possible, and even if I go months between, I'll still update it when I can.

For now, I hope you'll be satisfied with whatever you think this is supposed to be:

I drew it for my cousin who wanted me to draw a wolf, but I instead tried to draw anything but a wolf, and still have the picture look like one. It's almost like one of those hidden picture drawings you find in Highlights magazine at the Dentist's office. How many objects can you find!!

Koyoten von Weltraum

If I'm not mistaken, it means "Coyote of Outer-space" in German, which happens to be the name of the piece I'll be presenting to you today.

This song was written in 2009 by rock wizard Remy Chan and myself, and we recorded this take just last summer (2010). The recording is dropped 1.5 half steps to give my voice a grittier sound. It could stand to be cleaned up a fair amount but it's quite close to what I'd like the end result to sound like.




Here are the lyrics:

__________________________________________

Gather 'round folks, let me tell you a story
'bout a time in the future where I once have been.
Was a little caballera near Alpha Centauri,
runnin' from the law 'cause she killed 20 men.
At her call was a man made of alloyed steel,
killed for creds cause it was his trade.
Sent to kill the girl, but he fell in love,
so he packed his guns and he changed his ways.
She was there for him, he was by her side.
Hits on their heads, they were forced to hide;
just a gal and her tin man. . . tryin' to stay alive.

Droid and cowgirl chased like game
by the hunter they'd been assigned:
half-man, half-fox, red hair like flames,
and he went by the name of Valentine.
His gun, "cupid," shot plasma beams.
Never went for the head always shot for the heart.
Didn't quite matter where he laid his aim
'cause that damned thing could blow trains apart.
On Hades-6 he finally caught their smell,
and on the barren rock where many men had fell,
he chased them across. . . the plains of hell.

They ran as they could but he quickly gained
when they sheltered each other from the acid rains
that fell all night. . . at Back-Bone Ridge,
And the gorge at the ridge was a mile wide
and they tried to flee to the other side
across the old train line. . . the only bridge,
But the fox was there he had chased enough.
The bot stepped in front to protect his love;
he clenched his iron chin. . . and said "Let the duel begin!"
The girl protested with dread on her face
and Valentine shot on his second pace
so the cyborg would not win. . . but she took the blast for him.

His eyes grew red
with molten tears,
let forth a cry
hollow and fierce.
Drips of blood
on the metal man
flecked the ground
as he madly ran.
He clashed with the fox in a death embrace
of titanic proportions, blasting lasers
split the sky like a violet edge
as they both soared off of the canyon's ledge.

Red dust shifted on a stale wind
and settled on the hot and lifeless land,
but a silver claw rose and from over the lip
came the tall android, a severed head in his hand.
Valentine vanquished and lover avenged,
he wrenched and tore at his body's case,
found the last living part that made him a man
and with his dying act hurled it into space.
You can still see it there shining midst the stars.
Take heed these words I do impart:
Never second guess the love. . . from a steel heart.

_______________________________________

In addition, here's a rendering of my take on the climactic scene of the piece:

 Click for full size, and proportionate majesty.

Productivity?

Shredder Shredding

-2007

-Pencil on homework

If you look closely enough at the scan, you can see the printed text of an old assignment on the other side.

Coincidentally, I'm posting this as a means of procrastination.

Ants are cool

Here's a big ol' post which includes several drawings completed during my 2 week trip to Borneo. If you're curious about the trip itself I can show you photos, but this isn't the proper forum for that seeing as I didn't take any of the photos.
Over the 2 weeks we got to know and appreciate the 13 professional myrmecologists teaching us about ants, and some of the students decided to put together a thank you presentation. Someone launched the idea of making a key to the instructors, the way one makes a dichotomous key to identify organisms. For those of you who aren't familiar, a dichotomous key is something like:

1 :  specimen has 11 antennal segments . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1': specimen has 12 antennal segments . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 : specimen has wrinkly buttocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2': specimen does not have wrinkly buttocks . . . . . . . Franklin

3:  . . . .etc.

It's like a chose your own adventure of knowledge.

We put together a slide show splitting out the professors according to gender, physical attributes like hair color, and also according to character and things that made them memorable. It was our chance to give thanks, but also poke fun at them in a sensible way. In order to complement the species descriptions, I made the following caricatures of the instructors:

I made them all a bit smaller so that this post wouldn't be horribly long; so please click on them and look at them at full size!

Facebook Graffiti app and it's wonders.

I'm behind on my scanning, so today I've only pooled some old Facebook graffit. If you haven't checked out the work that some people are able to produce with such a simple engine, I suggest you check out their archives. The best part is that you can watch a replay of any piece as it's being drawn!

Some generic zombie slaying from summer 2008





This represents a hilariously dressed tourist from the Louvre dubbed "Skipper" imbibing Glogg, a spiced cider purchased at Ikea, and forcibly extracting teeth from Diablo of the Blizzard game franchise. It's kindof a "you had to be there" concept, but it's fun to look at.


  

 Finally we have Dragon Eye Morrison from the film "Electric Dragon 80,000 volts." A very strange and slightly worthwhile movie where Dragon Eye roams around Tokyo for about an hour looking for lizards and then in the last 10 minutes does battle with his nemesis: Thunderbolt Buddha. No joke.

I'm not 100% sure that those are the right Japanese characters.