A Heart To A Living Grave

So, I pretty much start every blog post with an apology lately. I've been pretty absent because for a while I was working an additional job as part of a transition to an awesome new job. Tomorrow that will come to an end and I'll be fully transitioned to a new job that will leave me a little more time for art and be somewhat more fulfilling than what I've been doing for the past four years. Hooray! There have also been tons of fun summer things to do and so so many shows here.

First off, before I forget, the bat show came down and the grand total of money raised was $4,700!!!! Pretty awesome. So much stuff sold but there are a few really cool things remaining (mostly prints and zines and duplicate things) so I'm planning on starting an etsy shop to make that stuff available to out of town people.

Despite being busy I have been doing art. It's all been for friends and it's all been somewhat outside of my normal style. One of the difficulties that comes with working in color is that it's expensive to reproduce, and generally when friends need work it's going to be screened or photocopied which means working in just line work or grey scale. I'm generally not 100% confident with this stuff which probably means I rely a lot on coloring and rendering at this point. Anyway, the first thing I did was this flyer which I mentioned earlier:

It's basically just goofy Ramones worship for my friend Carol who is a real life Riff Randall and set up this show for her birthday. Like I've mentioned before, I'm not super into attempting a likeness but I think the frankenstein Johnny came out really well:

same with the totally goofy Phanatic seal:

As someone who's been in PA pretty much my whole life I have an undying affection for the country's weirdest most annoying sports mascot despite having pretty much zero interest in sports. The scan of this flyer is sort of terrible. Whoops.

The next thing I did was a Tshirt design for my friend Nikki's softball team, the Brooklyn Rat Cannons. They didn't give me a lot of direction, they just wanted something rat finkish and for the cannon fuse to be a rat tail:
I basically just went for gross (which is always fun) and tried to keep it clean so there wouldn't be too much detail lost when they went to screen them. Hopefully they come out ok!
Finally, and this is the one I spent the most time on, my friend Francesca asked me to design a subscription renewal card for Maximum Rocknroll to send out. It'll basically work as a postcard with all of the renewal info on the back so you can just mail it right back. She asked for something with a seance theme but when I started sketching I went more of a necromancy direction with the same concept, of resurrecting a dead subscription:
Again, I've been working on painting in grey scale with the hope of making a little zine this summer that could be cheaply reproduced. There's a challenge that comes with working without color in an opaque medium (for me anyway) with only contrast to make things stand out and recede but I did the best I could and tried to keep the same amount of detail I usually use without it getting busy and hard to look at. A close up of the magic circle:

A skeleton with an envelope and one with a book:

The MRR obelisk:

Hopefully this prints well and they get some use out of it. It was pretty fun to do and some good practice.

Since I'm about to have some unscheduled time to work on art I have some fun personal projects I'll hopefully be able to get started in the next week and I should be a little more present on the blog and stuff.