This is a little something I did for a co-workers husband. He looks exactly like Barney Rubble, so we thought it would be funny to make a decal for his truck. He is going to heave this printed in vinyl and placed on the side of his trucks.

A pretty fun quick project for me.

Daniel is about to embark on a quest to start a web comic. This a prototype I drew up to try to inspire him in terms of defining his style. The main character will be Monday, well a personification of Monday. Monday's are evil, that's all I'm saying. I had a little too much fun with this, I have to be honest.

I started a songwriting blog about a year ago once the band I was in kind of fizzled out. It was my way to not lose that side of me: the musical side. The blog has evolved, and I have went down many different paths. I have been recording videos. These videos however rich in musical ability, are void in any kind of visual excitement. We are talking about me in my bedroom playing the guitar... blah.

I'm excited that I have finally come up with a way to fuse those two elements of my creativity: music and art. Part of the problem is I don't have a good camera, and it is not like I really want to make an entire music video with plot, additional actors, etc. The purpose of the blog was to keep it simple, and just do live acoustic recordings.

It took a while to come up with, and many versions, and a lot of editing, but here is a screen capture from the new video layout. It stays staionary the whole time, except for on the tv. On the tv is the video of me playing the song.


I really like this style alot and I have since came up with how I am going to present all of my new songs based on this style. Here is my new criteria:

• Interesting camera perspective, one that creates nice angles
• The scene will be in black and white
• Except for where there is text, video, and symbols (ie the poster)
• In which case the color pallet will only consist of blues and oranges
• Text will always be in 3d perspective corresponding with the scene
  
• The videos will always be playing indirectly, as opposed to being the main focus
• An example of this would be seeing the video in a rain puddle, or through a window of a neighboring house
  

I'm not sure why, but ambirgram's make for great tattoos. Clint and I designed this tattoo for a friend. Her last name is 'Ponce.' We wanted it to be legible when read right side up, and upside down. Go ahead, flip your monitor around. See?



Our Red Fish Blue logo is an ambigram, that is why the font is so unusual. I first heard about ambigrams about 4 years ago when I read Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. In his novel the 'Illuminati' have 5 famous ambigrams: Earth, Wind, Fire, Water and Illuminati. I recently watched the movie, and I liked the way they did the ambigrams in it.

An ambigram as defined by wikipedia:
An ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion, is a typographical design or artform that may be read as one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another viewpoint, direction or orientation. The words readable in the other viewpoint, direction or orientation may be the same or different from the original words. Douglas R. Hofstadter describes an ambigram as a "calligraphic design that manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves." Different ambigramists may create completely different ambigrams from the same word or words, differing in both style and form.

This is something we've debated doing, drawing charactures of people. The above is my friends Daniel and Chad. It is pretty easy and fun to do, we are just not sure how to promote it yet. A lot of people would probably like to use these as avatars for their facebooks, myspaces, or online forums.

The problem is figuring out how to promote this. I think I am going to make a posting on Craig's List: Get a Characture of yourself or a friend: $50!

A quick and fun logo designed for a local Babe Ruth Baseball team, the Red Roosters logo came more naturally than most logo designs. For some reason when I was told the name of the team, I could instantly visualize the finished product:

We recently finished one of the largest design jobs we have ever undertaken: designing and illustrating the cover and inner page elements for a novel by my friend George Smith. The novel is called 'Reveille', and it is an historical fiction novel based off George's great grandfather: Charles Andre. The story takes place before and after the Civil War, and though he travels with the war, the most central location is Louisiana.

We helped do a simple site for George's last book, 'Uncertain Times.' When he began work on the new book he thought of us, not for site design, but for illustration and design of the book itself.

I decided I wanted to do the drawing for the cover in scratch board. Scratch board (or clay board) is a piece of masonite - in the case of the one I used- painted white, then a thin piece of clay is covered over that and painted black. When you use one of the scratching utensils to remove the black clay, the white board shows through. It is more akin to carving, than drawing, and when using the black clayboard the other tricky thing is you are drawing the highlights, not the shadows. When you draw with black lead on white paper it is the shadows you are collecting on the paper, when drawing on black with white it is like 'opposite drawing'

Here is the picture I drew for the cover, maybe it will help this make sense. You can click on the image to make it bigger:


The next steps were as follows: paint the drawing, and design the full cover: front, spine, and back with title, text, and additional images. This was all done in the Adobe Creative Suite:


I felt like the muted reds and yellows, and the scratching/rough textures created a style that seemed to fitting with the story and the era in which the story takes place.

At first George wanted us to do illustrations for each chapter, a scene from each one that could go above the chapter heading. We both came to the conclusion, however, that with 34 chapters detailed scenes for each one would be very time consuming. Then I had an idea for doing icons for each chapter. Something small, that could either symbolize something in the chapter or directly reference it.

I wanted the icons to feel like the cover, but not take so long to draw. Secondly, clay board is expensive, about $8 dollars a sheet, for 34 chapters we are talking close to $300. The obvious solution was to illustrate using a computer program (Adobe Illustrator to be exact) but I had to define a style, and then I had to emulate that style 34 times.

In my mind I seen the icons as logos that might have been used in newspapers from 150 years ago. It wasn't until my third or forth one that I finally settled on a style, I was trying to make them look like woodcuts:

This process was working really well, it only took about an hour to draw one (as opposed to 6 like the cover) and I could teach Clint (the other designer) how to emulate this style so we could both draw them in order to meet the deadline in time.

The only problem with this style is it was too computer-generated looking. So after we made them I added some distress marks in Photoshop and brought them back into Illustrator and colored them the same muted red as I used with the cover. This made them look more authentic:


Next I added the chapter number and name to each icon, and the chapter heading pages should looks as follows:


We are finished, now after it prints it just needs to become a New York Times' best seller!