Animal Collective (the band behind my favorite album of the year) just put out a five-song EP, Fall Be Kind. You can check out the cover art on the link there. I’m not a huge fan of blurry photography. So I made my own.

It’s a little retro, probably much more so than Animal Collective goes for on a day-to-day basis. But it was a fun exercise in Photoshop/Illustrator.

I drew the original in sharpie, which you can find after the jump.

So I drew that freehand, and then colored it digitally. I was trying to emulate Chris Ware’s style, especially the following cover:

(Images taken from the Carl Hammer Gallery’s website). Gotta love Ware! I was also trying not to incorporate outlines into the drawings, which I think succeeded in some parts (the trees) but could have been helpful with the text. Anyway, I just want to get past this without anyone suing me for copyright issues. But I think I’m in the home clear. Adios.

It’s been quite some time since I last illustrated for Dreams of People You Will Never Meet, my friend TJ’s “other” blog (his first being Feeding Milk to Chickens, a meditation on music and life). As the site is nearing its one-year anniversary, we’re reviving it in the hopes of creating the Interweb’s premiere anonymous public dream archive (illustrated by the dude whose blog you are currently reading). While the latest dream won’t be posted until tomorrow, I offer you here and now a sneak preview of its illustration:

So yeah. Chew on that! And I’ll get back to updating regularly soon enough. It’s been a busy week, getting ready for David’s show… more on that tomorrow! And head on over to Dreams of People You Will Never Meet!

The awkwardness of the title of this post I attribute to my perennial desire to create portmanteaus out of the things I combine. Here, my friend TJ (author of Feeding Milk to Chickens and provider of new music), is the latest subject of a Photoshop cartoon portrait. Here is the finished portrait:

There’s a few things I’m not entirely happy with, but I’ll leave those to your imaginations. In the original photo I was working from (see here), TJ was wearing his hat backwards, which, I’ll admit, is a not unusual fashion choice, but didn’t look like a baseball cap. I found another photo of him on Facebook wearing his cap in the traditional manner, and superimposed that on the original, then went about drawing this piece.

If you’re interested in having a portrait commissioned for yourself or someone you know and/or love, leave me a message in the comments section or email me (see the About page).

Earlier this year (around the time of the first Jameson vs. Scott (all right, the only one (so far))), I was getting pretty into Photoshop. It was at this time that I started exploring vector art (the style of the film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly), learning from online tutorials and working with personal/friend’s photos. One of my unfinished works from this winter is below:

Original photo credit and the band name “Tropic Flannel” goes to Jameson. I posterized the desaturated original to about 8 or 9 different shade values and worked on my and John-Michael’s faces (I stopped at his hair). A while ago, while thinking about making a personal portrait, I decided to revisit vector art, but using much fewer values. I also added some significant contour lines, which I think are necessary when working with fewer values to delineate facial features and separate the figure from the background. To see the two I worked on most recently, read on:

Self-portrait (above). Took a picture in Photo Booth on my laptop, and edited it in Photoshop CS2.

It’s Lisa! Worked from an old (circa ‘07) photo of her. More to come, I hope!

How much fun is it to draw the random images you think of during the day? My answer: a whole heck of a lot of fun. After a quick Google search, I discovered that there is no image of a sunflower (or any other flower, for that matter) smoking a cigarette. Don’t read this as a picture that condemns or supports smoking, or sunflowers. Instead, enjoy it for its absurdity:

I drew it in Sharpie originally, then scanned it and did the colors in Photoshop. I’m also back to a strict MWF updating schedule here. Your thoughts (on the sunflower, on my blog, on life)?

Lenny Dee commentary is coming, and probably soon. But since classes are finally starting to wrap up, this weekend is very busy for me and I don’t have the time to spend on Dee-rector commentary that I wish I had. So instead: a short update.

Last weekend Tim (my partner in Dee-recting for four wonderful shows) directed a play by the name of Los Politicos, written by visiting instructor José Ovejero. It was en español (in Spanish), so I probably understood a good thirty to forty percent of it, having not taken Spanish for four years. Tim asked me to design a poster for the show, and what I gave him was this:

I hadn’t done much poster design in a while, and though I prefer working with physical materials, it was pretty fun to make this one. The two actors on the right portrayed the right-wing politician, while the two on the left, the left-wing. The overall design concept was having the two politicians separated, which I chose to do by extending down the “IT” in “politicos.”