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 about time for a new Lenny Dee-shirt! You can find the old, inferior one here. The new, improved one is below:

Here’s the front:

Aaaand the back (an inspirational quote):

New shirts are always exciting! Sorry for the late post but not the exclamation points! Catch you next week!

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!

Oh boy. That’s right, these suave, urbane musicians are all single, will make you tingle, and of course they’re ready to mingle. They’re the Funky, Sexy Jazzmen, the sole (or perhaps, soul) survivors of a dying way of life: the jazz (click each image for a larger, jazzier version).

The three featured here are but a small portion of the underground collective known as the Funky, Sexy Jazzmen. Rumors of their musical and sexual prowess have spread from Portland to Pittsburgh, and then right on to the other Portland.

Why, you might even have an FSJ in your very own neighborhood, under your nose! By day, they pose as ordinary men: dog catchers, small appliance repairmen, high school custodians, but by night, they transform before your very eyes into Funky, Sexy Jazzmen.

I’ve managed to capture the likenesses of just three FSJ’s here, but there could be countless others out there in the world… going about their daily lives with an untold, secretive secret: that they are the Funky, Sexy Jazzmen, bound by their honor to uphold a dying way of life. The Jazz.

Also, check out the slightly updated, slightly less pixelated, slightly bluer version of Protagonist: Fish!

This year for Carleton’s Politics and Culture magazine, The Lens, I did a series of drawings of the departing seniors, as opposed to photographs in the past. I used a similar contour style as I did some months ago for Morgan Freeman and the many other Scott Donaldsons. I think here I downgraded from Micron pen (specifically made for drawing) to a regular ol’ Uniball. I’m just as pleased with the results, though, and with a few exceptions I think the drawings are fairly representational of all the students. Here is a collection of the 12 drawings of the seniors (I originally drew them on four separate sheets of paper):

I’m very fond of representating the face with few lines. Don’t think it’s the last time you’ll see me do that.

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.”

One of my favorite bands, Gomez, is due to release a new album this Tuesday, March 31st. I’ve been waiting for quite some time for this! And to show my excitement, I painted this for the (anticipated) first single of their album, Airstream Driver (for a while, this was available as a free download from their website, but no longer). It’s a great song, and if any indication, A New Tide will be a great album. My roommate Peter and I plan on driving somewhere out of Northfield next Tuesday so that we can buy it as soon as it hits stores in the U.S.

And since I forgot to update on Monday, here’s a picture of a regretful man:

See you on Friday!

I recently responded to a want ad in Carleton’s NNB (Noon News Bulletin) looking for an illustrator for a website. Little Four Eyes is run by Ann Zawistoski, the Science Librarian, and mother of a glasses-wearing child. Having gotten my first pair of glasses when I was five years old, I was intrigued (though I wear contacts now). One of the driving forces of Ann’s website is the fact that children with glasses are underrepresented in children’s books, television shows, magazines, and other media. I started working on a banner for the site, featuring three bespectacled children. Here is the first draft:

Having been in a Figure Drawing class for the last several weeks, I was more used to working in a realistic style. The revised banner, which you can find at Little Four Eyes draws more on traditional children’s illustrative styles. I spent a lot of my youth cartooning, and it was fun to return to a way of drawing that I hadn’t visited in several years, and combining it with skills that I’ve picked up since creating art more seriously.

I will probably be doing more illustrations for Little Four Eyes. I also plan on soon creating a gallery page that will host a selection of my work, for better organization.

Only five more weeks of winter!

I did some brief research for my painting and drawing class recently on Canadian artist Marcel Dzama, one of the founders of the Royal Art Lodge. My art professor David Lefkowitz tipped me on to him, as his illustrative style was similar to what I was exploring at the time. Dzama works mainly in ink and watercolors, and produces hundreds of small drawings at a time for exhibitions. A lot of his pieces have a very limited color palette, and I found that Dzama often uses root beer as a base for his browns (I tried coffee once, which had a wonderful texture, but I didn’t think the color was that special). In 2005, Dzama illustrated the cover for the Beck album Guero:

Large, disembodied heads and bats (seen on the “sticker”) are recurrent in much of Dzama’s work. More can be found at the Richard Heller Gallery and David Zwirner, the latter of which shows some sculpture, a new area for Dzama.

This was the design I submitted for my sketch comedy group, Lenny Dee. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s supposed to be Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, villain of the Coen brothers’ 2007 film No Country For Old Men. Lenny Dee doesn’t have much to do with Chigurh, except that we all find him pretty badass and thought that it would be great to have such an intimidating face on our T-shirts, especially for the annual sketch comedy vs. improv softball game.