"KEEP ON WANGLIN'" inked version

Finished inking my "Keep On Wanglin'" t-shirt design. Based (of course) on the R. Crumb "Keep on Truckin'" comic. Colors to come.

"GHOST OF THE MACHINE!!" -- Inked version

Completed inks of my upcoming t-shirt design. This is a reworking of a previous design that I just wasn't happy with. Plus I had an expensively bad experience with a screenprinter involving the previous design, so I wanted to amp it up a bit to lessen the stigma associated with it in my mind. Thus, the new improved "Ghost in the Machine" t-shirt design! Colored version to come!

"Dirty Rat" T-shirt Submitted to Threadless.com

Hi, gang! Check out my new t-shirt submission for Threadless.com! Click on the image for an "animated" gif showing what the image will look like on a shirt. If it gets enough votes, I can be a millionaire! Sort of. Okay, not really -- but I do get some nice prize money and my shirt will be produced by one of the finest shirt screenprinters on the net! Celebrities eat these things up!
Here's the LINK!

"HELL BELOW ME, STARS ABOVE" -- Take two!

I guess you could call this a reworking of my original "Hell Below Me, Stars Above" piece. It's the same basic theme and layout(astronaut on rocky peak besieged by tentacles and claws, blasting away at the advancing hordes), just a bit modified. I have a bad habit of wanting to continually go back and tinker with old pieces I'm no longer happy with. I hope I don't spend the rest of my life going back and revisiting the same bunch of illustrations.

This is just the pencil stage, of course. I flipped the original and kind of like how it looks in reverse, reading more from left to right. Haven't yet decided which version I like. Inks and colors to come.

"The GREEP is coming to chew on you!"

My little girl, Parker, is 6 years old, and she loves to tickle and play with her daddy. One of her favorite games involves turning off all the lights in the bedroom (when it's dark outside), shutting the door so no light comes in, and trying to avoid me as I pretend to be a monster/dinosaur/fiend who's trying to eat her. I gave my monster an off-the-cuff name the other night: the Greep. It's also the sound the Greep makes as it stalks it's prey: "Greep, greep!"

She wanted to sit down with me and draw what the Greep looks like, so we each sketched out what we were seeing in our heads as we played. So, these are our versions of the Greep. Guess which belongs to whom...

"What the @#$%&* is Wanglin'"

Every once in a while, it's fun to dig up an old phrase or colloquialism and toss it back out into the public arena to see how it plays. "Keep on truckin'" (popularized in Robert Crumb's comic strip) was one that I thought was due for another ride around the neighborhood, so I started tossing it out there in casual conversation and using it to sign off the occasional correspondence. I don't know why (perhaps it came to me in a dream), but one day the phrase "Keep on Wanglin'" popped into my head (perhaps I was just bored with "truckin"). I liked the sound of it, and jotted it down in my omnipresent notebook for future rumination.

Most of my illustrations and designs are born from odd words or phrases that happen to jump to mind and are immediately captured in my notebook, and this is a perfect example -- I just had to figure out what "wangling" is! It came to me just the other day, and it seems so obvious in retrospect: "wangling" is "the action of a squid, octopus, or other tentacled creature walking across a solid surface using a majority of its appendages for locomotion". See? It's so obvious. And so, another future t-shirt design is born (with apologies to Mr. Crumb)!

"Don't Fear the Reaper"

This is the rare illustration that went from rough doodle to finished pencils in one sitting (while rotting my brain in front of the tee-vee, no less). Unless I'm watching the rare TV show that really engages my mind, I persistently doodle/pencil while watching TV with the wife before she retires for the night. I usually sit on the couch with my lightbox on my lap refining pencils or noodling out a work-in-progress sketch whilst "watching" TV, and this design went from concept to finished pencils in one day, which is rare for me, as I usually work on things in slow stages, allowing for a bit of time to let something sit before I come back to it to see if it needs some rethinking/retooling. This was a simple enough design, inspired by nothing in particular (just a sort of stream of consiousness sketch) save for a need to work on something while watching HEROES.

PISTON VINEGAR was the name of the crappy garage band that my brother and I were in before I moved off to Florida to attend art school. I haven't really played guitar since, due to living in apartments where the neighbors would certainly be irritated, and the plain lack of time to mess around with practicing. I still do the occasional t-shirt/poster design for a band that no longer exists, however, so whenever I come up with a random sketch that seems to fit nowhere else, it ends up as a PISTON VINEGAR design. The name PISTON VINEGAR, is of course a wordplay on the amusing phrase "full of piss and vinegar". I came up with that myself. Aren't I a clever boy?

"GEEKROCKET" t-shirt design pencils

Finished pencils for another t-shirt design I'm working on (for myself). This design was born from a simple coincidental "accident". I had arrived home from my latest trip to BOOKS-A-MILLION several months ago with two magazines I had purchased to try out. The magazines were fairly new launches: GEEK and ROCKET magazines, both of which dealt with similar pop-culture themes and interests. Seeing them lying next to each other on my coffee table, I smooshed them together and this image popped into my head. I did a quick sketch and it's been waiting patiently in my sketchbook to be fleshed out until now. The original sketch did not feature the coin-operated kiddie-ride angle, rather it featured the two "geeks" in a simple cartoon rocket. I thought the geek angle could be accentuated by having the two riding in one of those coin-operated "rides" you see outside of Wal-Marts and K-Marts, and a t-shirt design was born!

In doing a bit of web research on coin-operated kiddie rides, I thought I'd like to continue this theme in a few other designs. I've started several other sketches featuring various odd folks/creatures enjoying assorted coin-operated kiddie rides, and I think it'd make a nice sub-category of designs. I'd have to come up with something other than "GEEKROCKET" though, because they obviously won't all be riding in rockets. I (briefly) considered branding the series "KIDDIE-RIDE", but quickly discarded this as no respectable citizen wants to be seen wandering about in public with a shirt that potentially labels them some as sort of pedophile (though I could market them to the NAMBLA crowd). More thought is needed -- details to come.

"LUCHADOLOROSO VS. DEMONIOPULPO" ROUND 1: pencils!

And here's the brave Luchador with the "wee flopsy legs" confronting his archenemy. "LuchaDoloroso" roughly translates to "painful wrestler" while "DemonioPulpo" is, of course "Demon-Octopus"! I'm trying to decide whether to give them a setting at all, or to just use some sort of graphic element as a background (stylized speedlines or radial explosion, etc). I'm thinking the luchador could use a battle scar or two, as well. Still hammering out the details.

LUCHADOR!!

Top half of an work-in-progress featuring this big boy leaping upon his natural enemy! Finished piece coming soon!