Mo' Betta Donkey Kong!

Hey, here's some more DONKEY KONG drawings as I refine my images and slog towards the finish line. Freelance bidness is hampering my progress on this and I can only work on it during the dead of night after the day's work is done.
Still, progress is being made. I'm also working on some new button ideas in the meanwhile, but more on that later.

DONKEY KONG IS... STILL COMING!

More DONKEY KONG sketches from the ol' sketchbook, as well as some other cool samplings of DK fan-art.

Thorsten Hasenkam produced this first piece of fan art. Nicely produced piece with a seemingly oblivious Donkey Kong. Bonus points for being hand-painted, but I'd like to have seen a bit more relation between the characters of the piece. Seems like two separate images tossed together in the same frame. The pixellated blocks save it by tying the whole thing together from a design standpoint, if not thematically. I like his other work, too. His paintings feel like a fun mash-up of Glenn Barr and Shag.



Next up is a charming and adorable little hand-made Donkey Kong by Anna Chambers. All I gots to say about this one is "I want one!" Anna, let's trade!



Here's a fantastic feat of paper-engineering spearheaded by Ian Rickard. Some folks at the Jack Baskin school of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz built a huge-scale replica of the DK game board with about 14,000 post-it notes in 4 stories worth of windows in their Engineering building.
There's also a time-lapse video of them setting it up.



To round things out, I'm gonna close this chapter with one of the most bizarre reimaginings of Mario and his simian nemesis that I've come across. What's even more bizarre is that it is an officially licensed piece that was acually used as packaging art for an Intellivision game cartridge port. It's like they very loosely described the concept of the game to some freelance artist who'd never heard of such a thing as a "Donkey Kong" before. Mario seems to have ditched his job as a carpenter to become some sort of Mexican 90's superhero version of the god of thunder, complete with golden hammer, while the decidedly un-gorilla-like Donkey Kong holds the homely Pauline captive in some sort of boundless Tron-type laser-scape and hurls shiny untapped kegs of beer at our mullet-sporting hero! It's so bad, I want a poster of it! I should research this a bit and find out if there's an amusing story behind this piece of art.



More tomorrow!

DONKEY KONG is coming!!

I'm in the midst of working on preliminary sketches, character designs and layouts for my upcoming DONKEY KONG piece, based on another old arcade favorite of mine. I'm having a great time puzzling through interesting layouts and poses (there's so much more you can do with giant gorillas and valiant carpenters), and I have enough ideas to perhaps do 3 or 4 pieces, so we'll see how that goes.

I thought I'd share some of my sketchbook work. I don't usually share sketchbook scans and I don't really keep a traditional sketchbook, mainly cause I don't think my sketchbook stuff is any good. It takes some noodling on an idea before I get it the way I want it usually, and I'm trying to be a bit more loose and uninhibited with my sketching. More scans soon.

Accompanying my sketches are some DK tribute pieces I like by other artists that I came across whilst doing the ol' Google reference search (I also use something called "books"). I wanted to see what other artists had done with the Kong, and I wanted to make sure I wasn't treading on someone's toes by doing something too similar to another piece.

The first piece is a bit of fan-art by someone who goes by the name Question Josh. Simple, but a decidedly different and original interpretation. DK sort of reminds me of Homer Simpson in this one. Original image can be found here



The next piece is a twisted bit of eye-popping fun by Jorge R. Gutierrez. It's got a great style and an almost creepy metaphysical slant.



The new Donkey Kong Jenga game. I don't know how this works, but I want it!



More sketches tomorrow!

Q*BERT FINAL COLORS

Ah, the arcade classic Q*Bert. One of those fixtures of childhood whose memory is tinged with equal parts joy and frustration. I recall fondly the infrequent trips to the local mall, which meant at least three things: browsing at the toy store, having a rainbow sherbet cone melt all over my hand while I furiously licked away at it, and getting to take another crack or two at Q*bert at the arcade. I was never any good at Q*bert. I never had enough quarters at a time to gain any sort of mastery over it, and my height combined with the awkward diagonal joystick control (which completely clashed with my strict horizontal and vertical instinctive movements cemented by Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Frogger) left me helpless and frustrated in the shadow of Q*Bert's towering yellow arcade cabinet and alien foul language.

I've had a few occasions over the years to take additional cracks at the game, hoping that coming at it from a more seasoned gamer's level of experience would aid in my quest to help the poor orange fellow finally change the colors on all those doggone pyramids! Well, I certainly am not as bad at it as I used to be, but I'm still no expert. My love for the game and its mix of a simple goal, challenging tactics and bizarre creatures persists, however. I hope to one day own the arcade cabinet so I can perfect my game. I know there have been several console ports and flash adaptations of the game, but I don't recall any of them being exact reproductions of the arcade, and that's what I truly want.

Anyway, here's the final colored version of my Q*BERT piece. As I stated in the previous post, I've retooled Q*Bert, Coily, Sam, Slick, Ugg and Wrong-Way to bring them out of the 80's and more into the Pop-Monkey camp. And, yes, I turned Slick and Sam into pineapples with hands-for-feet. It just made sense to me.

Special thanks to Warren Davis, Jeff Lee and David Thiel, the co-creators of Q*BERT!
Check this site for a nice article on the history of Q*Bert: http://coinop.org/features/qbstory.aspx

PRINTS OF THIS PIECE ARE AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER! Just drop me a line for more info.

Q*Bert is copyright Sony Pictures

I'm Back In the Saddle Again! (And by "saddle", I mean "chair", though that's not nearly as exciting-sounding)

Holy jeez! I know, I know -- "Jared, we thought you died! What the heck happened to you?" Well, I clearly did not die, but that's not to say I didn't feel a bit dead for a while there. I was captured by a bounty hunter and delivered to Darth Vader, where I was frozen in carbonite for a spell. Luckily, Princess Leia came to rescue me from Jabba's palace before I was -- no, no, that's clearly a lie!
I'm not going to go into detail about my hibernation period, but I was occupied by my day job doing concept art for Automatic Pictures as well as trying to slog through an incredibly difficult and taxing period of my personal life. Things got very bad and very upsetting for a while, and my life has been turned nearly upside down as a result. I've come through it a better person with some rearranged priorities and outlooks, but things aren't necessarily all birds 'n' flowers now, either.

Regardless, I'm trying to get back on the wagon here, and I'm going to finish and freshen up all the projects I've let stagnate, as well as work on some new stuff I've had simmering in my cranial crock-pot for a while.

First up: a new video game-based piece involving a Pop-Monkey reimagining of another childhood arcade favorite of mine, Q-BERT! My Pac-Samurai print was a great success and attracted quite a bit of unexpected attention (and money), so I'm hoping the response to this will be just as good (preferably better). I'm busy working on the colors right now, but I thought I'd go ahead and post the preliminary pencils and stuff in the meanwhile.

Colors coming very soon!

"See ya' next year, Heroes Con!"

Well, Heroes Con was great, as usual. This year saw an even more impressive array of artists and creators -- I spent too much time walking around and browsing (sometimes buying), and not quite enough time at the booth, but it was great to meet everybody.
Special mention to (in no particular order): Joe Quinones, Chris Brunner and Rico Renzi, Team Eight, Dan & Dawna Davis (of Steam Crow), Renae De Liz, Ray Dillon, Chris Grine, Dennis Hopeless, Kevin Mellon, Jim Mahfood, Dave Crosland, Alberto Ruiz, Derek Ballard, Mark Brooks, Erik Jones and the others I might have forgotten.

Special thanks to Kyle Cross and Nick Black of GORILLA RIOT for having me aboard this weekend. It was a blast (though tiring). Also to Shelton Drum and all who helped him put on the convention -- super job, as always!

For now, I've got a lot of (paying) work to catch up on and a lot of prints to mail out. Thanks to everyone who dropped by and said hi, even if you didn't buy a print. See you soon!

HEROES CON IS NEAR!!

Hey, one of the best comic conventions in the US is happening this weekend, June 20-22 in Charlotte NC! The little show that grew into a favorite stop for industry professionals and industry hopefuls gets better every year, and I'm always excited when this time of year rolls around.

I'll be part of the GORILLA RIOT booth 420 (next to the amazing Indie Island), so stop by, introduce yourself and buy some stuff. GORILLA RIOT sells awesome t-shirts and stuff, and I'll be selling prints of 3 of my pieces at the booth. I had my "GORILLA VS. SQUID", "PAKKU-MAN" and "PAC-SAMURAI" pieces professionally printed on 100# cover stock, and they look fantastic! They will be $20 each, or get all three for $50!!

Be sure to stop and buy a print before browsing around too much, before you run out of money! Hope to see you at the show!

"GORILLA VS. SQUID: FINAL ROUND!" -- prints available!

Hey, it's finally finished! Been fiddling with this piece for a while, but I finally got it colored well enough to satisfy me for now. I wanted to do this in a limited and flat enough palette so it could be easily screen printed on shirts, but I think it's a powerful enough design to stand on it's own. Thus, I'm also selling prints of this piece! I'm having these professionally printed, as I did the last two pieces, and they'll be available from me via mail, or in person at the GORILLA RIOT booth at HEROES CON in Charlotte, June 20-22!
Pen & Ink with Photoshop. Coming soon as a t-shirt!

PRINTS OF THIS PIECE ARE AVAILABLE FROM ME! 11"X17" ON 100# COVER STOCK PAPER, PROFESSIONALLY PRINTED BY INDIGO INK! $10 + $5 SHIPPING! CONTACT ME VIA EMAIL FOR MORE INFO!

"Thanks, Boing-Boing!"

A favorite blog of mine, Boing-Boing Gadgets, has featured my recent hit "Pac-Samurai" piece on their site! I'm honored, flattered, and swamped with requests for prints. Thanks again to everyone who has passed along civil comments, linked to my blog, and/or purchased a print! I've had to go and have professional prints done to try and keep up with the orders!
Here's the link to the feature!

"Thanks, Kotaku!"

Kotaku.com has just posted a blog entry spotlighting my "Pac-Samurai" piece! Might this lead to me landing a job blasphemously giving Pac-Man a facelift for a new generation of gamers?!? I say "yes"! Fate, what do you say?...
...
Hmmm.