"HELL BELOW, STARS ABOVE" -- the final pass, I swear it!

A big part of getting back into the swing of things is going through my rather large backlist of personal projects that have been started but never finished. Call it my "new year's resolution", if you will. I started going through my files of in-progress work and was stunned at how many ideas I had been tinkering with or nearly-completed but then abandoned either due to freelance work monopolizing my time or just from setting the thing aside and forgetting about it. Going through a housing move recently didn't help either, as all the stuff I had strewn about in my work-pile got packed away and fell victim to the out-of-sight out-of-mind rule.

Anyway, this is something that's been in-progress for far too long. It's time to polish this thing off once and for all, but not before retouching it a bit. A big problem with setting something aside for so long is that, inevitably, when I come back to it I'm not at all satisfied with how it looks or (perfectionist that I am) I simply look at it and think "I can do better". Actually, that may not be such a bad thing. Sometimes an artist can benefit greatly from stepping away from a piece for a while and coming back to it with "fresh eyes". That's a big part of the reason why I don't like to rush my illustrations and let them progress at a natural pace. Unfortunately, if I take too long on them, or rushed them in the first place, I usually just want to redo the thing 4 months later!

It's always good to have a few projects going on concurrently. This keeps things fresh and allows you to jump back and forth at your leisure, and keeps a piece (and your interest in it) from stagnating. I'm always doing this, but I think I've taken it to ridiculous extremes by allowing my backlog to bloat to an overwhelming size. I made a list of all the illustrations and personal projects I have in various stages of completion and there are about 30 items on the list (and I know I'm still forgetting some). So, while it's very hard for me to promise that I will not begin something new before finishing off the old stuff, I can at least try to complete 3 new illustrations before beginning one new one. Hopefully I can whittle this list down within the next few months and build up my portfolio nicely in the process.

Currently, I'm in the midst of inking this thing, as well as the first DONKEY KONG piece, as well as reworking the final revision pencils for both the UGLY STICK and CARRION, WAYWARD SUN t-shirt designs. Also tightening up the final drawing for the second DONKEY KONG piece. More updates soon!

DONKEY KONG UPDATE!

Things are moving along at a snail's pace with my 2 DONKEY KONG pieces. I'm in no hurry to get them done, and I can only work on them late at night after the freelance work is done. This is a cleaned-up pencil drawing of the first piece with some odds and ends adjusted and tightened up -- the most notable adjustment is the size and position of Pauline on DK's shoulder. She seemed a bit too large in the first pass.



Next is a tightened up sketch of the second layout with the background and setting elements fleshed-out and the positioning of the objects adjusted. I really like how these are both turning out, so maybe I won't feel the desire to go back and redo these in 6 months, as seems to happen with many of my pieces (if you call them "pieces" instead of "drawings" it makes you sound like a real artist).



Finally, there's a page of DK head studies that I forgot to include in an earlier post.



I'm also including a cool DONKEY KONG QUILT that my magic computer showed to me the other day. It's done by Carolina Patchworks. It's nearly there and I wish it was a more pixel-perfect translation, but hey -- it's a Donkey Kong quilt! That alone makes it cool.

ZOMBAMA REMIX

Decided to do a bit of a retooling of the ZOMBAMA poster. This takes it a couple of steps further away from copying the design of the original, and fits the zombie theme a bit better. So there.

ZOMBAMA IS HUNGRY!

Betcha didn't know that Barack Obama had a twin zombie brother who was also running for president last year, didya? Alas, his platform was far too simple, and his rallying cry of "Brains..." lost to Barack's more popular and inspiring "Hope". What's a zombie to do?

Anyway, the lesser brother's campaign was just as historical as Barack's, so why not commemorate the first undead candidate in US history by buying a print from me? I've only minutes left until the secret service helicopters land in my front yard and haul me away for tastelessness involving a US President!

Oh, and by the way, if your interest in this piece is borne from some racist, murderous feelings you might have towards President Barack Obama, and you are mistaking this artist as harboring some wishful death threats against the president, please go away. I do not want your attention or your money. Good day.

I wanted to do an Obama piece (along with everybody else on the planet, evidently), but since my brain has been irreparably warped by cartoons and pop-culture nonsense I simply could not realize this intent with any level of serious meaning or maturity. I was looking at some of the parody images out there, several of which were based on the popular Shepard Fairey piece seen here...



And here's a collection of some of the parodies. Most are lame. My fave by far is the Bob Hope piece. The Soup Nazi image would be great as well, if it were at all competently executed. Oh well. (Revised to include the Luke Skywalker "New Hope" piece which my friend Adam Volker called my attention to. Thanks Adam)



Most (if not all) of the parodies I came across were a bit obvious, choosing to rely on simply basing their ideas on words that rhymed with "hope". I wanted to run in the opposite direction, so I chose to parody the parodies (as well as Fairey's reputation for using appropriated images in his art) by turning Obama into a zombie at the risk of coming across as an Obama-hater and attracting the attention of the FBI. Also, zombies are teetering on the edge of being overexposed in pop-culture (if they haven't already tumbled mindlessly over the edge of that pop-culture precipice). The slogan was easy, cuz what other slogan would a zombie choose for his campaign? Also "BRAINS" does not in any way rhyme with "HOPE", yet it somehow totally does. Think about it...

I did a search before moving forward with this image to make sure no one had beat me to the punch. A fairly thorough web search turned up many crappy "zombie Obama" images, but no one seemed to have thought to combine the concept of a zombie Obama with the "hope" poster, and no one had so far thought to coin the name "Zombama". Victory is mine! Just a note that there was no filtering an photo manipulation involved in this image. A drawing was made from scratch based on the original design and the color areas mapped out carefully with pencil and paper, imported and completed in Illustrator.



I can hear the Secret Service knocking at my door, so I must sign off for now.

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!