The Anti-Art II: Store of Dreams

Continued from my last posting, I have finished 3 pieces of work, coloring two more, and pumping out 3 more. All going according to schedule.... which I suppose would be impossible to mess up considering that I never set up a solid schedule to follow. Anyway, I have also gone ahead and set up an Etsy shop where you can buy prints of my art as soon as I finish them. The Shop is called "Uncouth Barbarian" and is located here:

http://www.etsy.com/people/UncouthBarbarian

I suppose the blog is a little late considering I officially opened the store up on Sunday. But we're still under the guise of this being up to date stuff.... so hooray! Breaking news!

Anyway, here are the images I have posted thus far. Do stop by the shop! And buy things! Or tell people who may want to buy things! I think I've said this somewhere before... but I'm poor!

The Anti-Art

It has been two months since I've updated this thing. In that time I've struck back out on my own and found some temporary forever internet to leech off of until is disappears and I have to pay for it again. In that time I've been doing some seeing, reflecting, professional and personal artistic development and reflection etc. etc. Nothing too profound.

Anyway in my travels I went to a gallery in Akron that featured some "Anti-Art". which was a room full of alternative/abstract/and somewhat disturbing art. Really cool stuff. A few weeks later I was invited to a gallery opening that was displaying the work of a couple friends of mine. Remember the Rustbelt Rebirth stuff I made a number of posts back? Probably definitely not, but it's totally there if you look. Anyway while there I inquired about the idea of putting some of my work up. Truthfully it's been bouncing around in my head for about a year now... but no gallery wants to put up "commercial art". And this gallery was no exception.

Nevertheless I set out to make some more "traditional" art... but traditional is BORING. The idea of "Anti-Art" intrigues me and that's the route I'm going to take. I'm setting out to do ten pieces, each more abstract and disgusting than the last. Some of the art I've already done that I'm updating with digital paint... and others are brand new. I want every piece to evoke the same adverse feeling visually that most extreme metal evokes audibly. It's a niche market I'm sure, but I'm having a lot of fun with this so I don't care.

In fact this is the 4th one I've completed the line-art for and the 5th in terms of the order of which they came to me. It's going to be colored so it's not done, but I'd like to get it up anyway.

Logorama IV: Doomy Doomy Doomstick

So I found this silly "Metal band name creator" on Failblog. Every letter of the alphabet corresponded with a word. There were two sets of these... one for the first and last name. My initials, D and S corresponded with "Iron" and "Temple". I actually liked it and deemed it "logoworthy". So, here is the logo for my fake DOOM METAL band, Iron Temple.

(Just for those who don't know, the Doom Metal sub-genre typically employs very slow, down tuned music and deep vocals that are either growled or clean which suggest a sense of loss or mourning. The songs generally tend to be very long. It's not uncommon for a 60-70 minute album only to have five or six songs.)

Ink Inkley and the Legend of the Lined Paper

Seems I haven't updated this thing a awhile. At the moment I'm sort of in the middle of 4 projects at once which I will be posting throughout June and July, but for now here's a bunch of ink doodles that seem to appear in my work notes. Seems nothing has changed since high school...

Logorama III: The Metal is Black

Recently I've been making black metal logos. One was just because and the other was a small commission. Black metal logos are cool because readability is not all that important. The most important aspect of those kinds of logos is the overall composition and pattern. These logos are very mathematical and complicated. No matter what the word is, the logo should generally have perfect or near perfect symmetry. That being said, I don't believe that what I've done is nearly as good as what it could be... but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

One more thing... not every black metal band has a logo in this style. Like everything, there's always exceptions to the rule.

WHAT DO THEY SAY??? Who knows? That's the fun!

Mama said PUNK you out!

This is a character of mine that I have been developing for a story that draws a lot of its visual influence from punk rock album covers, artwork, and fashion.

This is a drawing was something that I did on a whim at a friend's house a couple weeks back. I guess I was on that day because it came out pretty good despite the fact that I never laid it out in pencil first. I let my friend keep the original, but I snapped a picture of it with my phone.

When I was putting this together, Photoshop and Illustrator decided that they were going to fight me every step of the way. Thanks, guys!

Tales from the Sketchatorium

At the moment I have a boring 'ol shipping and receiving job which leaves much to be desire in the creative department. However, I have since achieved an ACTUAL creative job which will begin next week. (Hooray!) Because of this, I have begun to clean out my desk at work and I found a bunch of drawings I've done over the last couple months on breaks or if I got into a fit of "I need to draw something RIGHT NOW if I expect not to go crazy".

So here are 5 drawings, 4 of which are done in nothing but gel pen (because that was all that was available to me.) so please forgive any "anatomical errors" that might've happened.

   

  

Children's Book b:) The Sketchy Flower

Here are my concepts for the flower, the other main character in the story. It was emphasized to me that the flower has no face.... which means that all emotion is conveyed through acting. Good thing I had those acting and movement classes in school!

Anyway, because of that the overall design of the flower is such of that so it can really convey emotions with it's leaves and petals. Also, it was emphasized that this flower is magic and looks like nothing you'd ever see. So, though I kept the design simple, I think that the colors and speckles of the flower will change patterns and colors depending on the flower's emotions throughout the story.

Children's Book a:) The Sketchy Girl 2

Further development of the little girl character. I even got some specifics on her visual appearance! Also... for the first time.... one of the sketches is presented in glorious EXTRA COLOR.

Brandon's Brochure Bandits! Return of the Corporate Compatriot

So I took that nifty logo and incorporated it into a nifty brochure. It's colorful! It's eco-friendly! It's a WATER FILTER! Wooooooooooo!

Logorama II: The Corporate Compatriot

So one of the people I work with is graduating college with an engineering degree and he asked me to do the graphic design stuff promoting the product he built for his final presentation. It is some kind of water filtration system/energy generator/super robot that can do your homework for you/frozen yogurt machine. ....Okay, maybe not the last two, but it'd be really cool. Nevertheless, this guy is crazy smart when it comes to this stuff. When he was explaining to me how it worked, I felt like a third grader trying to grasp trigonometry.

Anyway, this third grader came up with a number of professional "corporate" type logos for his fake company "Engineering Enterprise". Now that one is chosen, I will make a brochure and pamphlet for him to print and bunch of times and give out as companions to his presentation.

Since being environmentally friendly is heavily emphasized in the literature he provided me, I figured a leaf would be appropriate. Slightly cliche, but very effective. He had an idea of making the first E into a waterfall... but I couldn't think of a way that didn't look tacky or over the top. I added some waves but in the end he agreed with me that "less is more" and let the blue color suffice as representing the "water" aspect of the product.

Web Madness 3.5: More Mines, More Clouds

Here's some more to the Cloudmine Website. There's a cool dropdown menu that looks like rain and below that you see what the "Meet the Team" page would look like. I do envision every page title written vertically and justified to the left side of the page. Also, JUST WHO IS THAT HANDSOME MAN IN THE DESCRIPTION?

Why it's Cousin Marc! What're you doing on Earth? Doing back-end programming and development? We have no idea what you're talking about.

Web Madness 3: The Mine in the Clouds

So here's my third website. This is my cousin's start-up company in Philly, called Cloudmine. Still not quite sure EXACTLY what they do, but it has to do with using the new cloud technology that seems to be surfacing everywhere. If you want to know more, hit up their website: www.cloudmine.me

Anyway, the site on there looks pretty cool. Great color choice... but the information is kind of everywhere. My main objective is to create an appealing design with an easy to use UI. Unlike my other two designs, I'm going to take this a little further past just making the main page. Now that the basic design is done, I'm going to go back and design the menus and work out some of the user interactions. So there will be more "screenshots" of the site in the coming week or so that will show different pages and menus while maintaining page continuity.

So here's the basic re-design:
















I also had an idea that would involve the site detecting the user's computer time settings and location. If the user is looking at the site after sundown in his or her area, the site will look like this:

Oooooh. Cloudmine.... After Dark!

Web Madness 2: Return of the Deadly Rust!

So I made a bunch of logo concepts for Rustbelt Rebirth. You can see them a few posts back. Anyway, two logos were chosen. A primary logo to go on shirts and a secondary logo to go on stickers and such. SUPER COOL.

Well I decided to take the logos that were chosen and do my own re-working of their website. Hopefully they'll like it. I've never done a website design quite like this one before. LOTSA photo manipulation. Enjoy!

Children's Book a:) The Sketchy Girl

So I was asked if I wanted to draw a children's book by the person that runs the comic book store I go to. I've never thought about doing a children's book before, but in the spirit of expanding my artistic horizons, I accepted. Now I've got the girl sketched. I need to turn my attention to the flower.

Logorama

So a friend of mine works for this really cool place that makes custom furniture out of junk metal. Really creative stuff comes out of this place! Well, they're going to be on TV at some point so they asked if I'd re-vamp their logo so they can print it on T-shirts they'll be wearing when they are filming. Naturally I said yes, and this is what I've come up with so far:

Anyway, here's a link to their website if anyone wants to check out their stuff: (I'm thinking about re-vamping that too!)
http://rustbeltrebirth.com/