Wedding Caricature

Well, I just finished  this caricature for a client, and am going to show it to her on Monday. As I've said before I've never been a fan of caricature style drawing, but I'm starting to find doing these more enjoyable. I've been really lucky so far with fantastic clients who have been really great to work with. Thanks.

New Tattoo

I got a new tattoo, done by the amazing Eric Starr, owner of Arkham Tattoo in Akron Ohio. It's a red winged blackbird, which I designed. If your in the area and want a top notch ink job, Eric or any of his amazing artists can handle it. 

Sick about stolen artwork!

I've made some mistakes in my life, but a positive intention turned and bit me in the ass and regularly pops up so I can't forget an amateur mistake I made a few years ago. (Above, my tattoo. Below, the original artwork in my sketchbook.) 

About 4 years ago I decided to start promoting my artwork online. the idea was that I would promote myself as an illustrator and a custom tattoo designer all at the same time. I had plenty of illustration examples, but only a handful of tattoo designs, which happened to be most of the designs for my own very personal tattoos and a few other things I had done. Well, I didn't have my tattoo designs up for more than a few months when I began getting emails asking permission to use my designs. I was dumbfounded, surely these people meant that they wanted me to design them a tattoo. Wrong. They were asking if they could use the designs as is. I would reply in a friendly manner that the design was my own personal tattoo, but that I could design them something similar for a fee. Most of the time the reply was a sorry and they liked my artwork but no one actually hired me to draw for them. The final straw was when I received an email from a guy in Germany. Who, in very very broken english thanked me for my swallow tattoo design and sent along a photo of his brand new rip-off tattoo. I was furious and took down the tattoo artwork immediately. (unfortunately I don't have the photo any more because I deleted it out of anger.)

Fast forward to today. I still continue to find my tattoo designs online on a regular basis. I will just be searching on google checking out tattoos when BLAM. There it is, one of my designs. Usually on someone's blog or myspace page, but worst of all I recently found 3 of my designs on a foreign tattoo flash website, promoting them as "Free Tattoo Flash Art" They even had the nerve to set it up so you can email yourself your favorite ripped-off artwork so you can easily print it out  and take it to your tattoo artist. The problem is the entire site is German or French (my foreign language knowledge is limited) and there is no email address for me to complain to. I even looked through the source code to see if it was stored there. Nothing. So if you are more knowledgeable than me at finding email addresses please help me find this. Here are the links. (Note: the original artwork had copyrights on them but they were photoshopped out.)

LINK 1, LINK 2, LINK 3

I also just today found someone on Etsy, who is using my Swallow art for necklace designs. I am furious about this and don't even know what to say to her in the email she is making money off of my artwork ARGGGG. I will write to her but I need to cool off first so I don't blow my top completely in the message. Any suggestions of what I should say to her? Here are the links and a couple photos of the stolen art.

LINK 1, LINK 2

Here another example of someone using my image for their own gain. This girl even lives in the same area as me and was using it to promote her photography business on Craigslist. As far as I know she stopped using it after I emailed her.

The other is a professional xtreme skiier who claims to have come up with it himself, but it is clearly badly traced or copied. Here's that link and a pic.

LINK 1

I do know that I made a mistake in believing in the goodness of people and now know that not everyone respects or understands art. Especially tattoo art. Everyone seems to think that the internet is just full of free tattoo artwork and that it can be used with no respect. So The lesson today is, ask your talented tattoo artist to design something for you, and if you just "have to have" that swallow tattoo you found on the internet, at least ask your tattoo artist to alter it so that the original art stays original!

Scene, Space Girl Pinup, and Car Salesmen Monsters!!!

Hello all. I had the opportunity to do a cover for a really cool weekly news magazine for the 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction issue, and was very pleased with how it all worked out. The final cover exceeded my expectations and looks super cool with the typography.


I've also just finished another illustration of a retro space girl pinup. I tried really hard to get that old school 1950's pinup style and think that I've nailed it.


Lastly just a couple monsters for ya. At my day job I'm occasionally asked to do some minor illustration, and these were created for an extremely picky auto dealer, who wanted to advertise his "Monster Car Savings Sale". so after other artists created about 8 monsters that he was not happy with they asked me to come up with something. His reference for a monster was Mike Wazowsky from Monsters Inc. So it was pretty obvious he just wanted some monsters that looked like they could be from that movie. So I created 2 that look like slightly sleazy car salesmen. Maybe that's why he didn't end up using them.

"Fight or flight"

Detail view


I finished this tonight and I thought I would upload it immediately instead of putting it off for a few days like I usually do. I'm not sure why this seemed important to me, it's not like very many people if any are actually looking at this blog. It's more like just a place to catalog my art during this part of my life, and not a place to show off my successfully published or popular work like so many other artists blogs. The older I get the better my work seems to get, but it also seems like my chances of being successful as an artist are slipping away. I know I need to buckle down again and work on getting my name into the mainstream somehow, It's just very frustrating sending out hundreds of promo postcards out and never receiving any feedback from them. What I really need is an illustration agent, who will go and find me the work, who has the connections to get my name out. The bad part is, agents like these typically won't take you in until you've had work published. It's a vicious cycle.

As for the above piece... it doesn't have any hidden meaning other than whatever you take from looking at it. I call it "Fight or flight." This idea popped in my head unexpectedly late last year. You know when your minding your own business and then a memory from the past just pops in to say hello? sometime last year I was sitting in my car in a parking lot wasting time before I had to go to work. Outside seagulls were eating some scraps of bread someone had left, when several crows swooped in to claim the food. They bickered and screeched and fought over the largest piece while there were plenty of smaller crumbs to be had. Then one of them grabbed the piece and flew away, two of them followed and a fourth one picked up something that looked like a shiny ribbon or candy wrapper then flew off. I guess this is a good reminder that everything has to fight to survive, let alone succeed.

The Holidays are here.

Well, it's hard to believe Christmas is already here again and I'm scraping ice off my car, wondering why fall was so short.

I've got a couple new pieces here. The first was a commissioned piece for a Christmas Card. I usually can't stand big headed illustrations, but I made sure their faces weren't distorted and demented looking (I can't stand that) like a lot of caricature's I've seen. The second is a piece I did as a gift to some of my family members and friends. It kinda captures the mood of the winters here in Ohio and reminds me that there is no escaping the snow. I've got a couple other projects in the works that I will post soon. Happy Holidays.

Some new work! Finally!

Here are a couple of pieces I've done recently. The first is just something for fun, I wanted to do a fun piece where I could work on some shading techniques and basically have fun. I'm really pleased with this. The second is a caricature that I did for my day job as a graphic artist. I'm not sure how I went from designing newspaper ads in a horrible environment to doing illustrations in a horrible environment, but I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that they have laid off something like half of the employees I work with. I guess it's just best not to tell anyone you have an art talent so that it won't be exploited like mine is starting to be. I don't like it.



On a happier note I've decided that I'm going to do some dabbling in comics again. When I was in high school I was pretty into comics and me and my friend Joe decided to give it a shot. I ended up doing about 2 and half issues and then kinda lost direction with it. Mostly because I was just making it up as I went and it was getting pretty tough to keep the details straight. This time I've got a really great idea and I'm writing every detail down and making an outline before I start. I think that I should be able to tell the story in less than 50 pages. It's not your typical superhero thing either, it's gonna be a bank heist story with an action sci-fi twist. When I'm finished if it's good enough I may try to get it published or at least self publish it. Anyhow, wish me luck.

I am going to try to make more of an effort to post more often on here. But truthfully I'm not sure if anyone reads these anyways.