The Art of Streeeetchy Pants.....

My good friend of mine, Brad Thomas is one of the best graphic designers I know. He's designed a couple of logos for me in the past couple of years. (As an aside, I HATE designing logos. It requires an acute sense of reducing ideas to a lowest common visual denominator. ) Brad is the man when it comes to doing this. For the last one I asked hime to do for me I told him I wanted to repay him with a drawing.

I had recently introduced him to the movie, Nacho Libre and he requested a drawing of him as a Luchador. So here it is....

Monday vs. Friday

Big, Fat, Mural-o-Rama!

The one and only time I ever tried to "paint" a mural by hand on someone's wall I gave up about 10 hours into it and offered to help paint over what I had done. It was heinous. (Sorry Kirby) A friend had asked if I could paint ivy around the kitchen trim. Being the wise 25 year old sage that I was, endeavored to hand-paint thousands of millions of little ivy leaves and flowers...by hand without any kind of template.

It was a bad night, but the friends forgave me, and I learned an important lesson: Don't agree to do painstakingly time-consuming stuff that you don't have the foggiest idea how to do. Learn to refer friends who can do those types of jobs. Learn what you can do well and fast and major at that.

Anyhoo, a few years down the line and I know a bit more about what my strengths and weaknesses are as an artist. So I give murals another shot. The secret: draw them comfortably small, scan, vectorize, color in Illustrator....then blow them up to an obnoxious size and hand them off to a large scale printer who will print them the way they should look.

Here's an example of three murals I did for some good friends' church. The subjects are:
1. The Garden of Eden
2. Noah's Ark
3. David the Shepherd Boy

For your enjoyment, I'm posting the original drawing as well as photos of the final product.
You can see more preliminary work on these suckers here.

Help a Skateboarder Out....

On Saturday morning, I found out an old skate friend, Lee Bender, (see above picture) had recently been hospitalized and diagnosed with MS. Lee is an incredible skater. I haven't seen Lee in about seven years, but I remember the evening I took the above photo. Lee was busting fat ollies off a launch ramp and over this truck bed in a church parking lot.

A skate company called AZPX is helping Lee pay his hospital bills by selling Lee bender benefit T-shirts. You can read Lee's linguistically colorful blog and/or purchase a t-shirt here.