Tangled (#124)

Darn pesky kids vandalis'n me tree over there done yonder.

I got to thinking about family today and how entwined are we to our family tree. Does your ancestral heritage have any influence on who you are now. This lead me to think that it must really start to become a tangled mess of inherited traits and oddities as more generations are born with the introduction of other families DNA into the “pool” as well as dormant attributes reappearing generations later.

How much do I have in common with an ancestor from 150 years ago and how different will my great-great-great grandchildren be from me? I suppose I could take up genealogy but I have too many hobbies already 🙂

Everyone loves beards! (#122)

Beards come in all shapes and sizes but they are all awesome.

I shaved off my beard a few days ago and am now chin deep in remorse. This illustration is probably little more ‘tasche and goatee than beard but it’s a healthy bit of facial hair all the same. And some nice eyebrow weight never goes astray.

Once again, I am in a little old school phase, drawing on some nice 160gsm gouache paper with my Letraset Pantone markers.

Finely Feathered (#117)

The Panic started as an opportunity for me to stretch my illustrative muscles (or lack thereof) and escape the bounds of day-to-day design work. This means I’ll try to experiment with many styles over the course of the 365 illustrations I’ll be doing. As the past few Panic’s have been rather simple ones I thought I’d get a bit more involved! 🙂

Once again, drawn, lettered and coloured in Illustrator CS4 and then textured in Photoshop.

Project Yourself (#116)

Ok, this really is a stream of consciousness illustration… in which the concept can be explained conveniently in dot point form for those of us with busy lives.

  1. Simone, my business partner and I have been involved in the Penola Coonawarra Arts Festival and part of that involvement is the Illumination of the South Projection Art Installation where motion graphics and other imagery get projected on to the side of buildings in Penola.
  2. On the way home from the weekend’s festivities, my wife and I were discussing how Lady Gaga’s recent song has a very similar sound to Express Yourself by another “considered-shocking-back-then” artist from the eighties. I’ve since been singing Express Yourself in my head and it’s starting to drive me crazy.
  3. Also for the Festival, Simone and I were judges in the Design Prize Competition where designers submit posters and the winner’s piece being used in all promotional material for the coming years festival and landing $1000 prize money! One of the pieces that was awarded a highly commended was a very awesome piece of lino-cut.
  4. I have watched some interesting documentaries of late about some of the most dangerous and brilliant artists of the past 50 years like Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson who are all similar in that they were only ever just themselves. No projection of anything else but who they were.

So with none of that in mind before I started drawing, when I came to the end of the illustration the above is what I attribute the Panic to.

Whoa. Deep. Not really… 🙂

When good fruit goes ZOMBIE bad (#114)

Strawberry Zombie... wasnt that a Prince song?

I love fruit and I love zombies and when I combine the two, the “When Good Fruit Goes Bad” series get’s another illustration added to its ranks!

Below are the other two in the series.