Summer's End Doodle Dump

Council Bluffs, MO. Above: Dinner. Below: Designs for a camping toilet (patent pending):Lake Barkley, KY. Above: Mort the Dog. Below: My Dad & Uncle Doug, Living Room in our Cabin.Dunton Hot Springs, CO. Above: Mountain Vista. Below: Ghost Town, Mystery Outfit seen in Airport (???).

Brides on the Bat

I painted this sign for our good buddies Dave & Barbara's bachelor/bachelorette bash at the ballpark. The whole weekend was a blast. Congratulations to them again!

Ink Vehicles! Art Show

I've got an art show here at the St. Louis Artists' Guild opening this sunday, September 5th. One o'clock to 3 o'clock. It's a fancy wood-paneled room that will be chock full of prints and drawings. Whoever can tell me exactly how many hot rods and out-of-socket eyeballs are hanging on the walls will win a piece of original art. Probably featuring a hot rod and/or eyeball.

Pocket Protectors Summer 2010

These are the shirts I drew and silkscreened for our summer bowling squad, the Pocket Protectors. Thanks to Will Horton for the Iron Maiden font & Bill Keaggy for the ligature advice. Front:Back:
The team, which placed (tied for) fourth in the Saratoga summer Monday night league.

L to R: B. Keaggy, W. Horton, D. Zettwoch, J. Burmester. We'll protect the pocket better this Fall!

Revved Up

I've got a drawing in this art show of Car Engines at Lula Cafe in Chicago, opening tonight. If you're in the neighborhood, drop by! Thanks to my pal Anders Nilsen for letting me be involved. Above: V8 with Orange Wires, Ink, white-Out & colored pencil on chipboard, 11x14".

Literary St. Louis

I've got a bunch of illustrations in this week's RFT -- including the cover and a big indexed map -- for a feature story on literary goings / geographical locales / (mostly) unflattering mentions of our fine, hot dilapidated city. It's kinda similar to this ARCH MADNESS map I did, but specially about book 'n writers 'n stuff.
My first impulse was to do a pop-up book, and for a while I tried to make an actual 3D pop-up book that would be photographed:
I had a hard time making that work, with the angles and actual street data, so I went back to the 2D drawing board. I built my map with vectors... Then hand-traced it with a lightbox:I did a bunch of li'l spot illustrations ...and added them -- along with new type and color and everything -- here:
We stuck with the "literary tourist" idea for the cover illustration:
And I drew it.
Good luck, and stay cool out there book fans!

Moon Man back in Orbit

For what is sure to be a crazy pennant race! I've printed another edition of my Mike Shannon "The Moon Man Speaks" poster for anybody who missed out the first time around. Same spec's as the original: 3 colors (Navy, Red, White) on chipboard, 18" x 24", edition of 100. Feel free to drop me an e-mail for info on ordering. Get up Baby, Get Up! Oh, yeah!

Missilefits Rocket Ideas for Later

Because I'm sure that I'll lose this bowling scoresheet before next summer, I'm scanning and posting the results of our brainstorming session here.

Seed Saver!

This is a cover I illustrated for the Albuquerque Alibi, for a feature story on seed saving: The two directions I explored were a mock-montage poster for a fictional action movie... about the art of old-fashioned seed saving, And an excuse to explore my usual love of cut-away/contraption, applied to a decidely non-technical practice. We went this direction:Here were my main two pieces of inspiration/reference:
Initial layout:
Ink drawing:Final, vectorized & colorized drawing:

Missilefits Launch this Sunday!

Our model rocket club has its big annual launch this Sunday, and I screenprinted these commemorative posters. Inspired by our pal & Missilefits co-founder Andrew, and his notorious duotone car the "Bruick" , the print is white, fluorescent yellow, and metallic purple on chipboard. Grab one at the launch! When you're not hiding behind a tree afraid of our homemade explosives/projectiles.

Tri-Clone T-Shirt in 3-D!

In honor of shirt.woot!'s 3rd birthday I drew/built this crazy 3-D t-shirt. It brewed with this sketch:Then grew into this blue-penciled version:Once we started getting serious about figuring out how the 3-D would work, I did these tests. I thought briefly about printing the shirt on yellow, hoping the it wouldn't interfere with the red & cyan drawing.Here are all the little ink drawings. I knew it would be nice to have all the flying parts be discrete units seprate from the background.I combined everything, added some halftones, then made two layers of the final art -- one red & one cyan -- and set them to optically multiply. Where the two layers overlapped a rich "black" was created. Then came the labor-intensive phase of creating the 3-D effects by nudging the layers apart.I considered places where the layers were perfectly aligned (like the pure black dots behind the monkey's head) the middle ground. The farther the red layers was moved to the left (monkey's hands) objects would appear to pop forward. Areas where the blue was shifted to the left (monkey's tail) would hopefully appear to recede.I picked this basic technique up from legendary 3-D stereoscopy comics master Ray Zone, who helped me turn a comic for Nickelodeon magazine into an eye-popping affair a couple of years ago. To answer your question - yeah, the shirt comes with 3-D glasses! In fact, I designed those too. Here's sorta what they'll look like:
You can still buy the shirt (& glasses) here! Happy birthday, shirt.woot!

Shop 'til You Drop

These are a couple of drawings I made for internal employee use in conjunction with the department store NORDSTROM's annual anniversary sale, which opens today. I'm off to buy some True Bahama Storm Rider Bootcut jeans (Loaded Gun Wash) now!

Facts in Fluorescence

We just finished printing a new edition of Leon Beyond's second volume of trivia strips in 2 vibrating new color combo's: Olive on Traffic Cone & Olive on Electric Pea. Buy it here!