Hardboiled Pixels

I worked with my pals over at woot! to draw a bunch of little assets for their recent 'Choose Your Own Adventure' text game / e-commerce opportunity WOOTQUEST: Bullets Over Crimeville.Although all the good stuff is probably already sold out, you can still play the game here.I drew that fancy extruded logo, the clickable arrow/maze gadgets, and these portraits of the seedy denizens of Crimeville you run into during your quest:
I simplified the sketches a bit to read better at 75x pixels:I also drew this sad finalé scene......featuring the classic woot! MacGuffin, the "Bag of Crap":Good luck getting yours, and not stepping in any along the way!

Custom Cornhole Cabinets

Cornhole

Grill Journal

Filet Mignon, June 25, 2011.

Tenth Life Buttons & Tattoo

Here are some little drawings I did for my friends (furry and otherwise) and the Tenth Life Cat Rescue here in St. Louis. Find them at this weekend's Pridefest in Tower Grove Park and get these buttons...... or this temporary tattoo:Cats are on that list of things that I love but have lots of trouble drawing (see also: men's dress shoes, horses, sexy women) but do it anyway.Here's another drawing a did for Tenth Life a few months back:Meow!

Still Life with Wine & Mutilated Stuffed Animal

Lures Optional

I'm looking for a power blue fishing hat like this. Bass Pro didn't have one. Where next?

Cicadian Rhythms

Leon Beyond takes a trip back to 1777 and bugs out. Read it!

STL / RFT Scavenger Hunt

I drew a bunch of quick spots for this weekend's RFT Showcase Photo Scavenger Hunt.If anyone wants to get any of these images tattooed on themselves, consider them all open-source designs.

The Vumpire

drawn 5/3/11. Redbirds lose to the Giants, 7-3.

Recent Leon Beyond Experiments

Assessing the Stickiest Situations

Assembling The Ultimate Branson Show!

Best New Poets 2011

I believe this Wednesday (May 25) is the last day to submit poems to this year's Best New Poets anthology, of which I drew the cover (above). Here was my sketch and a couple other ideas:

ARTCRANK / Pee-Wee Bike Print!

This was my contribution to the 2011 ARTCRANK poster show that just pedaled through St. Louis, 4-color (dark brown, red, yellow & silver) screenprint on Ivory Canson Edition paper, 24.5" x 18", edition of 30. Anyone who knows me knows that Pee-wee's Big Adventure is my favorite movie and I was excited to have a somewhat legitimate reason to make this print.

Here was my first sketch, made while closely watching the DVD and pausing every time Pee-Wee's bike was onscreen or a new feature was unveiled:Here's some more screencaps and reference I collected in my research:I started off with a straight side-view vector rendering of the bike, and worked on skewing it to the "lift-off" angle I wanted, as well as turning the handlebars/front wheel.The can see I also figured out the palette swatches I wanted to use, based on these ink tests:I printed out the vector bike and doodled roughly more on top of it:And then doodled a bit more tightly:And then, with the help of my lightbox, eventually made this ink drawing:And then scanned everything and created the final digital art seen here:Here's what the 4 seps. looked like. I make these just by using the 'select same fill color' function in Illustrator and turning the colors either black or white before lazer-printing the transparencies.And here's a much better picture of the final thing from the official Flickr set of amazing ARTCRANK prints, taken by Brian Cummings and Monica Heitz of RGG Photography (www.rggphoto.com)©2011 ARTCRANK™:I'm not sure how many prints are left from the original edition sold at the show, but I've still got these screens and inks in my basement so I make some more if anyone's interested. Drop me a line if so! Tell' em Large Marge sent ya.
Thanks to Charles Y. and everyone else involved with putting on a great, fun show! I'm excited to have been a part of it.

ArtCrank Tonight!

I'm in this bike print show ARTCRANK that opens tonight at Atomic Cowboy. It should be fun and I'm excited to be a part of it. There are over 30 artists, all prints are in editions of 30 and for sale for $30 each. My poster is a 4-color screenprint; here's another hint at what it deals with: