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!

Flying Tigers

This was a birthday card commission for a friend of a friend of a friend. India ink, reflex orange paint, & silver leaf on watercolour paper, 11 x 14".

Zoe+Kaftan+Banana+Gaga+Papoose

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Leon in Stereo

New Leon Beyond Picture Puzzle over at Amazing Facts... & Beyond.

Polyethylene Punch-Out!

Last week at Shanghai Normal University in China -- as part of EXPO 2010 -- there was an international poster exhibition entitled "Messages to the World! " and I was flattered to participate (although not attend, unfortunately!). Here's my poster, and some behind-the-scenes junk.Plastic polyethylene (mostly low-density, but often high-density) sacks are by-and-large wasteful, ridiculous, terrible, etc. Hopefully by drawing this poster I can at least remember to bring my re-usable sacks to the grocery. A Message to Me! I wanted to do a "How That Works" infographic, and keep it international/pantomime. My sketch:Some reference:Library of Ink Drawings, parts that I thought I would need (I didn't end up needing a sad molar or a pickle flying out of a pickle jar):All my drawings vectorized, rebuilt, colored, textured and designed into place:I really would've liked to screenprint these (and still might), as they were conjured as a 2-color silkscreen, but since these things were being FTPed to Shanghai to save on shipping costs anyway I took the easy way out. Here's the scan of part of an old canvas duffel bag I found in the basement:And here's the finished poster! Click for a larger view.Keep fighting the good fight, canvas tote-bag!

Wilderness Travelogue Doodles