Happy New You!

I wish you all the very best of the season and I hope you all have a wonderful New Year!

D-N-Aid is Nakfactorium's newest novelty item. Do you dare to try it? You can change who you are, just in time for the New Year! These are some of the packages I made just as a gimmick. I was thinking about Kool-Aid drink mix and the Lik-m-aid brand powered sugar candy. My designs are in the style of my memory of the Lik-m-aid packages from the time when I was buying them as a kid.

Loose Leaf Portfolios

Boy did I ever have fun creating this little novelty item! I've done other pieces of artwork and novelty items centered around the loose leaf page and this is the newest one. Yes it is that small. Each pocket folder is 22mm x 28mm and contains 8 loose leaf sheets with printed artwork on it plus one sheet that is blank. There are seven different sets available at the moment and each folder has its own subject label attached with hand lettering in pencil.

The idea started off as a juvenile set of pencil-like drawings that a young kid (me) might do in school, then it quickly grew into other sets of subjects and styles. There is an assortment set called NAK which has a sample from each of the styles but are not duplicated in the other sets. All of the drawings were done in Adobe Illustrator specifically for this project except for the ENG set which are reproductions of my breath doodles.  If anyone is interested in a set or two mail me 5 or 6 bucks for each and I'll pay the postage. And for 10$ you can get a set with an original pencil or ink drawing on the blank loose leaf!

   

 BIO

 ENG

 GEO

 MATH

 NAK

 robot

SCI

Here are a few original doodles done in pencil. Remember that each page is 19 x 25 mm. or 3/4 x 1 inch.

No Drawing Is An Island

We just had out first snowfall. It always does something to me.

How are these two pictures related? ( The one above and the one below.) Would you believe that they came from the same sketch?

Here is the drawing below that I actually did in 2005. I just recently came across it and had to transpose it. Below the drawing is the color scheme that I was originally working on but I ended up turning it into a landscape. It's alright but I'm not crazy about it. And probably because of that, I started to play around with it. You can see the sequence of events that then leads to the image at the top.

After arriving at this unsuspecting location, my mind was afresh in choosing a completely different color treatment for my original figure drawing. Click on any of the images for a larger view.

Mondrian Gallery

As I promised last week, here are a few more stereoscopes for your cross-eyed viewing pleasure!

Piet Mondrian is one of my favorite artists. He's famous for his compositions in red, yellow and blue. (He hated green.) He was an expressionist painter at first, then through a period of 25 years he distilled his subject matter to its simplest form. He then spent the next 25 years painting variations of his red, yellow and blue compositions. I cannot help myself but to love his dedication and work. Here are a few compositions I came up with to play with my stereoscope eyes.

Look at last weeks post if you need the viewing instructions.

STEREOLAND

Here is some more 3D action pictures. Instructions below if you need a reminder of how to work these things. No machinery and no batteries required. And be sure to stay tuned next monday for even more!

Here's how to do it.

1. Click beside the image to get a larger view.

2. Place your finger between the images.

3. Slowly move your finger towards you while keeping a focus on your finger. A third image will slowly grow between the two images.

4. When this middle image is the same size as the other two, stop moving your finger towards you. 

5. Remember to keep your focus on that distance where you finger is and do not change your focus to the image behind it.

6. Move your hand quickly away (don't change your focus ) and that middle image will become three-dimensionally clear!

Places

This is an e-reader cover image for a short story by Peter Atwood. He used to spearhead a publishing company in Winnipeg called Blizzard Publishers. They hired me for cover art illustration and design work and I liked how they were open to me using different styles to suit the book. I wish more publishers would be open to that way of working, in just knowing that the artist (me) would create something very fitting. Of course Blizzard and I would discuss the proposed treatment for the book cover from various ideas I would come up with, then go from there. You can see some of these covers on my website.

A print mailer, e-mailer and poster for an upcoming show which I was to be a part of but unfortunately the show was recently cancelled.

Oh those beautiful Black Hills...um, I mean Holes. Black Holes. Just having some playtime with a souvenir cover I came across. I've never been there. You all recognize this famous tourist site, yes?

Alter Ego

 Rodan Attack - July 2012 - acrylic on illustration board - 15 x 20 inches

The summer always brings out the Godzilla in me.  I am sure this has to do with the memories of watching late-night Godzilla movies in my youth.

These two different paintings have two very similar Godzilla poses. These are two new works done a couple weeks apart and I plan on doing a third with using a similar pose. But why bother you ask? Well, yes there are other poses at my disposal, so I wonder too why I spend time doing similar work and the simple answer is that the original idea was not done yet. What I mean is that when I come up with a painting idea, have an image in my head of how I want it to look, but when I actually start to paint the work, it takes a left turn right from the first brush stroke and I realize right away that this painting is going to end up being a very different work than I intended. Which I think is great because I have something in front of me that I have never seen before and it's quite exciting. It is also a challenge though because you are confronted with color or design problems that you have not worked out previously in your mind or on paper, through your previous work or even through other peoples previous work that you may have been looking at or influenced by and they already figured out some of the problems.

Sometimes it has taken me three tries to finally get my original vision onto canvas. But then I end up with three different new works where otherwise I would only have one. So, I am going to try one more time for my original concept of this Godzilla pose which I think I will do on the computer in Adobe illustrator sometime.

Alter Ego Godzilla - July 2012 - acrylic on illustration board - 15 x 20 inches

some guy some guy

Punk rock gig poster for a smashing veteran band from the States coming to Winnipeg. The figure is from a little plastic toy figure that I photographed.

Below is a  copy of the poster I recently rescued from a pole. It was all hacked to sh_t and was dangling by a piece of tape. It was the only one I had actually seen up and I thought that nobody else was really going to be seeing it, considering it's condition, so I rescued it.

While watching the movie Monster Zero I did a quick sketch of one of the aliens. I liked it enough that on my Godzilla Weekend (see Smashmonster blog) I created a fuller illustration of the X-Seijin alien. (above)

I wanted to submit the drawing to a Godzilla fan magazine but I thought I should see if my reproduc-tion was close enough to how they were portrayed in the movie. Yeah, it was close enough but really, just by going with my sketch, it was quite a bit different, so I did another version. The first one is in fact more alien like, but the bottom one is more like the movie. It's interesting to work from loose sketches of something you saw and to work from your memory as they create more original work. That is if your not worried about their outcome.

Recycler

 Recycler Meltdown

Mondrian 2020 Gallery

Parallelogram

11" x 17"  B&W poster design for Negative Space gig in Winnipeg. All vector hand-drawn lettering except for Banana Split font for Eat Em Up Presents.

Metamorphisson

Illusionary Territory Tutorial

Reality meets fantasy in this picture created for a virtual office wall. I have always loved abstract art as well as aboriginal art. This happens to be a nice fusion of the two. It's also a nice challenge to take such a generally non expressionistic medium such as a vector graphics program to create a realistic rendering of expressionistic piece.

 

Hemispheres

I like to exercise both sides of my brain. The rational and the abstract. The tidy and the messy. I am the worker and the dreamer. Often, the work I create from one moment to the next will be very different from each other and I really enjoy this. It allows me to have a much broader experience of the world. At times when I don't get out much in Winnipeg winters, I need to create a stimulus that allows me to see the world through various artistic disciplines.   

Happy Valentine's Day

Meta Gallery Stereoscope

click on or beside image for a larger view

     For the instructions on how to cross your eyes to 3D-orize  this gallery, just follow the instructions I posted on December 12th with the other stereoscope images. 

Happy New

Printed card - 4 x 4.5 inches - Rupertsland Cards - 2011