Some Unused Style Tests For A Sesame Street Segment, The Letter D.

Was doing some work on a graphic about electronic medical files and this was the first chunk of it before it got all medical-techy.

Bird 7: Laughing Gull

Another bird in the love it or hate it category, the Laughing Gull. The sea gull many of us think of is the Herring Gull, but they aren’t as attractive and don’t outnumber the Laughing Gull by very much here in Brooklyn. I see these guys all the time at Prospect Park. When I ride down to Coney Island and Brighton Beach, these gulls rule the school. I like them when they leave my junk alone. They strike me as crows that have retired - changed clothes to suit their beachier environment.

Season 3 Episode 13 in which two highschool girls experience the true power of planetary alignment! They kill baby Ryan Reynolds and are accused of Satanic conjuring by an increasingly agitated town. Some dude gets murdered by a spring... great episode.

This is part of an ongoing project to catalogue the villains from the television series X Files. Check out the others here!

My Life as a Musician and the Importance of Failure

After college, I was pretty sure I’d end up being a musician of some sort. The last year of film school really took it out of me. I got overly ambitious with projects and continually shot myself in the foot with intended scale, failure to adapt and refusal to scale back. I failed about as hard as I ever have that final semester and the summer after, about all I did was sit on porches reading comic books and rode a bicycle. In hindsight, I do think the experience was good for me. Since then I’ve learned to get things out, not only to have them done and off my plate, but to push myself to produce more and worry less about any work’s reception. It’s a balancing act of perfection and timeliness, a constant struggle that makes or breaks me daily as a designer and illustrator.

But back to music, I spent about a year after school concepting and working on an EP in my childhood home in Maryland. I’d write and record music for most of each day. Many months of this ended up in my being broke and a bit burnt-out on music. I kept producing the EP but started looking for a part time job. I was lucky enough to have a friend who had moved to New York after school and had a small illustration gig for me, illustrating tarot cards for some website for maybe a movie I think. Anyway, it went alright and it got me back into something I’d done my entire life but hadn’t much considered since highschool: drawing. I took the moderate success of the illustration gig and started scouring Craigslist for freelance design gigs. I suppose the rest is history, to skim over the agonizing period where I hunted awful Craigslist ads to work on my chops. As this started becoming more and more something I saw myself doing, maybe even for a career, the album started working on me in a bad way. I felt like I didn’t have enough time to finish it and I’d devoted so much time and energy on it already. So in a last crazed push, I slapped the thing together, called it Brighten Up Sourpuss (a directive and goal for me at at time of pretty extreme isolation) and sat on it. I had always intended to “shop it around”, whatever that means, and go on tour with it… I know. So, I went on with the design life, moved to Brooklyn and set about carving out a place where I could work for myself doing something I liked (something that didn’t make me as crazy as music did) and gave me the time to enjoy other things too (friends most importantly).

Well, here is the result of those many months in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by drums, cables, microphones, guitars, a xylophone, a banjo, a recorder, harmonicas, and anything else that I needed to commit to audio. It was a good time (again, in hindsight) and I’m rather proud of what I produced. I hope you enjoy it.

Yoga Me

I started doing yoga a month ago. Doing the job I do, I was in pretty serious need of yoga without really knowing it, with all the sitting and staring for most of every waking hour.  I’ve quickly become obsessed, as I am known to do, so I drew a picture of me doing yoga thinking about the things I think about when doing yoga.

Oye

Been mega busy with works but this one slipped out in all the pixel work I’ve been doing.

Bird 6: Northern Cardinal

Hello everyone, hope you had a great holiday weekend and that it was lazy and full of fine foods. Back on the birdwagon here. Today is a female Northern Cardinal, one of the prettiest northeast birds in my opinion. Haven’t shown much of a wing view yet, so here you go! The set is going well, many many birds still to go until I can even think about layout for the poster. Gonna pick up the pace a bit.

Maybe these guys are a brother-sister rock duo.

Every year, I host a dumpling party in which we make a heck of a lot of dumplings and watch a whole mess of movies starring a selected, beloved, actor. This year, it's John Cusack, so I drew him on a poster for the FOURTH annual ae Dumpling Party.

MOVIE POSTER

Big holiday gift for my girlfriend this year was my own rendition of a movie poster for Jacques Demy’s lovely Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Really pleased with how it came out and made me work really big - final was 27x40 inches. Also really forced me to come up with a script I liked and could duplicate across several signatures. Liked it so much I hope that jaggedy cursive can be my own.