Buenos Noches

I realize that I haven't posted anything in a long while. Occasionally I come here looking for new stuff, and am surprised at myself, as ridiculous as that sounds. Honestly, I haven't done anything new in some time. Not since I finished the MIA piece, at any rate. I have been trying to upgrade my website, though, and can't settle on a layout that I like, and therefore have done nothing.

Meanwhile, I'll whet your appetites with a card that I hand-drew for a friend sometime last summer. I scanned it in for this very purpose. I remember it being somewhat thrilling to work in a traditional media on a tactile surface. I'll have to do that again soon.

M.I.A Finished?

I think I'm done with this. I added some hand-drawn textures, as well as some computer magic in the form of pixelization. The pixelizing in particular represents the basic, yet bold and original way that many of the graphics in her CD artwork and music videos are.

I was inspired by Maya's design aesthetics with all the bright colors and textures. At the same time, I'm wanted to rein in on a really wonderful, selective color palette; something that I feel adds a lot of sophistication to any piece of art. I'd definitely say that working a selective color palette AND executing the look of crazy / wild colors was one of the biggest challenges I faced.

This is also the BIGGEST file I've ever worked on. Over 1 GB! I usually get a lot more mileage out of fewer graphic elements. I'm a little afraid about what 1 GB means... Will the file be less stable? I know it's taking a long long time to open & save. Is it easier to become corrupted? Only time will tell.

M.I.A. Redux

I've been working on a new M.I.A. illustration for a couple days (or weeks, if you include my thoughts, hopes, and dreams on the subject). I'm completely scrapping the test-painting that I started of her back in October, as I come to the realization that the time for playing around and experimenting is over and the time to make some serious illustrations needs to begin.

Also, I've been obsessed with Matthew Woodson's art for about a week now, and looking at his blogs and techniques have instilled in me a new sense of vibrancy towards inked work (which is probably the one thing that I can honestly say that I do very well). I'm going to try to push the colors to be a little more organic, using natural techniques where I used to use digital ones. Another artist who I love is Yoann Lemoine--he paints underneath his inked works. I've done some things similar to this, but never spent any real time playing with the format.

What I really love about both Woodson and Lemoine's art is the way that they stylize their drawings. Especially the way Lemoine applies a boxy look to everything. I still need to find where I stand in the world of stylization. In other words, what does a person look like through "Osgood-vision", or a dog, or a lamp post... anything? I've been trying out the distortion thing for about a year now, and I'm having trouble combining that with inked work, especially inked portraiture. In this image in particular, I stretched Maya's face out rather dramatically in the horizontal, but then wasn't completely sure how to go about her body... She is a beautiful, full-figured girl, so I didn't want to do the long arms and legs that I've been doing so much recently, but also didn't want to get too realistic with her proportions. I think I found a pretty good mix between the two... We'll see how I feel about it in a couple months after I've done some more work.

I definitely know that my work lends itself best to broad, incomplete, yet confident strokes, and I need to find a way to use that more. Kagan McLeod is another illustrator that I take a look at fairly often... he does some wonderfully vague ink work, if you look through his whole portfolio.

Iron-On Magic!

So I found this iron-on in my mom's basement when I was cleaning through my things last May. I ironed it on to a t-shirt and just love it, so I'm going to hope that the artist originally responsible won't mind that I'm sharing it with the world... because it's just too cool to keep to myself.

The Self

I hadn't picked up the Wacom in a couple months and "painted", so I did this for practice. I think taking some time off was a good idea. The painting technique came really naturally to me, and I think that towards the end of 2007 I was getting really frustrated with myself.

Rehab Sugar Cookie

Did you ever expect to see Amy Winehouse in cookie form? She was one of my contributions to a cookie decorating event by my wonderful friends, the Muza Family.

Project White House

Here is a cover illustration I did for the Tucson Weekly. It ran the week of Thanksgiving. Illustration by me, typography by the staff at TW.

How many, how man boys are crazy, how many boys are raw?

Here's a sneak into my next portrait... It's M.I.A. She's one cool chick and I can't get enough of her. Watch her "Boyz" video here.

Anyway, I think I just need to give this piece some air as I realize that I've forgotten how to paint efficiently and successfully in the last couple months. Between working on distortion and meaningful portraiture, I don't think my brain can wrap itself around anything else at the present moment. Well, that and a full time job managing a gigantic beginning-of-season design project :) Cheers for cash, jeers for forgetfulness and crappy paintings!

Jem and the Holograms vs. The Misfits

Here is a project that I started a year and a half ago and just never finished... The goal was to revamp Jem and the Holgrams for modern audience as a cross promotional media property (i.e. television cartoon, music CDs, fashion line, etc). I spent a couple weeks researching fashion trends and applying them to the ladies of the Holograms and the Misfits... all I ever really finished was these character studies and preliminary logo design. I think that if I were to do it again today, I would push the stylization even further... perhaps like some of Disney's newer shows like The Replacements or Kim Possible. Maybe I'll come back to this project one day...

At any rate, I think that these 7 character designs do present a nice time capsule to what I saw in fashion Spring/Summer 2006.

Flash..

I'm working on revamping my whole website... and have been delving into Flash as a means of adding that extra wow factor... I was thinking about JUST doing a flash "Welcome Page", but the one I've designed takes so long to load, that it's simply not worth it for functionality.

Since this project is dead, at least in this incarnation, I figured I'd post it here, because it is kind of cool. Any thoughts on gallery websites made in HTML vs. Flash?

http://www.adamosgood.com/flash.html