Couch beneath the heavens

Getting into that Corel Painter again. Still pretty hard to figure out which brushes do what since they're all named obscure things like "wide, flat, wet brsuh" — super helpful. I'm also still not sure if I should be trying to use layers at all, or if I should try to do it traditional-style and just paint everything right onto the canvas. 

This piece accompanies a poem written by Kelsey Amos. Hopefully they both get selected to appear in Hawaii Review Issue 79. Still waiting to hear.

UPDATE: Hawaii Review selected Kelsey's poem and my painting to appear in HR issue 79! Look for it at the end of the Fall semester.

Daft Experiments from the Moon

Wow, I really need to do a better job of posting my art right after I finish it, otherwise I forget to do it, months go by, and by then I don't always even like it anymore - defeats the purpose of a blog, to be sure.

Well I'm working for a new place now that Weekly exploded, which also gives me more time to do stuff like this piece. I wrote a review of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories for INhonolulu Magazine which will go live this coming Friday. This is original artwork I created to go with it.

DMC Hawaii Thumbnail

I'm writing an article for the Honolulu Weekly this time, but somehow I managed to get art involved too.
The story is about Disproportionate Minority Contact in Hawaii's Juvenile Justice System - Native Hawaiians account for 40% of youth involved in the JJS here.
UH Manoa's Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning helped put out a report with suggestions on how to fix this and I put together an article explaining all that.
This image is a thumbnail I did for an image I think I'll use to accompany this article. The editor of the Weekly asked for an image of troubled youth, and since the story is abstract, and not about any one youth in particular, I decided to obscure the face with heavy shadows that should hopefully also add a lot of mood and emotion.
However, it is still a news story, so we don't want the image to color the story too much, since it is fabricated (the image, not the story). We'll have to see what happens. I may have to revise before I can start painting for real.

The Four Elements

Part of my "real, live superheroes" project, this image was created by taking a photo of four friends posed as superheroes representing The Four Elements.
At the Ka Leo Arts Festival, my booth was a "get yourself drawn as a super hero or villain" booth. Thanks in large part to my marketing champion Reece Farinas, I made a lot of money and made a lot of people happy at the same time! Most of the customers took their pencil drawings home with them, but these guys asked me to keep theirs and turn it into a full blown, colored comic cover. So here it is! Hope you like it.

To the left is the original pencil drawing I did at the fair.

As always, right click on an image to open it in a new tab and view it full sized.

The Far Side of Business Bullshit

Since these illustrations were never used by TwentyWhat Magazine (the Obama Romney one was, but these ended up not making the cut for what the editor was looking for) I decided to use my buddy Vince's fake captions and turn these into hilarious statements about our times.  I hope you enjoy them too: