Android Karenina

Quirk Books latest mash-up from the esteemed Ben Winters, Android Karenina, is out now! Tolstoy's seminal work has now been infused with cyborgs, grav-trains, trans orbital bullet ships, wormholes, and alien infestations. Fifteen black and white illustrations done by yours truly are tucked inside this doozy of book! Once again thanks go out to Doogie Horner and Jason Rekulak of Quirk Books for giving me the opportunity to provide content for another mash-up. Each illustration proved to be a unique and varied challenge that made the process thoroughly enjoyable! Here are some of my personal favorites:

Monster Stew!

When I was a wee lad, I used to draw monsters. A LOT of monsters. Monsters on napkins. Monsters on ruled paper. Monsters in coloring books. Monsters on the walls. So when I was asked to create a series of illustrations of well known monster arch types, I couldn't resist.

The book is called "Horrorscopes" and it's being published by Chronicle Books. I was asked to create twelve interior illustrations plus a border illustration that would be used throughout the book.

Kudos to Kristen Hewitt, the wonderful art director, for keeping everything cohesive, and reigning me in when I got too gory (which was often...).

Without any further ado, enjoy the monster stew!

bear's gotta come out of his cave someday...

Once again I've fallen behind on my posts-but this time I have a good reason...

fatherhood!

My wife Mary gave birth to our beautiful daughter Audrey Olivia Smith, last November. I've spent the last 4 months figuring out how to take care of this new, amazing little person-as well as keep up with all the work I seem to want to pile on myself. I'm working hard on some new promotional materials which I'll post soon; in the mean time I've decided to post my submission for the new Beasts! volume from Fantagraphics. The competition is pretty fierce, over 200 artists submitted work, so my chances are slim. Although I don't think it's my best work, doing this project got me in gear and I'm ready to jump back into the fray of creating art again.



And here's my piece for Beasts!-



The Red Cap, here's the wikipedia entry for this little beasty:
A Red Cap or Redcap, also known as a powrie or dunter, is a type of malevolent murderous goblin, elf or fairy found in British folklore. They inhabit ruined castles found along the border between England and Scotland. Redcaps are said to murder travelers who stray into their homes and dye their hats with their victims' blood (from which they get their name).^[1] Indeed, redcaps must kill regularly, for if the blood staining their hats dries out, they die. Redcaps are very fast in spite of the heavy iron pikes they wield and the iron-shod boots they wear. Outrunning the buck-toothed little demons is quite impossible; the only way to escape one is to quote a passage from the Bible. They lose a tooth on hearing it, which they leave behind.

Telenovela Color Final

Here's the finished illustration in color including a header-I've been informed that they are going to play with the format of the illo and split it up throughout the article. The font is Bahaus 93-a new favorite of mine. I painted the illo with Hobein Acryla Gouche.

Telenovelas

I'm currently working on an assignment for StopOver magazine about the dominance of telenovelas in the lives of South Americans. Telenovelas are basically soap operas that have a finite number of episodes and are usually shown 5-6 days a week for about 6 months or so. "Ugly Betty" is a descendant of the Columbian telenovela Yo soy Betty, la fea (I am Betty, the ugly one.) A good deal of the article deals with how the majority of the public that watches these telenovelas have nothing even remotely in common with the characters represented in these programs; white, well-off, and generally disconnected from the everyday problems of the average person living in the modern cities of South America. The high drama format of the telenovela provided me with lots of fun imagery to work with, so coming up with thumbs wasn't dificult at all-



One of things I wanted to play with in the thumbs is the recent actions by Hugo Chavez involving the shutdown of Radio Caracas TV, one of the founders of the telenovelas, for reasons that range from the distribution of "pornographic" material (the telenovela) to political malfeasance. It's been reported that 70% of the Venezuelan people opposed this act.

I went with two very different ideas for the rough sketches - With the first I was interested in presenting the idea in a comic panel format (According to my dad, telenovelas started out as photonovelas, which were staged photos presented in a comic-book format. I didn't find this out until after the sketch was done). The comic panel format allowed me to show a number of different vignettes that represented the general themes of the telenovela, primarily being two people shacking up, and people freaking out about those people shacking up-not too different from our soap opera crap.


The next sketch took a little less complex direction but I think it got the idea over in a conceptual and simple fashion. I liked it because I thought a reader would be able to see it and get a pretty direct impression of what the article would be about.



To my suprise the AD and editors decided to go with the first sketch - In a way this was my choice just because I wanted the chance to illustrate Hugo Chavez. Below is the finished drawing that is going to painted in acrylics. The header is just a comp to be done later in photoshop.

LRRH-finito!

Finally finished this piece intended for a possible postcard image. I'd say it took about 8 hrs on photoshop mostly due to the fact that I'm pretty green with the software. The digital process is definitely more forgiving, and it's certainly nice to be able to correct mistakes or change color schemes instantaneously. I can't say I'd use it exclusively, but it's nice to have another tool to use in the creative process.

In the works...

Something I've been working on lately-finished version coming soon.

Communication Arts!

An illustration I did was accepted into Communication Arts Illustration Annual! It was entered in the unpublished category-done with FW acrylic inks. Good ol' Neil Young...