"Worst, Best Day"

best day skydiving

Asphyxiation

Snowman's worst day

Liar Liar. Gonna Die-ar

Raincloud

myles

Worst Day Ever

the best day ever is

enjoying a glass of wine and cigar without a care in the world.

Best Day Ever.

Hollaaaaaa.

The Worst Day...Interrupted by Karma!

Nike Soccer Ad-Final

Final Worst Day Ever: Car Wreck

a retail experience

final illustration. took more of a worst day look. original ink drawing layout in photoshop.

Zombie's Best Day Ever (Final)

Final..About to have the worst day ever

worst day ever.

dont trust strange monsters, even in your dreams.

best day ever

Final Project: A Chipmunk's Worst Day Ever

Final Project- Birth!

Final Illustration-Erik Lundquist

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neckbeerd/5259505110/lightbox/

Pen & marker on paper-11"x17"

The Worst Day!... Interrupted by.. Karma!

Melting Snowman

Worst, Best Day Ever

The day I ignore the call of nicotine:

I've taped on some rough sketches of what will appear in the boxes.

Best Day Eva!!

Best Day Ever

Pogo and the Worst Day Ever

Mony Bunni- Worst Day Ever

My worst day ever was a car wreck that happened to me my senior year of high school. I drew this in pen and ink and I'm going to go on Photoshop and clean it up and color it in. I'm going to exaggerate the red in the blood but I want to have all of the other colors muted.

Progress - Worst Day Ever

Ink, design marker, and water color. The idea was taking the old comic idiom of the raincloud over the character's head and making it full scale. Still going to clean it up a bit digitally. I like the wrinkles from the watercolor in the cloud, but there are some other area's which could be tighter.

Asphyxiation WIP - Worst Day Ever

This is going to be mixed media with multiple layers of paper and gouache. Textures are subject to change. I'm slightly satisfied with the wall texture, just have to get some shadow on the tub and paint details. The arm looks wonky right now because it's partially obscured, but no worries. (It's kind of hard to tell, but the other arm is clutching at her throat.)

Yay for experimentation! ... and texture studies.

Best Day Ever, Dream-style.

This best day ever is a dream about being a martian and swinging from the moon. I'm going to go through with watercolor pencils and pick up a lot of detail in the sky aond surface of the planet!

here are a few roughs of my concept "best/worst" day ever. birth. current layout is strictly to view the images. final layout will be different.

Best Day Ever in Vegas

this is my halfway point...The poker chips are a place holder until I create some in illustrator...the final will have more details in the hand and some other various things I am working on in other files...very raw right now but still working

Zombie's Best Day Ever

Been dealing with a family emergency, so my "halfway finished" art is not even close to halfway, but I figured I'd at least post what I have so far. That's the sketch.

Here's the pencils of the fourth and last panels:

Liar Liar

These are two of my preparatory drawings. The idea is that the bunny had just lied and now his pants are on fire and he's hanging from a telephone wire. To make matters worse I plan on putting a crocodile pit under him hence the drawing of the baby crocodile. I will be putting together the finished piece in Adobe Illustrator.

(my pictures wouldn't upload properly so here are links)

http://imgur.com/XGHf5.jpg

http://imgur.com/aD3M5.jpg

Nike Soccer- Best Night Ever

*EDIT* Okay, so my original thought was to make a full page comic book style ad for Nike displaying their new USA Men's National Team uniforms. However, as I look at it online, I think I'm just going to scrap all text completely except the slogan at the bottom, and use the same images but arranged slightly different. Vector photorealism made in Illustrator.

Halfway point-worst day ever

Walking on thin ice. Pen and pencil on paper and then adding color digitally.

Chipmunk's Worst Day Ever

"A Chipmunk's Worst Day Ever"-halfway finished. So far I've painted this in watercolor. I still need to go over some areas in watercolor, ink and probably colored pencil, and add the rain.

Teeth Strike

Halfway point, Digital comic done in Paint Tool SAI
Still needs to be done: Clean up/redraw person, try to make style more consistent.

Worst Day Ever and Best Day Ever

painting in photoshop

Laura Uhl: WDE

WIP: Worst Day Ever. Photoshop over traditional sketch.

Halfway point-perfect day/place.pen on paper

Ruben (and Isabel!) Toledo

Just to make up for a missing post, I’ll write about Ruben Toledo, my favorite fashion illustrator.

He’s married to his childhood friend, Isabel Toledo, who is a fashion designer, and also is originally from Cuba. The two met in middle school, while in New Jersey, and began dating after high school graduation. Ruben went on to the School of Visual Arts while Isabel went to Parsons.

Together, the couple inspires each other- Ruben sketches ideas for his clients, including Nordstrom, The New Yorker, Harper’s while Isabel designs and sews her own fashion collections. Ruben got his start, after marrying Isabel in 1984, as a window display designer at Fiorucci, a fashion store in New York. Currently, he produces paintings and illustrations for a variety of mediums- from store installations (Barney’s) to perfume bottles (Estee Lauder) and book covers (Penguin) as well as illustrations for Nina Garcia’s fashion books. The couple tends to wear clothes exclusively designed by Isabel and their apartment is decorated with Ruben’s images, so for them, life and art blend together.

I was initially introduced to his style through ads that I saw in Vogue for Nordstrom and I was immediately captivated by his highly stylized images of women wearing designer clothing. Typically, a store would run photographs of their collections, but instead, Ruben’s incredibly detailed depictions of fashion create interest in the product. In fact, I’m much more drawn to his art than the actual purse or dress because he gives it a personality that just isn’t captured in a photograph. Ruben has also dabbled in caricatures, with incredible gestural lines and the bold colors that are featured in most of his work.

I think that Ruben Toledo is a prime example of an artist who doesn’t limit himself- he explores all facets of the fashion world and creates art that is easy to interact with, with some help from Isabel.

So this week i came up with a pretty awesome illlustration of some well known actors, including: Will Arnett, Steve Buscemi, and Michael Chikitis. I was flipping through a GQ magazine and surprisingly this publication works with many illustrators, as there were drawings almost on every couple pages which i had no idea about. The illustration work inside consisted mostly of journalistic / editorial illustration along with a lot of pop culture drawings on famous people and what not. One thing i did find really interesting was the publications interest towards caricatures. Almost every famous person illustration inside GQ and a lot of other major magazines seems to lean towards caricature or exaggerated illustration for most their style illustration. Why this is, I'm not completely sure, for some reason i would think their interest would be towards something more accurate or realistic. On the other hand my personal taste goes in the opposite direction, as i believe caricatures have a way more dynamic look and feel to them were expression is captured on a greater level than a more accurate representation. Perhaps the caricature aesthetic just seems more appropriate to these publications to embody the essence or real mood of that person or thing the magazine is trying to illustrate or convey about them. The artist in this case is Andy Freidman, and upon doing a little research on the artist, this style seems to be his specialty. You can find more of Freidman's work throughout other major magazines such as GQ and Men's Health, along with many others, He also does a lot of collaborative illustration with John Cuneo which is another popular cartoonist. For a little about this illustration in particular, i think it would fall under caricature as style, but he has a unique trick and twist to his drawings that make them stand out from the classic caricature we are all familiar with. Freidman stands out as an illustrator in my opinion for his unique ability to draw these caricatures in an exaggerated, yet very accurate manner, in which expression and persona is captured masterfully through his delicate and controlled use of lines. HE seems to only work in black and white compositions, but you can see he is very familiar with design techniques as he treats his negative spaces confidently with black shapes. He seems to be playing with the whole composition of the image to make it more visually appealing and stimulating moving your eye from one corner to another. Great stuff, enjoy.

Conan the Adventurer

Last week I was watching a documentary called “Frazetta: Painting with Fire”. The movie is about the artist Frank Frazetta. I can’t tell you what artist made me want to make art, but Frank Frazetta has definitely had the most influence on me since I found out about him. To me, his work is magic, and I am not the only one that thinks so.

As a kid he was great at art. He was on his way to study in Europe before his teacher pasted away and everything fell apart. By 15, Frank started working on comics. His peers said that anything Frank touched became gold. He could have made a living alone on making comics, but he was just getting started in his career. He then worked for Hollywood for a bit making movie posters. After that he began to make covers for adventure books.

His cover for “Conan: the Adventurer” is the artwork that I picked for this week’s post. With this one work he redefined a whole genre of work. The fantasy world would never be the same after Frazetta. Books with his covers became collectables just for the cover. Some give him credit for selling more than most of the artists of the genre.

His version of Conan was much different than previous ones. Frazetta gave his a rough and scarred look compared to a clean muscle man. He gave life to his paintings. I think the composition of this work in particular is great. The pyramid form draws me from the pile of bones up the blood that is wrapping around the sword to this beaten champion that stands victorious starring you down. For the genre of sword and sorcery, this work is the Holy Grail.

Gorillaz

Created by Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn, Gorillaz is a band consisting of four illustrated members. The two came up with the idea for a completely fabricated band in 1998, after watching too much MTV and deciding they wanted to comment on how fake pop music was at the time. The band consists of 2-D, Noodle, Murdoc, and Russel. They’ve won many awards for their music, and their second album went five time platinum in the U.K. Hewlett also won the Design Museum’s Designer of the year award in 2006. Some of Hewlett’s other work includes Tank Girl, and album art for Mindless Self Indulgence.

There’s something very distinctive about Hewlett’s art. You can see it in the posture, the jawlines, and the faces of his characters, with wide mouths, and slanted eyes and a somewhat... lanky feel to their bodies. His images have plenty of personality, and tend to be very colorful, with clean black outlines. I think the idea of creating a band and having the member’s be cartoons is genius. It takes the idea of album artwork above and beyond, illustrating the band itself, music videos, photos, etc. I find the colorful characters much more appealing and a better face for the music that you’re average musician.