Board Game

So I’ve been chugging along on my board game for The 19XX. Here is the latest board version. I printed up images and glued them to an old Monopoly board. Hopefully I will get to test out the rules this weekend.

Below are some board design paths I went down but then aborted.  I’m glad I did though because I like where I ended up.

This was the first board I game up with, I realized I needed the board to be a square, so I took the opportunity to scrap it and start over.

This was the second board I started.  The colors quickly got out of hand and I could not reign them in.  So I started over! And the result is the top board which I now found acceptable enough to continue play testing.

Art Deco Poster

First post in a while…
I had a client last week who needed a poster for an event titled “A Night in Monte Carlo”. The challenge was they did not want to emphasize the gambling since they were trying to appeal to a family crowd and it’s an organization that tries to help children get adopted. So I suggested an art deco style poster in the vein of the old travel poster and they loved the idea. So here is the result. Could have been better, but it could have been worse!

A lot of times I see people do Art Deco Style images and they use illustrator to get the perfectly straight lines. I do that sometimes myself but if you actually look at the old Art Deco Posters close up, they were far from perfect. That’s part of what I love about the style, the mix of fine lines and thick brush strokes. Here is one of my sources for this piece.

Kit Fox

Kit Fox is a little guy I created for the Kern County Tourism department. Shown are a few images of him doing some adventurous things around the county. I kind of based the look on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. I went with a simple character drawing and backgrounds that looked kind of hand painted.



And here is the wooden seal a little larger…

Visitor’s Guide Cover

Here is the new cover for the 2010 Kern County Visitor’s guide. Hot off the presses.

Wolf Mother

Just finished this piece called Wolf Mother.
Not too much to say about it except I felt like
drawing some wolves, but didn’t want a picture of just
two wolves sitting there, so….

The Carpathian

New poster for the Carpathian, the ship the 19XX calls home. The ship is based on a few real life airships, including the USS Los Angeles, the USS Macon, the Graf Zeppelin, and the Hindenburg. I have incorporated some different elements from each one and added some new ones.

19XX

It’s a 09/09/09, and that means another project. This time it’s big! I’m doing a webcomic called 19XX. Here is a movie poster from the 19XX world, head on over to www.the19XX.com to read the first comic. If I get some regular readers then I will update it regularly, I’m thinking every two weeks would be a good pace for me. What do you think?

Vintage Postcard

The Oildale 100th anniversary, Yee-Ha!
I was very excited to do a historical design for this important occasion, but my excitement was quickly tempered by a stack of rules that was thrust upon me for the things they wanted to show and didn’t show. Then some small legal tension developed between our department and another government organization that was trying to charge us royalties on an old photograph. After a long talk about what things government can copyright and what things they can’t they decided that we didn’t have to pay any royalties at all..
I was very close to dusting off my old media law book, very close.
OK, the Card on top is the first one I did, but the client deemed it too fancy. So the card on the bottom is he one the client approved, far less schmancy, but less rewarding I think. The black border is just the bleed area.

I’m particularly proud of my Indian Head Penny, which bears the year 1909, the year of Oildale’s founding and the last year before the switch to the Lincoln Head Penny. Coincidence? I think not.

Ravenrabbit

I was once again inspired by the book covers by publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who published Jules Verne’s works in the 1800′s. Ever single cover I have seen has been amazing, and filled with detail. I also incorporated some astrological symbols; symbols being another thing I am obsessed with.

The Message

I know I’ve seen tattoos coming alive before, and there’s that Atmosphere song, “the girl with the tattoos on her hands”, but I still had to draw it.  The tattoos were fun to draw, and it didn’t take as long as I thought it would.  I wanted her reaching for something, and I chose a cell phone.  It’s as if someone just sent her a really painful message, and she’s so emotional, angry, or whatever that her tattoos start coming to life, maybe to protect her.  That would be cool.