Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Well my favorite holiday is upon us. Thanksgiving! It is a holiday when family gets together and just has a great time... the smell of everything cooking in the kitchen and the nieces and nephews running around.. the game on T.V. and yes I do wish I had a glass of wine in my hand .... but maybe one day when I hold Thanksgiving at my house that dream will come true.

This Illustration was inspired by a story Roger ( my step father ) told years ago around the dinner table, about a group of astronauts that came to a planet and the inhabitants were giants that captured them all and boiled them and ate them for a feast.. then kept the remaining astronauts around and bred them so they would always have them for dinner every year...
the joke being that the astronauts were from a Turkey planet and we were the giants... that is Roger's sense of humor for ya... funny stuff.

Graphite on Paper 8.5" x 11"
!!HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

Desert Star Back Drops

I was approached by the Desert Star Theater to create some backdrops for them like I did in 2008 fo rtheir show "Wizard of Odd". This year it was for "The Bi-Polar Express"

These drops have to be done in a very short turnaround process, 4 weeks altogether.
1 week of comps and brainstorming to get the feel for the drops they want. Now these drops had existing drops that were painted by hand and now they have a set for their dinner theater also, so they can run the show in both theaters at the same time.

They needed a drop to look like the interior of a train car with section in the windows that they will cut out.


This drop was hard because of all the toys and trying to get them to look like they were all individually painted... which they are but you really have to see the detail of the drop to see the painting effect, from a distance they look very picturesque.

This drop was the funnest one to do..it just was really easy and I had fun with it.. of course it was the one that went the fastest.
Each drop took about a week to do and they turned out well. It is a project that could use a lot more time, but time is not an option I have as a freelance artist

Digital Art done in Illustrator and Photoshop CS5

YOGA Sketch

I am going to try to hit up threadless.com again.. but this time I am going to try this sketch. The word Yoga illustrated in people doing Yoga positions.
So this is the basic premise, I will put this into Illustrator and make it a nice tight vector image for shirts... I hope this one works.
Graphite on paper.

My New Website is done!!!

Please go and check out my new website!!

deanillustration.com

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

My design was accepted!!!

I put this design up on threadless.com to be critiqued and it did really well, so I sent it in for submission and it was ACCEPTED!!! I learned a lot from my last design I submitted and put that knowledge into this shirt.

Please go to threadless and vote 5 for me, it is cash and prizes if I win... and I sure could use it right now.... help a poor artist out!

I believe you have to create an account to vote, but it is very simple and takes just a minute to do.

Thanks everyone

Threadless..again!!!

http://www.threadless.com/critique/77595/Patty_s_Crest

Okay so I designed a crest and I want to see how it does out in the critique world... I really enjoy the design so I hope it does well. Please check the link and vote if you can.

Thanks!!

Cross 2

Back in February I put up a post about a cross I had designed from a tattoo for a motorcycle graphic. Well the pictures are here of the finished product.

The paint job turned out absolutely beautiful... and the ghost graphics on the bike are phenomenal

The paint job was done at Coonyzs Customz / www.coonyzcustomz.com

The bike looks fantastic and is literally a piece of art rolling down the street, I am glad to have been a part of the creation.

Crest

One of my latest projects was to help a client come up with a family crest. Well when I say help I mean I illustrated and she just told me what to do.
This was her initial sketch of what she wanted and the final image is what we came up with.

After several emails and sketches we started to move forward. She wanted the classic animals protecting the crest and choose a swan and a bear (but she wanted the bear to look like the classic lions that you see in a crest) so there were a ton of elements added and changed.

Here is the final version of the crest once it was finally decided on. The process was several forms of media, traditional drawings for the animals, Adobe Illustrator for the placement and layout, and Adobe Photoshop for the coloring and effects added to the crest.
All in all it was around 25 concept drawings and samples and around a week of solid working to get it to her liking.

Pencil, Adobe Illustrator CS5, Adobe Photoshop CS5

Frank Frazetta 1928-2010

As a boy my father had a set of books by a fantasy artist named Frank Frazetta. I loved these books, strong muscular men battling with axes and swords and sexy curvaceous woman that were dominant and seductive.

These books were my first step into a bigger world of fantasy art, I loved turning every page and absorbing every detail, the colors and the detail in the armor and weapons, and of course his power understanding of the human anatomy.

Today he died at 82. He is one of the men I had wished I could have met, I would hope he was making a special appearance at the Comic Conventions I attended, I had even thought of taking a trip to his estate to see if I could meet him, but never did. His paintings inspired me to become an artist and to love art in a way so few do... through the eyes of a child. I will always look at his art in wonderment and aspire to create something as great as he did. Thank you Frank for making me the artist I am today.

APPROVED

LOST's Island

So I was sitting on my couch watching the greatest show on earth... LOST!!! And I got to thinking.. "Hmm.. I see some very close similarities to another T.V. show I used to watch" and so 'We are all LOST' was born.

Done in graphite of 11"X 17" Bristol - A mix of LOST / Gilligan's Island-The Minnow in the back ground reflecting Oceanic 815, Ginger and Mary-Ann replaced by Kate and Juliette... Sun and Jin as Thurston and Lovey...Sawyer as The Professor and Jack and John Locke as Gilligan and the Skipper.This is a color version of the drawing. I colored it in Photoshop and submitted it to http://www.threadless.com/submission/268474/We_are_all_LOST

vote for my drawing and if enough people do they will print it on a t-shirt!!!
So go vote NOW!!!

If the end of the show they run across the Minnow sitting in a Lagoon.... just know I called it.

Homework Assignment #2 Returned

Homework #2 has been returned!!! I used my good friend Elledge Bowers as my model..Thank you Elledge. and the results were very good.

Joe Kubert himself is correcting my homework.. I CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE IT!! I get a feel from his comments he sees real potential and wants me to succeed! I am so excited to start the next piece. Enjoy the wonderful constructive criticisms of a master artist.

American Express Project

I was approached by our marketing team here at O.C.Tanner to help create some files for a presentation of American Express. They wanted the O.C. team to be turned into SUPERHEROES to show their Heroic dedication to the Am Ex project. it was put into a slide show and presented to the Heads of American Express.
Each image shows the picture I used, the pencil sketch, the Illustrator image I turned them into and then the superhero bodies I put them on. I colored them all in Photoshop. The bodies (well all but two ) were created on a fun little web site called
UGO the website if you make your own superhero is, http://www.ugo.com/channels/comics/heromachine2/heroMachine2.asp , and then I hand colored them in Photoshop.
I was approached on Tuesday and had to have the entire thing ready to go Monday morning, along with access cards for the team to access there awards for working hard.

The background was created in Illustrator using live trace.

Homework Assignment #2

This assignment was to tell a story using no word bubbles at all...using facial features and body motion to convey the premise.

I used my friend Elledge as a model, thank you Elledge!
Graphite on Bristol Board 11"x 17"

King's Cottage Tuesday Nights

Went to King's Cottage on Tuesday and drew the live model.
Graphite on Paper 11" x 17"

Cross

I was hired to to recreate a tattoo into a tight image to be recreated into a graphic for a motorcycle.

The upper image is the image given, the one below is the sketch that did to get into the computer so I could start the illustration in the computer

Here is the final product that I did in Illustrator and sent off to the motorcycle shop to be painted on the bike. I am sure I will get a photo when the bike is done and I will post it then.