Long time, no post...

Yeah sorry about that folks, it's been a while since my last post, but here it is. So stop your whining.

Since my move to Amsterdam I've been trying to free up time to work on a new visual identity for BOLTgraphics. I thought if I have to print new cards and letterhead I might as well freshen up the whole look of it.
Well I've finally mangaed to free up a few hours and here are some of the results...

The basic concept our new corporate identity will be one of flexibility. It will entail several different logo's within a consistent visual environment, to show versatility and flexibility. Or, to put it less pretentiously, I've been drawing a whole bunch of different logo's to show people I can do all kinds of styles...
So here are a few of them. These are not the colors I will be using for the visual identity, I want to keep that under wraps for now.









I'm gonna try and find out if I can get baseball jersey's with those last two. If so they'll be available in the BOLTgraphics online store.

Practice makes... better

Lately I've been really working hard to get my inking and coloring to a higher or at least to a different level. To broaden the scope and become more of an all rounder. I have been inking sketches that I found on the web, by among others, Jack Kirby. Just to have something to ink. But I figures since I'm never going to be part of a comic book producing machine like the people who used to ink his work and I will always be inking my own work, it was an utterly pointless (though interesting) exercise. In order to develope my own style of inking I needed to ink my own pencils. So I did.
I took a sketch I posted in my last blog entry, but here it is again....


So I inked it. I did a light blue print out of it and inked on top of that.
I wasn't too unhappy with the result, although I think I overdid the details slightly. I'm trying to find a better balance between rough and undetailed parts and detailed more rendered part of the drawing. But I always get sort of caught up in the fun of putting ink to paper with a brush, which result in the whole thing being too detailed and loses all tension within it... Does that makes sense? It needs a contrast between rendered and less-rendered bits, so that certain parts jump out more and get more emphasis. That's important...
Anyway te ink:


So as I said, the inks had room for improvement, but it was a nice little exercise. So I thought what the hell, let's follow through with some more photoshop practice. I love the way photoshop let's you make the illustration look sexy...


I'm thinking of maybe adding some type, but I don't know what yet.

If there are any inkers/draftsmen/colorererers out there that have any points for me, please let me know. I've been a professional illustrator and designer for about 10 years now, but I still have plenty to learn and not afraid to do so. So if you have any thoughts on this stuff, it'd be cool to hear from you....

Doodles

Not much to post but a bunch of sketches.
Some inked, some not, some halfway.
Enjoy...

Mighty Thor

Some time ago I came across this Flickr page (through a post on Coop's blog) onwhich several artists, both amateur and proffesional had posted their own inkings of Jack Kirby's pencils of a page out of the number 144 issue of Thor.
Never having inked some-one else's pencils befire, I intended to join in and add my own but due to other deadlines and the like I didn't get to it for weeks. Untill yesterday...
On my way to my studio (on the other side of town) the weather changed from beautifull to crappy (as it has done every morning for all of this summer so far). Thunder and lightning were in the sky. I caught a couple of bolts out of the corner of my eye and scanning the skies for more fireworks I hadn't noticed a little post in the middle (!!!) of the road in time. So I crashed right into it, going over the bars,bending the fork and left pedal of my bike, cutting my hand and hitting my knee hard.... idiot.
Anyway since the god of thunder had distracted me that much I decided I let him destract me some more so I inked a panel from the page.... bla bla bla here it is.

The original pencils (just the last panel)...


Aaaand the inks...


I want to do the rest of the page aswell so as soon as that's done, it'll be blogged on.

Hitching the wagon

In august I'm getting married which is fun. But what's even better is I get to design my invitations! (only kidding, honey).
Since my lovely girlfriend soon to be wife is from South Korea and I'm still buzzing from the trip we took there in May I decided to go with Korean feel.

In South Korea almost everything looks beautiful and grubby at the same time. And in some way the beauty and the grubbyness seem to compliment each other wonderfully. So not phased by the fact that in Korea this came about over a few hundred years, I set upon trying to achieve the same feel in the invitation.

Since the Korean manga industrie is renowned for ripping off the Japanese manga classics, I decided to do the same... And since I bought a dvd boxset of AstroBoy in Soul the choice of which classic to rip off was easely made.

So First I started to sketch out the characters...


Then came the type. Based on some AstroBoy artwork from the 70' (i think) I did the main lettering of the word "Trouwen" in Illustrator. No handdrawn sketches because it's such a straight/blocky style.
For all the remaing typography I used Bullet Smallcaps from the House Industries font library, and quite heavily tweeked it using the 'skew' and 'free transform' features in Illustrator (yeah I went no holds barred on this one).


The next step was to dump it all in photoshop, color it all, add some cutesy robot characters, Korean type and some of that all important grubbyness. The latter mainly consisted of the 'pixelate > color halftone' effect and switching all the layer blending modes to 'multiply' and putting it all to the background of a scanned in piece of cardboard. Et voilá, c'est la belle grub.

Check this dude out.

As some of you might know, I did a short stint working at House Industries and that's where I met this guy Chris Gardner. He's an immensely tallented illustrator and actually the fella who turned me to using a brush and taking this illustration thing a lot more serious.
I recently found out he has a blog of his own. This guys work is as tight as a duck's arse.
Check it out.

Another PS coloring experiment...

I'm still trying to get more into Photoshop. I'm basically a big fat Illustrator fanatic (only using Photoshop to scan and adjust inks slightly), but I think in some cases it can be quite a bit more quick and efficient to use Photoshop.
But to really put the pixel-based bastard to good use I need some practice first. Here's some of it.
I decided to color in one of the sketches I did in Korea, but without inking it, so I could use the pencil-shading I did on it.

First the original:

Then I put it on a straight forward gradient to sort of set the tone. and put the blend mode of the sketch layer on multiply.

Then give the important bits a quick flat color. I also tried coloring thhe jacket and the flute and all the rest of it, but that made it all flat and boring.

Next I threw in some high-lights. Almost done.

I did some experimenting with rendering the jacket and the tree and the urn on the guy's back but that took all the attention away from the faces so i just kept it simple. I did make the overall tone of the thing somewhat cooler because all that brown was getting a tad too poo-colored.

So that was that. Another lesson in "keep it simple, you idiot".

Aaaaaaand we're back!

Yes folks, we're back... well I am anyway.
Still a bit jetlagged but those weeks in South Korea were great. The country is a breathtakingly beautiful, weird, dirty, spiritual, futuristic, traditional, spicy, friendly, proud, lovely place to be. It's so full of cool things to look at that I just couldn't stop taking pictures. I had to stop in the end because me little Nikon Coolpix 460 started complaining that it couldn't read the memory card.
I managed to get in just over 1400 (most of them crap) and in the end the memory card was fine and all the pictures made it back home. I will post pictures as soon as I've had a chance to sift through them all.

For now, here are some of the sketches I did to keep myself busy on the various trains, planes and automobiles.
Enjoy, gamsahamnidaaaaa!

South Korea...

Hey friends...
There won't be any posting on here for a few weeks because I'll be in South Korea for a month.
But check back in June because I'll most likely have tons of pics, sketches and inspiration to post on when I'm back.
Hint: you can also use that nifty rss feed, then you don't have to remeber anything... ah isn't life easy sometimes...

Bye.

Those pesky clowns again...

In the nick of time I got them all done for ethe Garage Sale show. Which was this weekend.
I'm sorry I didn't post them any sooner. I couldn't be bothered.
The show made for a nice weekend, didn't sell much (apart from a a bunch of posters and some t-shirts). There was a couple of people interested in the Clowns but seeing as that the paint had litterally just dried the day before I had decided not to sell them. I want to look at them for a bit before I flog them off.
Here are the finished products.




This is how they were displayed during the show. Showing the whole saga of Paco's last day on this planet, in the right order.

I think the 'One-shot experiment' was a succes and I will definitely have do some more of these painting in future. But next time I want to try a slightly less weathered surface, and maybe some more color. We'll see.

Send in the Clowns!!

Don't you just hate those face-painted psycho's emerging from tiny broken down fire-engines and squirting water all over everybody? With their grins and noses, walking down imaginary cellar steps, before utterly disappointing you by just standing up. It was all fake. He just crouched down. Somebody should have shot him in the neck when he was down there..... (or am i being harsh?)
So, back in my fantasy world of crayons I decided to set one on fire and after seeing his hair and career go down in flames, drink himself to death. Here's the play by play....

It all started with a doodle in my sketchbook.

And it pleased me enough to turn it into a series... Coincidentally I had 4 used skateboard decks lying around, and I thought it'd be nice idea to combine the two (get it? Clowns... skateboards).
Anyway I sketched on for the rest of the decks.



With the sketches done it was time to think about how I was going to stick them on the skateboard decks. I still had a tin of One Shot enamel and reckoned that stuff would be perfect... After some messing about, trying to transfer the images onto the wood I started to slap on the enamel paint.



As you can see I'm in the middle of painting the thing (and finishing up the drawing for the last deck) so I will continue blogging this particular subject at a later stage. But I hope I'll get them finished by the end of this week because I want to show them at the GarageSale art show, of which I will (hopefully) be a part....
Anyway keep 'em peeled.

Type added

A while back I posted something about a t-shirt design I was working on which had 3 caricatures on it....
See it here if you must.
Anyway I still needed to the lettering.... so I did.
I tried out a few different styles but soon enough arrived at a chunky script which was loose yet bold enough to correctly balance out the whole piece.


The on on the left (the lazy option) was too fascist looking. The other one to scrawny (and wobbly for that matter).

For the final version I did some sketches using a brush, which I have never done before. I've been practicing my brush-scripts, but I never actually used it.... well I haven't really used it this time but it helpful to kind of study the shapes and then base drawings on them. Just to make my lettershapes a bit more natural. One day I just have to retouch and scan in my brushed work, but seeing as I'm a clumsy lefty that day won't be tomorrow soon...
Anyway check out the sketches and the subsequent result.



For the "Noordwijk's own" and "TATTOO" I used the 'Poster' from the Housemovements collection (which came free with the House Industries Book). Did the trick beautifully. Don't you think?

Easter Garage Sale!!!

On April 7,8 & 9 we'll be holding a garage sale!
It's the yearly reoccuring art-show by some of Amsterdam's finest low-brow artist. This year I've been asked to also take part. A great honour, but I really have to scramble to get some work together.
At the same time there's a show in a different part of the city in which I also take part (Ars Macabra Hollandica: see my previous post) so all of a sudden I needed new stuff to show. I can't bear showing old work so I'm working on all new pieces.
Well on one I've been already working for a while. The painting I've posted on earlier which I'll do more posts one later and hope to finish in time for the show.
One little side project which is going to be part of the Garage Sale Art Sho(p)w is a series of 4 23x23 cm Piëzo-(a.k.a. giclee-)prints by every participating artist. Those will be available for a great bargain: only 50 Euros!!
Anyway here's my entry:

I started this thing years ago. Well the drawing of the girl and the inks too. But I abandoned it after I did a really shabby 'experimental' coloring of it. So I decided to re-color it for this occasion, and put it to a background (which I did for this especially. sure kids, there's none of that 'graphic-ornaments-stock-book-with-CD-inside' bullshit going on here).
I did one thing I don;t usually do which is blur the background and add blurry shadows and stuff. I works... sort of.
Anyway, I hope you like it (you can come and buy one) and if you don't, let me know why... you miserable bastard.

ARS MACABRA HOLANDICA

In April this is one of the shows where some of my work will be on display...
Grand-opening: April first.
This is the flyer, which was done by Erik Kriek (also curator of the exhibition).
The front:

aaaaand the back:

Caricatures inked

I put ink all over the caricatures that I drew a couple of weeks ago. I also put them together and drew some stuff around them (actually I did that before I put the ink on, you might be interested to know). Anyway here's the result.

I still need to put some type around it. I'll keep you posted on developments....

New sights, new sounds...

Same beats though...
The operation was a success, ma'am. We successfully transplanted my office from The hague to Amsterdam. We took two days and today we jump-started all the equipment back into life and we're rolling again.
Here's a pics of my new digs, and as you can see I'm not done unpacking yet.

I share the studio with a bunch of other designers and programmers, in case you're wondering who; just check the newly added links to the right.

Even more of MY ADIDAS

The advertising agency (180 Amsterdam) send me some more pics of different so called mega-site that were put up for the ADIDAS campaign. As you might have read in earlier posts, I did the custom lettering for them.
These are all in Brazil, I guess they like it big over there.



I apologise for the quality of some of the shots...

Horror show returns

I finished the third part of the horror trilogy. It's another creepy one.
Not quite sure how I'm going to have them reproduced. Maybe have them screen-printed, although that's quite expensive. I'm also considering using a duplicator because that gives it a nice cheap and grubby look (screen-printing it might make them look too clean and crisp). Maybe present the inks as one-offs but then I won't have the color.... Anyway they have to be done and dusted by March 27.