Still at work on the poster of the common birds of Brooklyn. This is where we stand at the moment. The plan is to do 15 birds for this poster, and 15 more for the rare birds version. This frequency rating is based on the Prospect Park Audubon’s statistics and my own wandering through my home park. Very excited to get this one wrapped up and printed!
Was doing some work on a graphic about electronic medical files and this was the first chunk of it before it got all medical-techy.
That time again, DJ Lani Love’s new wintery mix. Cover art by me as usual. This is my favorite one thus far, so put it in your eartubes.
I launched my first comic of the new year over at the Friend Mold tumblr. It’s been in the works awhile, this comic, and I’m extremely excited to get it out in the world. It was a lot of work, but it has me anxious to get working on another (which I have begun but is still too early to be showing anything. SneakHear: it has a goat). During the process, the toughest design decision was the cover, and it kept changing. I ended up with something quite different from my initial design, which isn’t all that uncommon in the design process, but most of the book’s illustrations were set from the get go. The Friend Mold idea all came from a thought I’d had coming out of sleep one winter morning. I won’t bore you with dream-details, but the thought spawned a concept, a rough script and definite look within a few hours. Here is a look at two alternate cover designs.
The one on the right is closest to my original concept, which had a rubber like pour-mold with swappable head, chest, and crotch pieces. It just never read as well as it should have and the shadowed relief look didn’t fit the interior illustrations. And that always bothers me (pardon to any comic artists out there), where the cover illustration style has little to do with the interior art. The design on the left was just a bit too morbid when I polled some folks about it. While I did like the face down look, it did slowly give me the creeps when working on it. Made me feel very claustrophobic – which also isn’t the point of the book’s content.
So, head on over to http://friendmold.tumblr.com/, and see the book as it is released, a page a day with the final interior on Feb 14th!
It’s coming… Seems like this year the Super Bowl football game is on the same day as Puppy Bowl, but don’t worry, I don’t think it’s on the same channel.
Phew, today marks the 2 year anniversary of my starting this blog. It was a slow starter the first year, trying to figure out exactly what to post and how to talk about my work. The blog underwent a huge shift this past year, in tone, content and importance for me. It has become a place to experiment with new techniques, make jokes, write music, and share what goes on in my everyday life as an illustrator and designer. I plan on pumping up the volume exponentially this year on the blog and all things AE. Looking back at the year, I picked out a few posts I was particularly proud of and hope to match and maybe top in 2012.
http://austineustice.com/blog/good-good-good-bad-bad-bad-buffy/
http://austineustice.com/blog/misspelled-characters-captain-americat/
http://austineustice.com/blog/st-valentino-and-his-corpse-army/
http://austineustice.com/blog/lets-ghost-some-ghosts/
http://austineustice.com/blog/on-mustaches/
http://austineustice.com/blog/my-year-in-bicycles/
2011 was the year of illustration. My work shifted heavily towards hand-crafted, fun imagery – a departure from my more precise and clean design previously. My 6 favorite images of the year pretty clearly show this trend.
I had forgotten about my favorite pair of jeans, but I found them, in my pants drawer of all places. I will be wearing these a lot.
Yesterday I posted a Happy New Year for all the folks who follow my blog. After that, I went about my work day as usual, getting back into the swing of things after a most excellent break the past week and a half. During lunch, however, I checked the blog, I suppose egotistically, and the strange and happy dragon on the front page really struck me. I made a few doodles on a notepad and surmised what he or she might look like at different angles. As I did, a mascot for the year of 2012 took shape and seemed rather undeniable once done in color. This is Newton.
2011 was perhaps a most excellent year for you, as I hope it was, but it could have done with a bit more excellence I believe. I hope to follow Newton’s spirit this year – a chins up, sashaying, all around righteous dude.
Hello all, a happy new year to you. Here at AE HQ, I’m pretty exited for this new year. So much to come: apps, posters, games, and countless blog posts about all the wonderful and awful things that make up our 365 days a year. Thanks for following along.
Many birds very common to New York fall into the recognized nuisance category. These birds, like the pigeon, the sparrow and the gull, are at times nearly invisible to the average person. Many of us only notice these common birds when they are actively in our way or bothering us in some way. Studying and drawing these birds in great detail has given me a greater respect for them – probably the feeling I had when I was younger and didn’t have any bird-stories yet; about how this one did this yucky thing, or wouldn’t move because it’s superdumb. They really are pretty incredible, even the American Crow, the dogged black sheep of the bird world. This marks the half way point for the Common Birds of Brooklyn poster. Phew, more to come.
Been putting some megahours into the app. This is a guy, with hair like a melted fudgsicle, that you will be able to make in my upcoming app! If this looks like you… awesome. This guy is a killer guy. I can’t even tell you how many combinations of faces there are going to be, but it is thousands upon thousands. More soon!
I’ve unsubscribed (I use this word loosely, in a non-factual manner) from Apple emails no fewer than 15 times in the past few years. It has not yet stuck, but I hope that someday I’ll at least stop getting the internal memos.
In the 1990 movie Marked For Death, Steven Seagal must take down a Jamaican druglord named Screwface. In it, there are a lot of Jamaicans, and when they talk about Screwface, it is awesome. At the risk of seeming insensitive to the Hollywood portrayal of Jamaicans, I’ll tell you I have a phrase that I often say whenever I hear the word face, and that is “witch ya scroo feese mon.”
Anyway, I’m working on a face / avatar generator app for the iphone and ipad. I’m pretty pumped about it. Below is the loading screen, homepage and main face-making page. I like the style and am starting to crank out the assets. Hope you like it – coming soonish!
Another bird in the love it or hate it category, the Laughing Gull. The sea gull many of us think of is the Herring Gull, but they aren’t as attractive and don’t outnumber the Laughing Gull by very much here in Brooklyn. I see these guys all the time at Prospect Park. When I ride down to Coney Island and Brighton Beach, these gulls rule the school. I like them when they leave my junk alone. They strike me as crows that have retired – changed clothes to suit their beachier environment.
After college, I was pretty sure I’d end up being a musician of some sort. The last year of film school really took it out of me. I got overly ambitious with projects and continually shot myself in the foot with intended scale, failure to adapt and refusal to scale back. I failed about as hard as I ever have that final semester and the summer after, about all I did was sit on porches reading comic books and rode a bicycle. In hindsight, I do think the experience was good for me. Since then I’ve learned to get things out, not only to have them done and off my plate, but to push myself to produce more and worry less about any work’s reception. It’s a balancing act of perfection and timeliness, a constant struggle that makes or breaks me daily as a designer and illustrator.
But back to music, I spent about a year after school concepting and working on an EP in my childhood home in Maryland. I’d write and record music for most of each day. Many months of this ended up in my being broke and a bit burnt-out on music. I kept producing the EP but started looking for a part time job. I was lucky enough to have a friend who had moved to New York after school and had a small illustration gig for me, illustrating tarot cards for some website for maybe a movie I think. Anyway, it went alright and it got me back into something I’d done my entire life but hadn’t much considered since highschool: drawing. I took the moderate success of the illustration gig and started scouring Craigslist for freelance design gigs. I suppose the rest is history, to skim over the agonizing period where I hunted awful Craigslist ads to work on my chops. As this started becoming more and more something I saw myself doing, maybe even for a career, the album started working on me in a bad way. I felt like I didn’t have enough time to finish it and I’d devoted so much time and energy on it already. So in a last crazed push, I slapped the thing together, called it Brighten Up Sourpuss (a directive and goal for me at at time of pretty extreme isolation) and sat on it. I had always intended to “shop it around”, whatever that means, and go on tour with it… I know. So, I went on with the design life, moved to Brooklyn and set about carving out a place where I could work for myself doing something I liked (something that didn’t make me as crazy as music did) and gave me the time to enjoy other things too (friends most importantly).
Well, here is the result of those many months in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by drums, cables, microphones, guitars, a xylophone, a banjo, a recorder, harmonicas, and anything else that I needed to commit to audio. It was a good time (again, in hindsight) and I’m rather proud of what I produced. I hope you enjoy it.
Hello everyone, hope you had a great holiday weekend and that it was lazy and full of fine foods. Back on the birdwagon here. Today is a female Northern Cardinal, one of the prettiest northeast birds in my opinion. Haven’t shown much of a wing view yet, so here you go! The set is going well, many many birds still to go until I can even think about layout for the poster. Gonna pick up the pace a bit.
A very pretty, pretty mean bird: the Blue Jay. These things would always scare away the smaller birds on the feeder at my childhood home. In the city, they’re a bit more humble with nastier competition.
The ultra-common, often ratty, occasionally cute House Sparrow. These guys are all over the states, and Brooklyn is no exception. Commonly found fighting pigeons for bread.
Chugging along on birds. Here is a bit of beak detail for the big water bird. I’ve made all these birds pretty happy looking – this guy wins for that so far.
The indefatigable Rock Dove a.k.a Rock Pigeon a.k.a “Pigeon” a.k.a a lot of awful names. The quintessential New York City bird is up for today’s small part of the large Birds Of Brooklyn poster set I’m working on. I hope you’ll keep tagging along as I uncover more of the avian element of where I and so many nature lovers call home (even though we should be living somewhere a lot more natural if we’re honest with ourselves). Thank goodness for Prospect Park.
Kicked off the new bird-poster project in earnest today. I’ve a duck to show for it. Messing around with a few art styles and so far this is the one that is sticking. Not something I’ve really done before but I’m liking the direction. I especially like the slight caricature look of this guy while retaining that aviary nobility… Much more to come. This is 1/30 (I think).
A lot of my design is a bit exhaustive. I like studies of things, comparing similarities and differences and out and out putting a lot of things on a page. Some of these ideas come naturally through drawing or doodling on the computer, but most come from a specific event I experience. Sometimes I can just wing the design, but when facts or data get involved, I go for lists. Long, scribbly lists, like the one below.
This is for a new poster project I’m working on. Alls I’m gonna say is that it is about birds. Birds like this?
Very possibly. But less janky, and more flighty. More soon.
I’ve been flying more than usual lately. Sitting in airports, you get a good look at airline branding. For as much money as they must put into the marketing and collateral of their brand, so little of it stands apart from its competitors. I suppose this makes sense when all they’re really trying to do is appeal to the largest audience possible, and this will always involve snoozers design. I had to go a bit out of the way to try to find airlines that didn’t use only red, white and blue (thanks Lufthansa). Feels good to return to some more studies!
Adventure Time is never too far from my mind when doodling. BMO killing some down time.
Hey folks, today is Halloween. I was looking around my music library and found an old Valentine’s Day mix I made, and boy, it’s got some pretty dark stuff in there for that holiday. It’s all about zombies and lady snatching. SO, I thought it would be perfect to unleash this thing on the day of ghouls. It is a mix of some fine songs with a narration of the young Victor Valentine’s life, written by me and voiced expertly by a computer. Follow Victor on his quest to find a woman, crossing the fields of Chick Chick Chick, swimming the sea Fortuna and scaling the cliffs of Gabeldor. Witness his downward spiral into darkness and evil – and hope against hope he comes out the other end with that he most desires. Enjoy!
St. Valentino and His Corpse Army by PS Hugs
On a graphical note, I’ve been heavy into hand-drawn type for a while now. Something fantastic happens when you handcraft everything on a page. I was pretty proud of myself when I completed that gothic type, but when the Corpse Army took shape, I had to stand back and pat myself on the back!
#1 – Batmen
Someone pointed out that I seemed to really like polka dots, and you know what, I do. So I’m going to correct all my past mistakes of not adding any polka dots to the things I’ve drawn.
It should be known that I occasionally play video games, and with winter coming, several activities see a significant boost in activity, namely: cooking, eating, sitting, and video gaming. I’m way behind on games and decided not to try to play anything too new until I catch up. I had a copy of Red Dead Redemption at my house, so I popped that in, knowing full well that I don’t care for many Rockstar (game studio, not quality of game) games or how awfully they treat their hardworking development teams (after the completion of at least 2 games I know of, Rockstar decided to fire the entire team before bonuses and profit-sharing kicked in. Classy). Anyway, I played some of this mostly janky, un-amusing game to find that the only real plus is the horse physics. Horse riding is excellent which is good, because you will be doing it for hours and hours. Won’t last too much longer on this one, especially since the now 7-year-old Resident Evil 4 has been released on Xbox 360. So much video game jargon in this post, I apologize, but also, expect more.
During my time in the wild west, I think I met Tony Montana. Image captured offscreen from Red Dead Redemption – then cleaned up, colored, texted and all around prettied up.
Q-Tip image taken from back of Target brand Q-Tips.
Was messing around with my initials today when on the phone. It’s a good looking set of letters, the aje.
I needed to make a Down For Maintenance page, which isn’t a fun thing, so I made a fun one. I like everyone’s pants and hair situation here.
