How Gabby, my 2 year-old niece, inspired me

A couple of days ago my sister posted to Facebook a doodle that my 2 year-old niece did. After looking it over I got really excited at the idea of giving it my own flare. I brought her drawing into Photoshop, lowered the opacity of it and traced right on top of her drawing, adding in details I imagined when I looked at her picture...pretty much doing my own take on Dave DeVries' The Monster Engine.

Gabby's & Michael's drawings

I really like the outcome of my piece. I think you can clearly see my nieces drawing come through, but at the same time I've made it my own. I'm not sure if my niece Gabby can understand what I did if I showed her the drawing, but maybe someday she can appreciate it and maybe even work with me on another piece.

College Humor Playing Cards

This is College Humor's logo

The project I worked on with College Humor has finally been released and so I finally get to talk about it! I was approached about doing some artwork for a College Humor themed deck of cards. The original idea was a little bit different than the final product, but I think we came to a successful conclusion.

Card back (designed by College Humor)

Over Skype, I discussed the original ideas with a group CH of writers. They came to me with the idea of giving the deck an internet theme since CH's main platform is the internet. I gave my own feedback on the ideas provided by the CH team but they had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted to do so it was mostly just tweaking and refining their original ideas.

Check out my new threads. Get it? Because they're SUITS??

Each suit would have it's own newly designed pips for each suit: Spades, mouse pointer; Hearts, power icon; Diamonds, wifi icon; Clubs, USB icon.

The royalty

Then each suit was assigned it's own theme for each of the face cards. Spades featuring various PC icons: the King with his mouse pointer swords; the Queen with her hourglass that everyone dislikes so much, including her; and the jack with his pointer finger for clicking links. Hearts featuring different computer accessories for faces: monitor King, keyboard Queen, and mouse Jack. Diamonds pay homage to various internet memes...can you guess them all?? And finally, Clubs referenced various adorable animal videos that saturate the interwebz, including a King of Corgi, a Queen of Cat, and a Jack of Sloth.

Jake and Amir

Jake & Amir and their show

Jake and Amir and their cards

Last up are the Jokers, which feature two of CH's most popular stars, Jake and Amir, from the sketch show titled Jake & Amir. The Fedora on Jake is an inside joke for all the Jake and Amir fans.

This was a really exciting project to get to work on and you can probably tell based on my portfolios that this is pretty different than the work I usually do. It was a real pleasure getting to work with the College Humor team and I really hope I get the chance to do more work with them in the future; such a blast and it felt extremely rewarding.

So by now I'm pretty sure you want your own deck, right? Of course you do! You can purchase your own deck of College Humor playing cards on the website Busted Tees by clicking HERE

Sanbone Trio: Part 2

A while back I posted a portrait of a character from the video game, Gitaroo Man. His name was Carrot and he is the leader of the Sanbone Trio, a musical group made of of 3 skeletons that use their own boney bodies for instruments. I recently finished another portrait of another member of the group named Pine. Below you can see the new portrait right beside the old one. Will the Sanbone Trio ever be complete? You'll just have to keep an eye out and see for yourself ;)

Pine & Carrot