Marvel Masterpiece III Sketch Cards, Part 2

Here are the next batch of approved cards for the Upper Deck/Marvel set. As you can see I was experimenting with mediums here using colored pencil, pencil and ink. I was trying to see just what would work as far as Marvel was concerned. Just as in the Lord Of The Rings set I ended up doing the majority of them in ink. They looked the best.

1. Karnak 2. Loki 3. Machine Man

4. Madame Web 5. Magneto 6. Luke Cage, Power Man

7. Psycho Man 8. Puck 9. Recorder
10. Moon Knight 11. Mysterio 12. Mystique

13. Nightcrawler 14. Ghost Rider (the original) 15. Nomad

16. Red Skull 17. Ronan The Accuser 18. Sandman

CD Designs, Part 2

Here is the next batch of CD designs that I experimented with over the past few months. I have a buddy down in Columbus who is one hellava sax player and a teacher and if he had a website I'd link it. One day when he gets time in his busy schedule to record a CD I'll take a stab at doing the cover. So, I tried out a couple of images. Why the octopus? Why not. It's my favorite cephalopod mollusk if you need to know. Jeez.

And the other design is an early concept for The Good Leads (with sax-hater Chris Quigley I might add) with a title that they were considering.

Lots of stuff going on around here that I'm more than happy to pass along. I'm currently in the midst of my work on the Upper Deck/Marvel sketch cards, working on some unique greeting cards, as well as some commission work. Plus, I will be the new cartoonist for a Seattle health care newspaper, so I'm looking forward to that challenge. And today, I received an invite to be on a new sketch card set, but I've been down that road before, so we'll see. Busy, busy, busy.

CD Designs, Part 1

Prior to doing the artwork for The Good Leads single "Dead To Me Now," I did a few CD designs to experiment with a more graphic black and white look. I mixed and matched band names (The Good Leads, Chris Quigley, The Pseudo Strata Orchestra, [in which I have spelled that wrong on the artwork and apparently am far too lazy to fix right now] and James Miglia) with certain images just to see what would work. I will have another batch in the next post.

These were done in ink with a brush and pen and then tweaked in photoshop.

(Top photo right side image based loosely on a photo by A. Claeys)

Dead To Me Now

My buddy and Chicago musician Chris Quigley asked me to do some artwork for a song that he just finished recording. The song is called Dead To Me Now and is a mighty fine tune and you can listen to it by clicking the link. I remember about 20 years ago sitting in Chris's living room watching him playing Prince songs on his guitar with no amp or anything as we were as poor as hobos. I would sketch and he would twang and we were both bad. Now Chris is a bad ass rocker and still doin' what he loves and that, my friends is all that matters. And I couldn't be more thrilled to be a part of all that than to do some artwork and hopefully you'll see more from this collaboration. A while back, I was fooling around with some CD designs for his band, The Good Leads, so I will post some of those soon.