Above is a quick comic I did for N+1′s #ows gazette, Occupy! It’s edited by my friend Astra, and she asked me to do a comic, about pretty much anything. Life here in New York as the Occupy madness gets bigger and badder is surreal; suddenly, idealistic rhetoric is plastered on telephones and on the front of tabloids. It’s a heady time, and I tried to reflect that.

You can see a bigger one here.

Are you someone who actually listens to music legally? Good for you, citizen! In that case, this post is for you!

Grooveshark, erstewhile internet radio and online jukebox, is doing something very cool: it’s reaching out to visual artists and asking them to design wallpapers for their online players. I was honored to be one of the artists they asked. Above are the two I made for ‘em, both a bit reappropriated from previous work, but still stand-up in their own right. You can only access them by being a member, but I recommend it; it’s really cool, and has less lawsuits against than other new services. Wheeeee!

Above is a photo of the papercrafted card (click here for larger version) I made for Molly on our anniversary last week. Goopy sentiments aside (that are none of your business, anyway), I’m really pleased how the forced perspective turned out. I was afraid that the multiple layers and manufactured vanishing point would make it look fun-housey, but it really came together. It reminds me of all those amazing dioramas in some of more antique (and ramshackled-ly brilliant) museums around the globe. And of course, there’s some of this stuff, too. Ain’t the world grand?

New comic by yours truly, for no other reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time. I like probably more than I should. Click here for larger size.

Since being lucky enough to get a lot of work lately, I’ve been finding I actually have more time to spend on personal projects, which is strange. It turns out that a lot more time is spent hustling than I realize, I guess. Up next: long awaited Untitled Gallery Project finally goes into preproduction! W00t!

Above is a poster I did for 97bottles.com, a social beer site, which seems like a great idea. Inspired by some great WPA stuff.  See the full size here.

I’d thought I’d also show how I got there, just because when I do this type of stuff, I get that questions occasionally.

This is the scan of my hand drawing, after I’ve gone over it with ink. I take it into Photoshop, convert it to a duotone via the Threshhold tool, and then select the black out, and place another layer. Then I delete the background layer, so I just have the line work on Layer 1.

I lay down a new background layer of that light, elementary-school-bathroom green, and apply a reverse gradient, with the Dissolve brush selected of a nice dark green, also on a separate layer. Pretty much everything I do from here on out I do on a separate layer: it creates a lot of organizational hassle, but to me, it’s worth it, to have the total control of having everything of a separate layer provides.

I create the big blocks of color with the straight-lasso tool, which mocks the big blocks of color laid down in silkscreening. Obviously, the blue here is the lowest layer, and so on. I choose a distressed brush, again select the ‘dissolve’ brush type’, and shade upwards in sweep motions, making sure it’s not *too* even, with my stylus.

I apply the small blocks and shading and color in similar ways to the previous step, using the gradient tool to mock the airbrush effect on the WPA posters. Again, the “dissolve” option is my best friend here.

I add a second reverse circular gradient around the top most layer of the image, to give it a nice vigniette. I also cut out the line work from the line layer, that contains the bottles, place them on their own layer, and use the “Color overlay” layer option to apply the light green.

Finally, I lay th type on top, and in a stroke of inspiration, I turned off the line layer for the objects, which alluvasudden made the whole thing sing. I love when stuff like that happens.

And there it is. Hit me with questions.

It’s a DVD cover for a new indie flick entitled “The Go-getter”, and allow me to point out a few things.

1.) This movie is clearly aimed at the 24-40 year old This American Life-loving, Decemberists-listening, vegan-eating, guiltily-two-car-owning yupster set.

2.) The car apparently so prominently featured in the movie is an 80s Volvo 240DL, a car which I not only owned and loved for quite a while, but a car that speaks to a greater truth about the owner: that s/he has parents that bought the car, and gave it to them to it’s waning years, which pretty promisingly puts the family into the East Coast/West Coast liberal leaning college- educated electoral demographic.

3.) Hollywood’s decision to appeal to that (my – oh, god, so embarrassingly so – my) demographic has revealed a pretty steady formula. To wit:

I’m kind of torn about this: as an illustrator that would love to do a movie poster, I’m encouraged to see comic-style drawings and hand lettering on a poster. But, for the love of Tom Brady, surely we’re in a rut. It looks like there’s a InDesign plug-in for this type of design now. So, it is with a heavy heart that I say:

You designers, STOP IT. STOP using blockhead font, stop using slightly sloppy hand drawn illustrations, stop using bearded motherfuckers to portray to the potential audience that this about people who read Sarah Vowell and wear tweed jackets. STOP IT.

Please, surely there’s another way.

In other news, you can see why I’ll be launching a new look for my website next week. I’m guilty of the same design crimes above, and someone’s gotta say something. It might as well be me.