Advertising work

Today I am able to post up a few samples of the recent work that I have been doing for Warshaw Blumenthal and their clients.

First is a series of portraits of Jennifer Aniston for Smartwater and Second is a portrait of ESPN's Jay Bilas. This one was used for an awards campaign.

Cheers!

The Avenger

Hey All,

I just wanted to share that my cover illustration for the newest "The Avenger" pulp paperback has finally been released and I can show my artwork.

Here is a Link to the company's webpage

I've always been a huge pulp fan and it's been very gratifying to work on a classic character like  The Avenger and follow in the footsteps of many of my art heroes of the past.

I've been contracted to do a couple more covers so stand by for even more awesome artwork as I really start to get to know this character and sink my teeth into his world.

Newhouse

Hey all,

Today I thought that I would share some footage from a short film that I worked on last year. It is called Newhouse and you can find it and watch the trailer here.


I completed several pages of storyboards for this sequence and I think it turned out really well and several of my shots made it into the film. I never do get sick of that ;)

Cheers

Titans Released!

About a year and a half ago I worked on some concept art / game illustration for Uken Game's latest title "Titans". Now that the game has finally been released I can share some of the work that I did. It's been a long time so without further adieu...

Adventures in Time. Retro NES box art

Today I am posting up my submission to this years art book and auction for the Calgary comic and entertainment expo. 

I know it is a bit of overkill for an art book piece but I was inspired and had a lot of fun making this image. NES game art was very influential on me as a kid growing up playing these games and I used to study the art and judge a game based solely on the cover art. Sadly that did not always work out and I ended up buying Predator. One of the biggest let down wast of money piece of trash games that I ever laid my eyes on. But I digress.... ;)

Anyways, I came across some really neat faux box art images in my internet ramblings and I was inspired to do one for myself based off of the Konami model. When the theme for this years con was released, I found myself an excuse to finally make a NES box and "Adventures in Time" was born.

Below, I am posting some process images and the finished box layout. I have actually made the box and I'll save that for a later blog post.

 Finished Cover Art with Watermark. Babes, Dinosaurs, Valkyries, Spitfires, Phone Booths, Nuclear explosions can you pick out any more 80's pop culture references?

 Pencil under drawing.

 Painting the background in order to establish the color temperature of this image.

 Basic Monochromatic values.

 Fleshing ( pfft! snicker) out the details.

 Adding in the dinosaurs and background elements.

 Here I was playing with the game logo and the various relevant packaging logo's and the over all layout.

And finally we have the finished box layout, complete with game description! Now can you tell m that your 11 year old self would not think that this game looked promising? Nintendo power gives it 5 stars! Wicked Graphics, amazing controls, makes the Adventures of Link look like pong in comparison.

The Walking Dead Season 5 Poster Process

Hey All,

I thought that I would cap off all of my process videos by providing you with a breakdown of how I created this Walking Dead poster image. Up until now, I've shared a few time lapse videos but this time I will share how I got from point A to point B.

To start off with a spent a lot of time photo comping and rearranging various images trying to come up with a pleasing arrangement. I ended up setting on a nice triangular composition with that included almost all of the Hero's cast from season 5 as well a few zombie to indicate the threat and motivation in the overall narrative. You can't make a zombie movie poster without zombies in it!

I didn't keep many of these photo comps but what I do have is the initial pencil drawing. I had originally thought about putting a border around this image as a bit of a homage to some of my drew Struzan posters but in the end, my wife talked me out of it and I think that she was right.

 Next, I painted in some background color and texture. The show in general has a real saturated, green/ sepia tone to it and I wanted to start off and paint into a nice ground that conveyed that gritty, dirty, blue world.

 Here I am laying in all the local colors with an airbrush ( Photo shop) just like I would do it traditionally. The goal here is to give me an indication of the basic colors and forms and how they will interplay with one another.

 

This next image is a halfway done process shot. I've completed the rendering of about half the characters and really it is all just labor from here on out. Rick himself took me about 7-8 hours to paint. The time lapse condensed it into a nice 4 minute chunk but I ended up putting a lot of time into this piece.

 Final Image. Once all the rendering was done, I added the text and a few embellishments to the composition. I ended up making several minor adjustments in photo shop to harmonize the color scheme a bit more and "amp" up the piece in general. Photo shop really does have several "Make it Better" buttons. ;)

Well that is it in a nutshell. If you have any questions or comments on this piece and/ or my process, please drop me a line as I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers.

Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead by Mike Perry