Well guys, we did it! We got Face Your Doom!! printed! My 2nd Threadless print, in a time span of 5 years! It unfortunately didn’t win the whole contest (an all those cool prizes that came with it), but it did get printed, and I’m excited! That long and stressful night I spent working on this paid off. Unfortunately the back print wasn’t print, understandable given the circumstances, I am still happy with it and can now say that I have designed an Official Ninja Turtle t-shirt. Now go grab one now so I can start collecting the money.

My good friends at StandOut Stickers (whom I use to print my own stickers) approached me to join an incredible artist list for this years Sticker of the Month Club. It’s not too often that I get a change to design whatever I want, so I jumped at the opportunity. Enlightened End is my sticker, for the month of June, and is a love letter to the old skateboard graphics of the 80′s.

These stickers are massive, and the quality is top notch! You can grab a couple, or join the club and get new stickers sent to you each month. There are some really great artists who have already done stickers, and the rest of the year is filled with even more great artists. Head over to the club website to join or buy some stickers, and check out Stand Out Stickers if you are looking to get some of your own custom stickers made!

My good friends’ Seneca Press have recently put up a new webstore. Seneca has been critical in helping me put out product through my own store, they were the ones who printed the Double Death shirts I put up in my store last year. They had me design a t-shirt design for them, the Cafe Racer is inspired by old motorcycle shirt designs of the past, and you can go grab one in t-shirt and tank top form. They also have a really cool new product, a moleskin journal you can get with the design on it as well. It’s great to see them putting out their own stuff, in between printing shirts for other people. Speaking of that, they are helping me out with some new items that I’ll be putting in my store later this summer…stay tuned…

Death, Shred! just released a couple of new pieces just in time for summer. I have been waiting a long time to show off the EC Comic’s inspired Lurking Death shirt (for guys and girls), and the Maniac shirt (guys and girls) is another classic. You can go grab the stuff right now (as well as the new bodysuit  and 5-Panel that were released a few weeks ago).

“I would rather suffer the end of Romulus a thousand times. I would rather die in agony than accept assistance from you!”  - Nero

Since moving to LA, I had been wanting to do things besides the regular client work and t-shirt designs. Towards the end of 2012, I got an email from Gallery 1988 to be a part of a few of their upcoming shows. I was excited and honored, I had been following the gallery for a while now and had seen so many great art shows and art work come from the gallery. The first show they wanted me to be a part of was their official “Bad Robot the Art Experience” show in conjunction with Bad Robot and J.J. Abrams.

This was the perfect time to get into a different type of work, gallery work, something that I never thought I would be doing any time soon, and a gallery like Gallery 1988, just a few months after moving to Los Angeles. It was also the perfect time to work on an art piece for a movie, revolving around a television show that I watched so much as a kid.My mom was pivotal to my introduction of science fiction. She let me watch Star Trek: The Next Generation with her and take me to the various Star Trek movies that were released as I was growing up, and this lead me to start watching the original series. I wouldn’t consider myself a “Trekkie”, but it definitely plaid a big role in my love for science fiction growing up.

I wanted to do something different than the standard “floating head” style posters that you would normally see, and decided to focus on the main villain of the movie, Nero, a symbolic image of him after he meets his demise at the end of the film. In the recent years I had been reading and studying a lot of old EC/Al Williamson space comics as well, and I wanted to give the piece that same kind of feeling. This is a signed and numbered edition of 30, and has various slight offsets in the printing to give it more of a vintage comic feel. It will be available at Gallery 1988 on friday, and the remaining will be sold on their website the day after the show, with a portion of  proceeds going to The Mission Continues. I will not have any AP’s for sale.

I never expected that the prints would sell out at the gallery opening, I would have thought I would have at least had a few left that could be sold on the Bottleneck website after the show. However that wasn’t the case and I was overwhelmed by the amount of messages I received  with people asking me if I had any AP’s for sale. I hadn’t planned on this, so I went back through my stack of test prints and picked out the best 6 and I will put them up for sale. Now these ones will have some subtle flaws on them, which is why I didn’t add them to the final edition number, but they are only small flaws. I also found a numbered edition that I accidentally kept as well that will go up for sale.

I’ll put these in my store sometime Monday afternoon. I would suggest you follow my twitter or facebook, that’s where I’ll be posting when they go up!

*Update: Prints will go on sale at 3pm PST today in my store.

So if you have been living under a rock, you should know that I am a HUGE Ninja Turtle fan. It was one of those shows and toy-lines that I was obsessed with as a kid, and it just stuck with me into my adult life. I still watch the cartoons, still collect the toys and I try and watch the movies as much as I can (except for the 4th CG one). This shouldn’t be anything new to those who know me, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.

In 2002, Kevin Eastman (one of the creators of the Ninja Turtles, with Peter Laird) put out the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Artobiography, and I grabbed a copy as soon as it came out, and the art in that book has been an influence ever since. In the past few years, IDW has been putting out collected editions of the old black and white comics that Eastman and Laird worked on, and gave me a chance to read and look at the art I had heard so much about. I had tried to stay away from doing anything Ninja Turtle related when it came to my art/work (with a few exceptions) but when I heard that Threadless was running an official Ninja Turtle competition,I knew that I had to submit something.

Face Your Doom!! is my homage to the Ninja Turtles, one of the many things that have made me who I am today. The design is a reference to the 1st appearance of Shredder in the comics, with subtle nods to the old arcade game, as well as the cartoon (cowabunga!). You can score the design right now, and please forgive me while I continue to whore the design out for the next week.

I love anything that glows in the dark. When I was a kid I would actively search for action figures with the glow in the dark feature and weapons (and I still kind of do). When I was asked to be a part of the “When the Lights Go Out” show for Bottleneck Gallery, I couldn’t say no.

Inspiration for this design came to me when I was reading the Mail Order Mysteries book (that also has a glow in the dark cover). There is a section about the Hypno-Coin, a cheap mail order coin with a lenticular spiral image on it. Supposedly it was supposed to give you hypnotic powers, and as a kid you would give anything to control and hypnotize people (especially girls). Obviously because it was a cheap and gimmicky mail order product and it didn’t work that well.

I’ve always been obsessed with magic, and things similar to it. I think it stems from the first time I watched Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and he goes into that amazing magic shop. This is my tribute to that, with a funny (and adult) twist to it. The gallery opening for the show is tonight at 7pm EST, so if you are in Brooklyn, NY, go pick one up. This is an edition of 35, signed and numbered, and the remainder of the prints that don’t get sold at the opening will be available to purchase on the Bottleneck Gallery website. I’ll update this post tomorrow with a direct link to purchase.

*Edit: So I guess the prints sold out at the show and none were left for the online sale, sorry! I didn’t anticipate the interest, this being my first screen print. I might have some AP’s, but I have to look at see. I chose the best 35 for the show, so the remaining weren’t up my my standards, but I need to check again. I will make a new post with more info about the AP’s soon.

Last week, I was able to stop by my good friend Luke’s screen printing shop, who also runs I love Antix, to screen print the posters for the When The Lights Go Out show at the Bottleneck Gallery . Luke has been a really good friend since I had moved to California, and has been incredibly helpful in getting these prints up and running, and I wouldn’t have been able to do this without him. I am an incredibly controlling person when it comes to my art, so I wanted to be around when the prints were getting made, and luckily Luke didn’t get tired of me asking a bunch of questions or shooting a bunch of pictures (well, Ciara shot the pictures). We did a lot of problem solving, and Luke when the extra mile and stayed up incredibly late to get these things printed and shipped off to New York.

I had never seen anything screen printed, so it was a really fun experience to see how everything works. This was also the first time I got to see the design on something else besides my 15″ macbook screen. The whole process is really interesting and I still don’t exactly know how it all works. What I do know is that, the screens were huge, and glow in the dark ink is true magic.

We did some test prints on a few shirts to see what it would look like, and it turned out amazing. The glow in the dark part is the best part, I feel like everything should be glow in the dark. The actual prints turned out amazing, but I’ll save that for another blog post later in the week. I hope that if you are in New York, you go and check out the Bottleneck Gallery on friday (April 12th) and grab a print.

I used to be a pretty big professional wresting fan when I was a kid. I can remember watching Wrestlemania’s up until high school, and then I just stopped keeping up with it. I don’t know if it was because I grew out of it, or if things had changed from the old WWF to the new WWE. Regardless, it still holds a fond place in my heart when I think back on the WWF and WCW. I was incredibly excited to be a part of this new drop from Electric Zombie, and produced one of the most difficult and stressful designs I have doneto date. In the end it turned out better than I would have imagined, and it deals with one of the best tag teams ever. There are some really great pieces, so grab some stuff now!