“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!

One of my goals this year was to do things that were outside of the normal “t-shirt” design stuff that I usually do. Finally, this month, I will be a part of some pretty great gallery shows. The first one is a Glow in the Dark show for Bottleneck Gallery in Brooklyn, and if you snoop around your website you might be able to find a preview of my piece. The whole Gallery will be outfitted with black lights, so you will be able to see the glow in the dark transformations without having to walk around the gallery in pitch black.

Also, later this month I will be a part of The Official Bad Robot Art Experience for Gallery 1988 on Melrose. It will be a piece revolving around Star Trek, and since I moved to LA, I will be going to the Gallery Opening as well. This is an official art show in conjunction with Bad Robot and JJ Abrams so I fully expect to see some famous people there (but first I have to finish the piece).

I’ll update once I am able to show the pieces, and give more info after the exhibits have opened!

*official exhibit posters shown, not my artwork

I didn’t make a lot of friends in my art classes in college. Most of them were away from the classroom, and far away from the art buildings. However I did make a few, and Joel Putrah was one of them from our very first art class freshman year. And while we were constantly misunderstood because our style of art, we stuck with it despite most of our classmates who really didn’t “get it”. Now, some 5 years after we both graduated from college, Joel has started a new longboard company, Sanctum Longboards. I was fortunate enough to design a few decks for the launch, and was also able to reconnect with Joel, who I hadn’t talked with for a while.

You can check out and learn more about the new line and read some great features over on the Sanctum website, including an interview with me on the release. These are fantastic longboards, and I know Joel has put his heart, soul and knowledge into this new venture and I can’t wait to see what happens next! He’s already mentioned some ideas he has for the next release and it’s going to be really fun!

I was able to work with a really great clothing company, Paper Root, on some new designs that were just released. The A.G.E. Shirt is a hood version of Scrooge McDuck, based off of Trinidad James and his song All Gold Everything. The Big Chill has Chilly Willy taking the place of the Notorious B.I.G in the Biggie photograph. Each design comes in a T-Shirt and a Tank top, just in time for the weather to start warming up. Head over to the Paper Root store and grab them.

8-Bit Zombie continues to release some really fun items, and these Power Packs are no exception.  There are 2 packs to choose from, each with their own unique set of items, and each include the brand new 8BZ token (that you can purchase separately as well), that will take you back to the arcade days of our childhood. I’m lucky enough to have multiple designs either as stickers or patches in the sets, including a brand new Cobra patch and Pee_wee herman sticker that I can’t wait to get my hands on. Be sure to grab these packs before they are gone, and keep collecting those power points. There will be something great dealing with those in the future!