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“Weird Al” Yankovic is all that is man.

bill main — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:30:01 +0000

I have had two musical constants throughout my life: Elvis Presley and “Weird Al” Yankovic. I may have memorized the lyrics to Blue Suede Shoes first, but learning to irritate my mom and dad by reciting the whole “Spatula City” commercial from UHF (complete with Spatula City jingle) over and over was much more important to me. I’ve gone through the years from the short, tight and lovely white man afro and glasses years of Mr. Yankovic to the now clean shaven and contact lens wearing Al. I have seen him live…he is awesome and his band is unbelievably tight. One thing that hasn’t seemed to change is the way he handles his parody material. While many parodists poke fun in a mocking way, he seems to do it in a more, “We’re both having fun here, right?” kind of way. That’s not to say that he isn’t very direct in his approach.

I chose to paint him clean shaven, as he’s often seen now. I wanted his serious face (he poses with his crazy eyes for almost every reference photo I found) to be juxtaposed by his gag gun to relate his true dedication to producing great music with the fact that ultimately, he makes funny songs. I handled the stage lights in the background with a fusion watercolor technique to pop the crisp linework in his hair. All hail the pop music poacher extraordinaire.

I was reminded how much I miss painting in watercolor by a Drawger post by my friend, former instructor and truly skillful Jeffrey Smith and an amazing book of theater posters by the ridiculously talented and thoughtful James McMullan. Unfortunately, because of time and day job responsibilities, 2011 brought me very little time, space or energy to sit down and paint. Happily, this painting really didn’t take very long so here’s to 2012 and more watercolor paintings.

Have a great day!

My good buddy and I as Beavis and Butt-head

bill main — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:00:56 +0000

Well hello again. This post could have come directly after Christmas but I was a busy boy.

A little background: I have known my good friend Charlie since 2nd grade. He was my best man at my wedding and in general, just a really great guy. At any rate, Charlie and I used to be kind of obsessed with Beavis and Butt-head from jr. high through high school. We would literally watch reruns as background noise for most anything we did. Even painting Warhammer models. OH! I just threw you under the bus dude! (We secretly painted Warhammer models in high school under the guise of “shooting pool.”) So I thought he’d appreciate this portrait of the two of us doing dude stuff like two dudes. Merry Christmas Charles.

Masters of the Brewniverse

bill main — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:31:21 +0000

I’ve said before that my day job is as a sign artist for Trader Joe’s. I usually don’t share things I do there because they are typically not the most visually interesting things in the world. There’s only so many ways to spin how delicious Fuji apples are. But seriously, they are pretty delicious. At any rate, I was talking to a co worker who writes the beer order and we decided that he needed some type of point of purchase display for beers that he thought should stick out of the crowd. I told him that if any section in a grocery store could play up the tongue in cheek aspect, it was definitely the beer section. So we decided that our POP display should have very little to do with the actual product. The beers rotate from month to month so the display couldn’t be something specific.

Side note: we constantly have battles of pop culture/useless trivia and that definitely informed our decision to make what we made.

We decided to go with the title scene from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. If you aren’t familiar, He-Man stands in front of Castle Grayskull and calls out, “I have the POWER!” Um, in a word, awesome. Here is a shot of that.

In place of He-Man, I used the section order writer with a frosty mug of brew in his paw. Almost equally as buff as He-Man, he serves as a bastion of beer-y goodness near a see of two buck chuck.

A detail of Colten the beer man.

Since the sign is set on the end of a low wine shelf, people will be seeing it from behind also. Couldn't go having a naked sign backside now could we?

Christmas Beer Labels in the can…er bottle.

bill main — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:52:47 +0000

I recently finished up a project for a friend who happens to be a home-brewer. He called me up and asked if I had time to create a couple labels for the new beers he was brewing. The idea of making beer labels has crossed my mind before since I see them constantly at my day job which happens to be working as a sign artist for Trader Joe’s. I see a bunch of labels every day and only a few of the beers really stand out to me so I wanted to make something that was actually fun to look at. Hopefully, I could make a label that people would really WANT to read because my buddy was putting a lot of effort into the actual product. So yes, we did move forward with the project and I think they came out pretty cool.

The first beer was a stout Porter that was dubbed Santa’s Little Helper. We talked about having the imagery be a simple portrait of old Saint Nick about three sheets to the wind. I have an affinity for bringing out the creepy weird side of the people I draw. That’s usually something I kind of push against when the illustration doesn’t call for it but I could let it go this time. I kept thinking of all the department store Santa’s that smell like a liquor cabinet.

The other beer was a Gingerbread spiced brown ale. We wanted to go with a scene of some Gingerbread men after a rough day at the office. I always try to think about the story that the characters are a part of whenever I do an illustration. In this particular scene, the surly Gingerbread man wants no part of his drunken buddy’s story time. Look, when you get the part of your brain that controls patience bitten off, its hard to be sympathetic.

It was a really fun project to work on and I’d love to do more!

Christmas card 2011

bill main — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:19:00 +0000

Merry Christmas,happy holidays and if I don’t see you first, happy new year folks!

This year we went with sled cats…because who doesn’t like making their enormous cats pull them through a winter wonderland?

Printable Holiday Gift Tags

bill main — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:42:37 +0000

Click the image to go to my Etsy!

I made some Holiday tags to adorn your packages this season. Go to my Etsy page to see them…and buy them.

Sega PaletteSwap!

bill main — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:45:58 +0000

PaletteSwap, which is (to me), the equivalent of the grown-up version of hanging out with your 5th grade classmates and redrawing video game box art (only 300% cooler), is doing a Sega art jam this month. Aside from my horrible use of commas and parentheses in that sentence, I hope that made sense. What I mean to say is this: if you like video games, art, illustrators, creativity, humor, or supporting awesome people, then you should go look at the site and tell the artists how cool their stuff is. After all, artists like being liked.

At any rate, I threw my hat into the pool of artists doing their interpretation of Sega video games. My wife used to play the game Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse and when I told her I was going to draw a game from the Genesis console she mildly demanded that I start with that one. So here is my version with the old box art to go with it.

Original:

My interpretation:

3 years married

bill main — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:00:56 +0000

My wife and I recently celebrated our third year of marriage by going up to Oak Glenn, Ca. We stayed at a little bed and breakfast up in the mountains. It was a perfect getaway for us and the people who owned the B&B were really sweet. My wife, who happens to be Christina of Sweet Lavender Bake Shoppe, took a ton of photos and wrote a nice blog about it. So if you’d like to get a break from my sarcasm and mildly creepy drawings, go ahead and use your clicking finger (assuming you use your your hands to navigate the interwebs) to click over to her blog here. In the mean time, here is a drawing I made one morning while we had some coffee.

I got blogged on What I Wore Today (in drawings)

bill main — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 14:16:44 +0000

My wife showed me this fun and quirky what I wore today blog that featured a bunch of illustrators drawing um…what they wore that day. Some of the little callout blurbs that people write are pretty hilarious.

Here is the link to Gemma’s blog

http://whatiworedrawings.blogspot.com

Lee Marvin will beat you up if you go out of the house with sweatpants on. Just sayin’.

bill main — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:38:27 +0000

I have a weird fascination with Lee Marvin. I think it falls in between the “oh yeah, that’s a perfectly healthy fascination with Lee Marvin” lines. Yes, those lines do exist. They were drawn for people like me.

That is all.

Ok, not really. When you’re done looking at my picture, google “sons of lee marvin.”

Ok, that is really all.