Purrcasso Art & Craft Gala

Purrcasso is an art and craft auction held every year and it benefits the Berkeley-East Humane Society in Berkeley, CA. They put out the call to artists to send in a piece of artwork to be donated to the event — anyone can send something in! The piece must have either a cat and/or a dog as the subject matter. I really wanted to participate in it last year, but I was short on time.

This year, I made some time to do a small piece for donation. The piece is an 8" x 10" gouache and ink drawing entitled "The Scratch Post Really Tied The Room Together." If you're a movie buff, I'm sure you get the joke of the piece being from "The Big Lebowski." I also wanted to do a piece of the character Walter depicted as a bulldog, but wasn't able to find the time. Oh well, there's always next year! My wife and I both have dogs that we adopted from a shelter, so I feel this is a really worthy cause and a great way to help out.

The Purrcasso event will be held November 7 and 8 and more info on the event can be found here.

Creature from the Black Lagoon

On the heels of the monster illustration I did earlier in the month for In This Week magazine, I just had to do a portrait of my favorite Universal Monster, The Gilman from "The Creature From The Black Lagoon." Using my Creature figure as a model, I drew him in ink and colored him digitally. You can watch video of me sketching and inking the black of the Gilman on my channel at Draw Dammit. Just click on menu, and click on "movies". The "Creature Feature" will be under 10/19/09 5:34.

Tangled Up In Blue

Here's an illustration I did for my Friday Mix page in The Salt Lake Tribune. Bob Dylan will be in town for a concert, but since he wouldn't give an interview, we decided to have a quiz. And instead of the hand out art we've run a hundred times before, I decided to do an illustration.

It took forever to figure out how to do his hair, but I think it turned out really well. Here is the finished page:

Me, as E.T., on Pop Candy

USA Today's Pop Candy blog is posting reader's old Halloween costume photos this month and the E.T. costume my mother made when I was four was today's pic. The quote I gave: Check it out here.

In This Week cover

Almost forgot — here's the final cover of In This Week that came out last week with my illustrations in it.

The Monster Squad

Unfortunately, no, it doesn't have to do with one of my favorite childhood movies, other than the fact that it has many of it's co-stars. I recently did a cover illustration and some inside illustrations for this week's issue of IN This Week, a Utah entertainment magazine. The cover article will get you in the mood for Halloween and is a great primer on classic monsters made famous by Universal with zombies thrown in for good measure. I love Halloween and I grew up on a steady diet of classic monster movies, so this assignment was right up my dark corridor. I had a blast drawing them.

Here is the image that was used for the cover featuring a zombie, the Wolfman and Frankenstein's monster:

And here are a couple of illustrations of Dracula and the Mummy that were used for the inside:

The article doesn't make a mention of my favorite Universal monster, The Creature From The Black Lagoon, so I think I might just have to do a portrait of him sometime this month myself.

If you live in the Salt Lake area, the issue hits newsstands on Thursday, Oct. 1. Be sure and pick it up!

"Edith Keeler Must Die."

I've had the idea to do this all summer, but was busy with other things and didn't get around to it. Frankly, I'm still busy with other things, but I decided to take a couple of hours to get this out of my system last week. It's ink and digital, but I plan on making it into a limited edition screen print when I can find the time. If you could figure out what it pertains to without looking at the title quote, kudos! — you are a major Star Trek : TOS fan! Poor Edith....