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....

Star Wars Uncut

Star War uncut.com is a project where people can grab a 15 second clip from "A New Hope" and remake it however they want. When all the clips are finished they will be cut together. I'm still not sure if all the clips will ever actually be finished, but it's a fun idea and it's interesting and inspiring to see what other people can do with such a short time frame.

Here's my submission below. I decided to do something that I could turn out pretty quick. It's based off of the old "Clutch Cargo" cartoons (could you really even call them cartoons with little to no animation?) using the wonderfully cheesy "Syncro-Vox" human mouths. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Star Wars Uncut - Scene 252 from Blain Hefner on Vimeo.

"Gracie is pregnant."

My wife got me the Star Trek Trilogy collection (ST 2, 3 & 4) on Blu-Ray for my birthday and after re-watching "The Voyage Home", I got inspired to do this peice in gouche. I love this scene, I crack up everytime. Kirk's reaction to Spock swimming with the whale is priceless and I've often thought that the whale's was pretty much the same.

Curing a Rainy Day

Leonard "Bones" McCoy has always been my favorite Star Trek character, now he's my wife's fav too. So, I did this portrait in gouche upon her request. Stay tuned, more characters to come!

Munny's that rock and swim

I made these a while back, but I keep forgetting to do a blog post about them (even though they've been on my website gallery for a while). These are custom Mini Munnys I made for my niece and nephew for Christmas. I forgot to take pictures of them so Braden, my nephew, was kind enough to take pictures for me.

The first one is of Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl. Braden and I are both big fans (I took him to his first Foo Fighter's concert) and thought Dave would make an awesome Munny.

The next one I did for my niece, Katie, was of Michael Phelps with a gold medal and Rosetta Stone to help him learn Chinese. Yeah, go ahead and make your stupid pot smoking jokes -- I still think he's cool. I did this before all of that happened though.

The Final Frontier

This page I designed is from last Friday, when Star Trek came out. I had a lot of fun manipulating the hand out art and creating the pictures for the character profiles.
As far as the movie goes, even if you've never watched Star Trek, you might just like this one. I highly recommend it.

Summer movie time!

I've been meaning to post about this for a couple of weeks now, but keep forgetting to. This is the cover to this years Summer Movie Preview for The Salt Lake Tribune. As always, since I love the summer movie season, I love putting together this section and making it look great. This year, our film critic Sean Means got an interview with Pete Doctor, the co-director of Pixar's "Up" so I decided to play off of the main poster to tie together some of the other movies coming out.

Even though making it look monochromatic was an idea I had before executing it, I decided to go ahead and paint it in full color with gouche, just to see what it would look like in case I liked it better. I made sure that I kept the values light enough so I could make it monochromatic in Photoshop later.

After several dry runs, we all decided that the sepia version would not only print better, but would look better and be different. The single color really carries your eye through the illustration much better than had I gone with the final color version.

I AM IRON MAN! (Mini Munny)

This is my most recent Mini Munny, Iron Man. A friend a work requested him for his daughter's birthday and she loved it! I have to admit, it was hard giving it up, it turned out really well. I've been wanting to do an Iron Man since the movie came out last year, and this gave me the perfect opportunity. Thanks, Darren!

Jump over to my Flickr page to see more pics of him!

New paintings: Lil' Me

I recently completed work on several new paintings based on me (as a kid) dressing up as some of my favorite super heroes and cartoon characters. I'm sure most of you could guess who I am in all of these. Yes, I played dress up a lot when I was little and have pictures of me as all of these characters. Click here and see the other four new paintings in the 2-D gallery on my website.

These paintings will also be a part of a new show called "World of Imagination" at the APW Gallery in Long Island City, NY. There are about 500 artists participating in this show, all contributing up to 5 12" x 12" paintings a piece! That's going to be one heck of a show!

The opening reception will be this Friday night at 6 p.m. and the show runs through March 29. I won't be able to make it, but if you happen to be in NY, stop by and give the show a look!

Award of Excellence

I did it! I won an Award of Excellence in the Features Page Design category from SND's (Society of News Design) 30th annual “The Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition” for my 2008 Summer Movie Preview cover! I can't begin to tell you how shocked I was when my boss Josh Awtry told me I had won the award.

Considering I worked on putting it together for almost a month, it is very gratifying to be recognized for my effort! I had a blast putting the page together. The page (above) will hopefully be included in the Best of Newspaper Design book from SND coming out this fall.

Nom for a clown, Batman gets the shaft

The Oscar nominations came out this morning and as expected, the late Heath Ledger got a posthumous best supporting actor nomination for his brilliant performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight.

Unfortunately, Dark Knight was denied the Best Picture and Best Director nominations that geeks were hoping for (Seriously…The Reader was a better movie than The Dark Knight?!?!?).
Anyway, I guess we should be happy that overall Bats got 8 nominations in all. Not bad for a “comic book movie” as movie snobs like to degrade it to. 

Also, Wall-E, another best pic hopefull only got a best animated pic nom. I guess the vindication here is that Andrew Stanton got a best screenplay nom for the film.