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.

YES WE DID!

An evil EMPIRE has fallen so let us UNITE and CELEBRATE!

APW Gallery Halloween show

This is my custom "Mask of Red Death" Mini Munny that I made for the APW Gallery's custom toy Halloween show. Opening recepition was tonight (wish I could've been there) and the show runs untill the end of next week (Nov. 7). So if you happen to be on Staten Island, swing on by and see it along with a lot of other great Halloween themed custom toys!

Happy Halloween!!!

Back from the dead ...

Tonight at 5 p.m., the Wichita Falls Museum of Art in Wichita Falls, TX will be showing a film I made in 2005 titled "The Vampire Brides of Midland" in their Media Center. It was a lot of fun to make with all of my friends and I have a lot of good memories from the expierence. It's very campy with some fun dark humor thrown in, so if you go, I hope you enjoy it, wish I could be there. It's cool to have this playing so close to Halloween. Special thanks to Danny Bills for giving it, ahem, a new life.

Blue Sue

A quick sketch of Sue Storm I did the other night for the heck of it.

"Stay Frosty" with Manhandle

"Manhandle: The Assassin" is a new web comic series from Clay Sisk and myself! Based on the character created by Clay, we each write and illustrate a different heart-stopping Manhandle adventure in our own style.

Head on over to the Manhandle site and check out his exploits! You can sign up for e-mail updates when a new strip has been added.

Celebrate Bastille Day!

Happy Bastille Day everyone! Today, go out and try something new by indulging yourself in a little bit of French culture!

The Smell of Gunpowder in the Air ...

Stadium of Fire is usually a big deal here in Utah, and this year we decided to blow out the front of our Friday Mix section and make it a poster for the fans to keep (and download for printing online). Decided that it would be fun to do a painting of Miley Cyrus as a tastefull, patriotic '40s cheesecake pin up. I'm extremely happy with the way it turned out!