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!

Munnys can't look up

It took me a while, but I finally took some nice shots of my latest Mini Munny creation, "Shaun of the Dead." I'm pretty happy with the way he turned out. I really wanted to capture that smug, bad-ass look that Simon Pegg is giving on the SOTD poster. Speaking of Simon Pegg, his brilliant BBC series "Spaced" finally comes out on DVD in the US in July!

Anyway, you can see more pics of my Shaun Munny over at my Flickr page:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hefnatron/sets/72157603873704662/

Summer movies have started!

Ahhh...I love this time of year! The weather finally begins to warm up and the local theaters are ruled by the mighty summer movies to entertain us!

This is the cover for our annual Summer Movie Preview at the Salt Lake Tribune that came out last Friday. I had an absolute blast illustrating and putting the section together!

Major kudos to anyone who can figure out what classic comic book cover I'm paying homage to. Double major kudos to anyone who can find the Green Lantern reference!

"Fräulein Ravenwood, let me show you what I am used to..."

Here's another Indy inspired drawing I just completed. I've always thought it was one of the most tense and scary moments from "Raiders." Seriously, how much would it hurt to have a hot poker to the eyes? *shiver*

Poor Marion -- thank god Indy came back.

Nothing like a good cigar...

Despite the fact that the main image is a piece of stock art, I'm pretty proud of this week's cover for IN Utah this week. I think it looks pretty classy!

The Calm Before the Adventure

It started out as doodles on my weekly budget at work yesterday, then I decided to put the elements together. I'm started to get excited for the new Indy movie, so I've been doodling Indy and company a lot lately. Here I depicted a nice, quiet moment with Indy and Short Round.

Raiders of the Lost Munny

Another Mini Munny creation I recently completed is of one of my favorite heroes, Indiana Jones. I decided to depict him in a scene from "Raiders" (my favorite film of all time). He's holding an "Idol Munny" I made from a Munny zipper pull. I also created a base, which is based off of the floor from the temple in the opening scene of the movie. More picks of him can be found at my Flicker site here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hefnatron/sets/72157603873704662/

I'm currently finishing up 2 more Mini Munny creations that I will post about in the near future!

Hints as to who they are: One "Aims to misbehave" and the other is a "Slice of fried gold!"

Lil' Leonidis

I've had him done for a couple of months and I can't believe I haven't posted him on here yet! It's my second custom Mini Munny--Leonidis from the movie "300." I made him for my wife for Valentine's Day and she absolutely loved it!

Check out more images of him on my Flicker site here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hefnatron/sets/72157603873704662/