I died again

Hey, so uh I've yet again fallen into a black hole of watching Transformers three times a night, and re-runs of Ghost Hunters until the sun rises, then complaining that I have no time to finish anything. Actually I really have been working on a bunch of different stuff, just I have yet to actually get any of it 100% done. SO I'll share a few things with you, so I don't feel like a complete asshole as this semester is basically done tomorrow.


FIRST OFF I've got this Bells and Whistles assignment thats due for Soojin Buzelli's Big Bad World Of Illustration class thats way over due. Last night I finished inking it now it's sitting in my "things I should have gotten done 3 weeks ago but will have to finish when I'm back from winter break" list of things to do :/ I'm actually looking forward to finishing it though, at first I had a hard time with her art direction simply because we both have totally different directions with illustration. Soojin is a great AD, but I feel like I'll never have anything in her publications because when I sit down to do an illustration or come up with an idea, I literally say to myself "okay how can I make this look a little fucked up" and thats not necessarily the direction someone would want for their magazine promoting new household products or business resourcing. ANYWAY, so the theme for the illustration was Bell's and Whistles. I decided to go with a cool underwater sorta scene where I'd turn all the sea life into OMG YES bells and whistles!!! How awesome right? >.<> went with that environment for an Illustration because many of her editorials/artist whom she works with do really sweet Illustrations that have to do with animals doing cute things or blah blah something with animals. I'm still working on the compo and re-arranging the fish/eels (which are all cleverly turned into bells with their mouths), so the end result WILL look a bit different. I got my satisfaction in the octopus and the seaweed, after that I kinda lost steam, and by that time Optimus was beating the hell out of The Fallen so I kinda just zoned out for a little. I'm not kidding. But yes, like I said I'm gunna try to finish it during break.
As for the second image I'm posting its one of the several Illustrations I'm re-doing for Tomer's portfolio class. This was supposed to be about a mental illness (I still can't really tell why I love his class so much) and we had to basically just do an editorial style illustration based on any mental disorder we wanted. So naturally I picked something that would smack me back into my Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Dumb and Dumber phase. I chose Multiple Personality Syndrome, and at first had a hard time solving it. I was doing a lot of cliche like sketches dealing with people looking in the mirror while brushing their teeth, cept the person staring back was like a Pogo the clown/John Wayne Gacy character. Tomer wasn't really feeling that, and we discussed all the cliche sorta things to steer away with certain topics. Mirrors and reflections being one of them. So I tried to go with more of a person inside of a person sorta thing. I'm not sure how I'm going to re-vamp this one, but I'll be sure to post it if it tastes good when I'm done.

Thirdly is just a snapshot of the inking I've been doing for another project for Tomer, its dealing with the Humana Festival poster for this coming year. Tomer actually did a really beautiful book cover for them 2 years ago (i think it was 2 years) and once I make more progress on that I'll elaborate on it. But yeah theres a little ya know of what I've been doing with it.


AND lastly (amongst many other things I've chosen to leave out) Kyle and me did the first run of prints for his documentary that I did the poster art for back in October. It looked really awesome seeing one of my posters actually being printed for the first time, so I of course took a few photografas and yeah, hopefully in the spring I'll have finished a few more thesis posters for the Dusties.

BLAH BLAH OH and in less than two months is the deadline for the Society of Illustrators student competition, and for the first time I'll be entering a bunch of juicey stuff. SO we're looking forward to that. and by we're I mean Optimus. and Me. and the Cube. OKAY BYE I'll update again during this week when I'm home and ya know. Doing laundry and watching Judge Judy.



also be cool and follow me on twitter
www.twitter.com/stevensmithart
OKAY BYE

Punks Vs Mods

For Marcos Chin's fashion illustration class, we had to illustrate the theme "Fashion Wars" so I chose Punks Vs. Mods. This image has gone through a ton of editing, and I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out. Lemme know what you think pleaseeeeee I need yo love to fill my brainnn. Anyway, so yeah I've been working on this image a lot lately, and I've got a two projects left for Tomer's class and an awesome Munny surface design project I'm going to spend my lonely Thanksgiving in my dorm room doing this week :] so yeahhhhh I'm gunna try to update as soon as I have more things worthy of showing. Also, new website layout almost done. Its ridonculous.

ALSO I've been wicked lazy lately and had chipotle the past three nights for dinner, and low and behold these pictures were taken this morning when I was in bed before I decimated my toilet. :/




on that note EVERYONE HAVE A HAPPY THANKSGIVING. BE SAFE PLEASE. EAT TURKEY. AHHHH chaaa
-Steve

A Brave New World

This was for Tomer's class, and its probably the first image I've done that I'm really satisifed with, portfolio wise. The assignment was to pick your favorite book and Illustrate a cover for it, so I did A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I think it came out pretty good, a few days of tweaking after my crit and yeah blah blah. Tomer and Marcos have been having me experiment with different approaches to color my stuff digitally so lately I've been pushing a lot of offset colors with a limited pallet. We'll see how it carries itself. In other news, I updated my blog as you can see. Now its all fancy and such. I'm gunna try to start pushing and using my twitter a lot more too so that should be fun. not really. NOM. Also, in two weeks I should have my profile and artwork on the schools website under the undergraduate student work section! I'll be updating another piece soon so check back in a few! AH oh and follow me on twitter and be cool.

-Steve

Movie Poster Designs

Full Size pay off with a half inch boarder, 27x40 @300 dpi

Okay, so as most of you know I've been working as a Jr.-Designer at Indika Entertainment Advertising for the past few months making movie posters. Since then I've really fallen more in love with that art and design.


This year I decided that ontop of my illustration work I want to persue a more free-lancey sorta exploration in graphic design making movie posters for my friends thesis films. Now, although this first poster I'm posting about is not a thesis film, its for a friends Documentary about his father's life and his relationship with his father. My friend, (Kyle Mumford) really worked hard on this movie and I'm looking forward to working with him again in the future. The film is very deep and has a very serious tone to it so we wanted to try to obtain that sense of emotion in the direction of the poster design. As you can see ontop is the finished payoff poster. I'm also sharing all of first and second round comps that I worked on for him before we ended up going with the final. Lemme know watchu think!



<3

The last two weeks I've been failing at life

Okay, so I think I'm finally coming out of the hole I fell into the past two-three weeks. I've been really over worked with a ton of crap and now I am trying to prioritize shit. In the mean time, I wanted to make a post to some images that I said I wouldn't post because I was really un-happy with them, but you can't appreciate sunny days without some rainy ones.



This image is the second project that was created for my Portfolio class with Tomer, the direction was to pick a significant character/person real or fictitious and illustrate a portrait of them. The catch was that the portrait had to give a "feeling" or a general idea of what that person did in their life. (or of who they were) SO I chose Jay Adams, one of the original Z-Boys from Dogtown. I'll spare you the info but nut shelling it, he played a very significant role in the evolution of modern day vert-skateboarding. He lead a very rough childhood and basically I view him as a very passionate athlete who never sold out when everyone else did around him. But he did kinda washed up with going to prison BUT thats a different story. Anyway, the Jay Adams persona has been one that I look up to with longboarding and freeboarding since I was a kid.

The image I did the final on was a bit different from my initial sketch which I am going to do a re-worked version based on as soon as I can, but basically I wanted to focus on the surfing aspect of Jay's earlier life. I was working with using the water and the waves of the ocean and integrate that with his long blonde hair/and the Venice boardwalk that was a very symbolic location in Jay's life. If you've ever seen the movie "Lords of Dog-Town" or the documentary you'd see the connections. Anyway, I chose to do this image in a slightly different approach than my usual illustrations. I went with graphite and charcoal instead of ink. And I tried to get more of a painterly feel with my digital coloring. I did an ink wash for the waves and put them behind my coloring. Then laid the graphite drawing ontop and blah blah blah. Tomer said that the waves needed to be bigger and more aggressive and that they weren't selling the image. :/ I'm in the midst of re-working it though so we'll see how that one turns out.