Original drawing.

Leather jacket mock-up.

Over the last little while I feel like I’ve been mired in paperwork and administrative stuff. Necessary evil I understand, but I’m a creative guy and my interests will always lie in making things. The craft of it all. So when I’m forced to deal with taxes and forms and whatever else that takes away from my creating, it puts me in a quiet and pretty foul mood. Just want to make things, man.

That said, I wanted to create something a bit rebellious this week. Call it therapy or whatever, but a lot of times my state of mind translates almost directly into my work. Couple that with getting into SONS OF ANARCHY recently and we end up with the Signalnoise Biker design. I wanted this one to look like it was drawn by someone in an MC, then photocopied over the years. Degraded. Last thing I wanted was something “slick” for this one, y’know? A few people said it looked like Skeletor, which is fine. Was going for a laughing Reaper. Very inspired by the SOA patch.

I’ll be arranging a sticker and t-shirt pressing this week. Watch for this one in the Signalnoise Store soon.

Here is my new portrait piece, THE VILLAIN. If you’re new to these ones, I tend to do portraits in between full posters as a form of practice as I continue to explore this form of print design. Trying to sharpen my skills.

As with all my stuff lately, this is 100% vector. No brushes, or plugins, or LiveTrace or fancy “time-saving” tools either. Just hardcore bezier point scrutiny through lots of hours. Nuts and bolts stuff. If you want it to look right you have to get right in there and do it yourself. Really trying to simplify things too.

I wanted the colour palette to hinge on THE DARK KNIGHT film, but not exactly. This one is much grimmer than my previous portraits: THE SMUGGLER and THE SCIENTIST.

EDIT: This is the second version of THE VILLAIN. I did further work on it this weekend to mend some issues.

A couple of early digital concept studies.

Sketch of the alien gore on tracing paper. Ink and blue lead.

Here’s a poster for my favourite movie, John Carpenter’s masterpiece: THE THING.

I started this design hot on the heels of completing the BLADE RUNNER poster. I’m continuously learning new tricks and processes as I go, so I wanted to really dial in on the style I explored in BLADE RUNNER and simplify it. Really concentrate on the shapes that make up the highlights and shadows. The goal was to reduce the overall number of points, but really make them count. Smooth curves.

The over-arcing concept was to depict the alien taking human form, so I knew early on I needed some kind of weird abstract alien gore in there which proved to be the toughest challenge. I sought reference in the film, but I didn’t want hands, or tentacles, or a spider-head. I wanted a mess of scary “whatever”. I had to draw it all from the ground up (pencil and paper, kids) and on the third attempt it finally fell into place. From there it hit the scanner to be re-built in Illustrator.

Like my BLADE RUNNER poster, this is 100% vector. Not a hint of Photoshop in there. I see this and the BLADE RUNNER poster as kind of companion pieces since I did them both back to back with similar methodologies.

But again, it was all about atmosphere. I wanted this poster to feel like the movie. That was priority 1.

I spoke at Montreal Meets on April 9th and one of the big hooks in my presentation was revealing this poster onstage for the first time. Until now, it had only existed in cellphone photos on Twitter. But here we go, a poster for one of my favorite films: BLADE RUNNER.

This poster truly represents the new direction I’m forcing into my work. I’ve had a keen interest in designing movie posters for quite some time, and this was nothing less than a huge undertaking. From reference photos, digital studies to the final build it took about 2 weeks full time to get it done. Another big departure was building this thing entirely in Illustrator. There is zero Photoshop work in this piece, something I’m pretty proud of. If you saw my Influxis Voodoo Lounge presentation at FITC Toronto 2012 you would have seen an indepth process of how I planned and built this poster. Really long process, so long it ultimately changed how I work.

This poster needed to be treated with respect. I love the film and it has a huge following all over the world. It ultimately defined a new genre of science fiction in both story and atmosphere, and I needed to keep that intact as I worked through the design. High scrutiny was placed on every element in this poster to ensure I got it right. Pursuit of a proper representation of BLADE RUNNER.

“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” – Roy Batty

For the second year in a row I will be speaking at Montreal Meets, this time at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montreal on April 7-8. I had a great time last year, and organizer Francois Hoang upped the stakes with an all-star roster this year including Shelby White, Radim Malinic, Fabio Sasso and Rik Oostenbroek.

And also for the second year in a row, Signalnoise is supporting the event by providing an original poster. I actually started this one months ago but never had the opportunity/reason to complete it until now. I was late getting this one over to Francois but he’s a patient guy when it comes to my antics. I’m not sure what his plan is for this design, but you will probably see copies floating around the event when it kicks off.

Funny influence in this design. You old-schoolers might have spotted it already:

So, be sure to check out the Montreal Meets website for all the details, and follow on Twitter. I’ll see you real REAL soon Montreal!

The juggernauts behind the mighty Digital Abstracts started up a side project called Creative Cards, where they have 54 playing cards designed by 54 artists. I was pretty thrilled when I woke up one morning to see an invitation to the project sitting in my inbox. Real thrilled as I’ve been a fan of Digital Abstracts for years now. When they opened the floodgates to select a card, I was lucky enough to grab the King of Clubs. I wanted a face card so I was pumped.

I started out wanting to do something involving Skeletor, for whatever reason. See, dumb things happen when I’m alone in my office at night. I got pretty far in designing it too, so you might see some kind of Skeletor-related thing appear on the blog in the near future. Fair warning.

Completely unrelated at the time, but I decided I wanted to watch FIGHT CLUB the other day as I haven’t seen it in a while. The better idea hit me as soon as I glanced at the DVD cover, so I got to it. Always wanted to do something involving Tyler, one of my favorite film characters of all time.

Be sure to check out the other Creative Cards already displayed. Some killer stuff in there by some of my favorite artists. Can’t wait to see the entire deck in person.

I was rooting through some of my old drawings and came across this one. For those of you who were into comics back in the ’90s, specifically Image Comics, you might recognize PROPHET. Being dumb teenagers, me and my pal Mike were all over Image back in the day, constantly drawing our favorite characters. Looking at this, you can probably tell what comic pencillers I was a fan of at the time.

But this drawing of PROPHET represents something special to me. Real sentimental. I drew this in 1995 on the very first day of Graphic Design. After going through the signing of forms, course outlines and whatever else, the teacher gave us all some paper and asked us to draw something so she could get a gage on where people were coming from creatively. I remember people drawing houses and portraits … I drew PROPHET. I was out of high school for only 2 months at this point and this was the first drawing I did during a huge turning point in my life. I was 18, just a kid.

Drawing was something I just loved to do, at home in my room. But this time it was different. I was in a place to learn to create. To take those years and years of drawing and wield it in a different way with access to new tools and materials. I was at the beginning of a long journey and my future was unknown. Still is, I guess.

So when I was asked to draw something that September afternoon in 1995, I fearlessly drew PROPHET in a room full of strangers. No embarrassment at all. Still proud of that.

Here’s a poster design of everyone’s favorite scientist, Dr. Emmett L. Brown. In between doing full movie posters I like to do practise pieces to improve on some skills and techniques I’m exploring. This one started that way, as did THE SMUGGLER.

I’d like to think this was the expression Doc had on his face right before that lightning struck the DeLorean at the end of Part II. Stone cold determination, bravery and curiosity toward the unknown. But lets face it, he was probably screaming like a loon. His character was always my favorite from the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy. So here he is, heroic, immortalized in blue and purple.

“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”