Casa Rivas

My friend Dan recently bought a house.  He's a single guy with a big empty house that needed filling.  He asked me to create an original piece of art to warm the place up.  As is my usual method, I tried to put myself in a "Dan" headspace and sketched the first thing that came to mind.  Click the image to make it bigger.

The original image is 24X36, I put it in a nice frame behind glass and presented it to him at his housewarming party.  I think it fits his old school geek personality pretty well.  The illustration was done entirely by hand on a digital tablet in photoshop.  Cheers.

Hardcore Musky Shredding

I've been busy working on a short story for the last couple weeks, so my illustrations have been on the back burner.  But a couple days ago my buddy Josh Caroon asked me to do a Tshirt design for his new website Red River Fly The idea was to incorporate Rock and Roll with Musky fishing.  I took inspiration from some of the awesome photos of Elvis doing his thing on stage, then realized I had no idea what a Musky looked like.  Google helped me out with that one.  Add the two together and pass it through my fingertips and this is what you get:  Click to see it full sized.

I'm happy with the results.  For the actual Tshirt, I changed the text to say "Team 50" which refers to a fly fisherman who has caught a 50" musky.  I also removed the blood from the pick, as conservationists wouldn't like that.  I told Josh to just tell them that it wasn't the fish bleeding, the dude was just rocking so hard that the pick itself started to bleed.  Anyway, let me know what you think, this will be up on my website as well at www.nickbruhn.com 

New Stuff To Look At!

It's been quite a while since I got behind the tablet and freed an illustration from my head.  This idea has been swirling around for a while.  I think it's original, but you never know nowadays.  I wanted to challenge myself to draw a woman.  Women are really tough to draw, they've got angles and curves that I can never hope to fully understand.

That was meant to sound endearing.  No?

Anyway, my interest lay in trying to successfully draw a woman, everything after that was just fun and games.  I had plans to draw a DJ spinning records a long time ago, but scrapped the illustration early on.  The idea was reintegrated into this new piece.  Click the image to see it full sized.

Additionally, many of you know that I am currently out of work.  The firm I was working for hit hard times and went into survival mode, laying everyone off except the top brass.  In an effort to help organize my portfolio and house my resume, Amanda has helped me in creating a website.

http://www.nickbruhn.com/

For now, I'm going to continue to post new artwork on this blog, as well as in the 'artwork' section of my new site.  Eventually my website will co-opt this blog entirely.  Please check out my website and let me know what you think.

Also, if you know of any solid Architecture/Design/Illustration work in the Austin area, let me know.  Thanks, pass this along if you like it.

A Frog, Continued

Been feeling uninspired lately.  Maybe it's because we're watching The Wire, season 4.  That show just sucks the life force right out of my body.  Don't get me wrong, it's probably the best television ever produced, but it is also soul devouring. 

I have a couple ideas floating around.  My homework is to learn how to draw gatling guns, seascapes, and manatees (dugongs more specifically).  But, despite these ideas I haven't been able to produce much over the last week. 

On the writing front things are going better.  I've had a couple revelations recently.  Writers always say, "Write what you know."  I've been ignoring that in a big way concerning one vital piece of the story.  I realized my mistake and went back and made some changes.  I'm from Minnesota, I needed to embrace that.  I'm being cryptic, but you'll see.

My Mom and Aunt are visiting Amanda and I this weekend, so I don't expect to get much work done.  Look for an excerpt to be posted by week's end. 

Here is a variant of the frog I drew earlier, click to make bigbigbig:

 

Drey's Logo

Drey's logo has a complicated beginning.  I knew I wanted to do a logo for Drey because he's shared a lot of his art with me, and we've spent long hours discussing creativity and how to stay sane.  Not to mention he's been very helpful with my writing projects as well.  He didn't ask for a logo, and I didn't offer.  That's not really how he operates.  In any case, I knew I wanted him to be near the top of the list.

At first, my brainstorming produced a picture of a spider, I didn't know where it would lead, but that's where my mind went.  Probably because Drey hates spiders and I'm a sadist.

At the same time I was sketching boxers for some reason.  I like boxing, I know I need to work on drawing humans.  So I had these two sketches, when I started working on the actual file, the boxers came first.  I drew two men fighting.  It was alright, but the second dude just didn't fit.  I stopped working on that one and started up the spider.  It wasn't working either.  Frustration ensued.  I went back to the boxers, scrapped the second dude and the spider idea, and stared at the half empty canvas.  I fiddled with a few ideas, but the one that stuck was to have my boxer fighting a squid.  20,000 leagues style.  I guess I was still on a nautical kick after Amanda's logo.

The squid was sketched, pass after pass saw it getting further and further away from reality, and closer to some hideous Lovecraftian monstrosity.

Here are the results, click to make bigbigbig:

I like the whole thing.  The monster is pretty rad, I used a gorilla's mouth as reference for how to draw a good howling mouth.  I used the same pustule technique from Amanda's octopus on Drey's monster.  I like the idea of somebody boxing a monster.  Amanda says I was unconsciously drawing myself when I drew the boxer.  Probably true, although I'm in better shape and have a beard.  Also, she thought the background colors reminded her of some country's flag.  Neither of us could think of which one it was.

No variations on this one yet, although I've got some ideas.

A Frog, suddenly

I've been working on this damned spider illustration for a couple of days now.  I got sick of looking at it, erased the whole thing, and sketched a frog instead.  I liked it, so spent some time and made a pretty little picture out of it. 

This one isn't a logo for anyone, just a frog I drew for some reason.  I've got an idea for a cool variation on it, we'll see if it coalesces. 

Frog, click to make bigbigbig:

I drew hundreds of tiny little circles to detail his skin in a different way than I normally would.  I like the effect.  Amanda isn't crazy about the orange face, but I think it fits.  He's pretty simple, no fancy techniques here. 

Next post is Drey's Logo, for real this time.

Scott's Logo

By this point, I'd decided that I was going to do a logo for any of my friends that asked.  As an added challenge I was going to ask them to give me a list of the likes/dislikes to consider while designing.

Scott was the first to jump when I offered.  I asked him what his main interests were.  He said, "Politics, model trains, buffalo steak, and golf."

Of course, those elements all flow naturally together.

My immediate though was to recreate those classic presidential profile shots, and add some sort of twist.  I knew Lincoln would be one of the presidents, but at first I thought the other would be Washington.  I actually sketched out the design with Lincoln and Washington, but decided they didn't really have an interesting dynamic between them; a modern president would be much better.  That led me to Nixon.  The first design had their tongues sticking out and touching to create a bridge that a train was rolling across, but I wasn't crazy about it.

Here is what I ultimately came up with, click to make bigbigbig:

I did the whole thing, and was somewhat satisfied by the results, but something was missing, that's when I added the barf.  All of a sudden the whole thing pulled together.

The trains took forever to draw.  I finished the green one, took stock, liked what I saw, and prepared to draw a second one.  I got a few lines into a second, different train, then realized that they were going to be small and all I really needed to do was copy the first train and modify it a bit.  Same result, half the time.

Variation number 2:

I did away with the trains, not a smart move.  This one ended up alright, but boring.  Really, I just wanted to mess around with a monochromatic design.

Variation number 3:

This one was fun.  At first I lined them both up facing the same direction, but left them blue.  I was going to mess with having different stuff coming out of their mouths, but I multiplied them a few time, liked what I saw, and kept going.  Amanda said, "make them a rainbow", so I played with some other color schemes then added the rainbow barf.  I love the name plate on this one.  I wish I could take credit for that amazing font, but all I did was manipulate the kerning and size so that the first and last names lined up, then scrunched them so they blended together.

Let me know what you think.

Next post, Drey's surprise logo.