Gabriel Byrne

I did this caricature of Gabriel Byrne for the March issue of The Vancouver Voice. It's for a review on the TV show 'In Treatment'. The likeness was tricky, but my wife, Heather, helped me get that straight. It was a rush job and they pretty much had what they wanted in mind, so it went fast. I did it a rounder, more cartoony style than usual, more like some work from a few years ago.

Test coloring

I figured it'd be a good idea to test my 'coloring in illustrator' idea for my Wondercon promotional piece. Above is a sample I saved out. I wanted to try Illustrator because it has a Live Color option, which basically makes it insanely easy and fast to adjust all the colors on a piece. I found a ton of combinations I liked with this piece, including this 'high contrast' type of combination. Once I get colors all set, I'll pull it into Photoshop and do some shading and highlight tweaks. I think this method might work well. Adjustments to the pencil tool made it easy to outline the shapes. The only downside I can see is having to choose one scheme...

By the way, if you have Adobe Illustrator CS3, it's possible you don't even know about Live Color. This is the first time I've used it myself. It's not the most obvious tool, but a very powerful one. Here is the path to get to it: first, select color shapes to edit, then go to - Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork .

Valentine's Marshmallows!

My lovely wife, Heather, made some Valentine's Day themed marshmallows. She's been making awesome homemade marshmallows every few weeks for the last couple of months. This time she added a little red food coloring to make them pink, and used a heart shaped cookie cutter to separate them out.

More pictures on Flickr.

SUPERTRASH

Last Sunday I went to the SUPERTRASH film festival in Portland. The festival was all weekend, but I could only make it for a while on Sunday. It was held at the Baghdad Theatre/Pub. It was the first time I'd been to that theatre and it was pretty neat. The theatre had every other row ripped out and replaced with a bench for food and drinks. I went with my father-in-law Randy and we split a pitcher of Terminator Stout and some popcorn.

The exhibition was small, in the lobby. I took some photos of the pieces that can be seen here. It was fairly packed when I went through so I didn't get too many pictures, but I did get at least one of mine and my friends who submitted. Here is the piece I submitted (from a previous post).

I overheard someone say the liked Ulises' 'Deathrace 2000' poster. And when I went to look at the purchasable prints, the seller said someone had inquired about my poster. (I'm sure Gabe's and Ben's were also big hits, I just didn't here them mentioned). My favorite poster overall was probably the one for Samuel Fuller's THE STEEL HELMET. It was just very well done. I also liked seeing DASH SHAW's interpretation of EXORCIST 2.

There were a lot of great movies playing there, but most of them I'd seen already. I hadn't seen ROBOCOP 2 before (or at least didn't remember it) so we stayed for that. It was not the best print of the movie, but neat to see it on the big screen.

I think they are still accepting submissions for future shows and a possible book published by FANTAGRAPHICS. More information can be found on their MySpace page.