TUMBLAH

Hey gang, thinking about phasing this here blog out in favor of my tumblr site. The design is way better and easier to modify than this beast. If you follow me here, I'd love to see you over there.
Johnny Sampson on TUMBLAH!!!
Thanks!

YOUR HIGHNESS

This little guy is for a special advanced screening of YOUR HIGHNESS at the ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE in Austin, TX. I couldn't use any likenesses or scenes from the actual movie because there wasn't enough time to get any of the legal jazz cleared, (that's also why Tyler Stout or one of the other amazing Alamo poster artists didn't handle this one). Maybe that worked out for the best, I do like how it came out. These were screenprinted, 3 colors, 11x17. I don't have any for sale, so don't bother asking. Oh wait, no one bothers anyway. Thanks for looking, smell you later.

MISHKA

The fine folks at MISHKA recently released a tee that I did for them. It's a Garbage Pail Kid inspired take on one of their recurring characters. This one was a lot of fun to work on. They also did a little piece on me for their blog, which gives you a little more insight to what goes on in my head. Lookie here if you're interested. Here's the final art and the uncropped version as well. I also did the lettering at the top (in Photoshop). The painting, as I'm sure you could guess by now, is gouache on illustration board, about 11"x17".

This is how I made this poster.

First of all, I was contacted by the band to make a poster. They originally asked for sketches for two shows but we ended up using one poster for both. Yonder is a bluegrass band, and there's an old standard called "Under The Double Eagle" that came to my mind. I'm not even sure they play it, I just thought it called up some great imagery that would be a good fit for the band. The double eagle is also a Freemason icon, which is really appealing to me. So I sent the sketch and they liked the concept.

Next, I did the pencils for the final art in blue line pencil. I really like the look of the blue line, and sometimes I hesitate to ink it for fear that it will lose some of its spontaneity. Inevitably it does, but that's the nature of the beast, or at least as far as I know it to be.

I did all the inks with Speedball Super Black and a Windsor Newton series 7 #2 brush. I did some of the white lines with Copic opaque white and even some white out. The inspiration for the approach was from a stamp I found online that struck a chord with me. I liked how the background had these consistent horizontal lines contrasting with the sunburst behind the eagle. I also liked the idea of this looking stamp-like, so I used the perforation from the stamp to complete the look.

The final prints were done in two colors with minimal registration (my kind of print), 75 of each. I printed with plenty of bleed so I could cut the prints down to 16"x20" with the black extending to the edge. Very pleased with the way they turned out, I hope you enjoyed our little chat.

More Reader illos...

Hi blog. I did some more work for the Reader here in Chicago. If you can read, the article is linked herein.

More Madness

I've had a really great response to the prints I put up on my shop, thanks to everyone who took the plunge. I upgraded the store to accommodate more inventory and put up a bunch more aberrations, such as these fine ladies:

YOU NEED THESE.

These fantastic mono-prints and others were done for the aforementioned show "Cosmic Aberration". Just scanned a bunch of them and put them up for sale HERE, ya hear?