of having had and lost some infinite thing

I've updated my website. It is a joyous day indeed! There are new illustrations and even new sketches. 

Here's one, for to tempt you...


All can be seen at www.emcguire.net 

I'm driving 1000 miles tonight. See you when I see you.

Of fuzzy hats, and also muffs.

Quick character study. I like to pretend her hat is biting her head.

I head down to Florida next week for a very whirlwind visit. Luckily I'm splitting the drive with Adam and Dustin, so it should be an adventure. I look forward to seeing what this year's illustration seniors at Ringling have been doing. Hope to see you there!

g-g-g-ghost cat

Little is known about the proper protocol for approaching the ghost cat, though many experts suggest a laser pointer and/or a profound sense of humility. The ghost cat, whence perturbed, has been known to cause thunderstorms, forgetfulness, and the occasional sneezing fit.

Approach with caution.

centenary

See, here's the thing- I unapologetically mostly draw girls. Here are some new sketchbook ladies.

This one is about half photoshop, half sketchbookins.

A couple of sketches I did while at the workshop, I think I was in a "drawing hoodies" mood.

Sometimes, every so often, I can get Drew to collaborate with me. It usually ends up looking like this though.

Lately I've been splitting my time between Dallas and Shreveport Louisiana, where I eat gumbo and po' boys with a few fine gentlemen while drawing children's books. By strange coincidence, Joe Bluhm has relocated to Shreveport as well, and it is nice to meet new art friends. What if Shreveport is the new artist community? 

Being semi-nomadic is oddly inspiring, and I really feel like making some new work. We live in exciting times.

Strange, really

Life is a little strange.

I think being in the right place at the right time means you get some surreal experiences.

Like helping the head puppet wrangler from Laika frantically assemble original puppets from Coraline to be in one of our gallery shows (as the show was happening) and getting to see these incredible works of art up close and hold them and glue their eyelids on.

The past 4 days or so have been crazy. I'm super jazzed up from the Concept Art workshop, and excited to do some new work.

AFI Film Festival

I was asked to create a lot of our promotional material for the AFI Dallas Film Festival, which starts today. Limbert Fabian art directed, and simply asked me to make something that "makes the studio look awesome." This illustration is going in the program for the Festival to be seen by real cool people, so it made me real nervous.

I knew that my normal stuff doesn't really scream AWESOME FILM FESTIVAL, so I did a weird Shaun-Tan-esque robot with cowboy boots and cacti and it is probably a friendly robot. I figured Reel FX is a real rag tag crazy contraption. Either way, it's powered by studio love and coffee. Dustin and Yashar helped me think up doodads and gadgets to put on top.



In conjunction with the Festival, Reel FX also hosts the Tex Avery award, so I did another page for the program to advertise the event, and we decided to keep it in the same style as the robot ad.




And then, ALSO in conjunction with the festival is the Animation award, so I did the certificate that the winner will receive, along with whatever supersweet computer system.

Crazy times for me lately. Life is pretty exciting and work is satisfying. I have a lot of projects on my plate right now, and as usual the coolest stuff has to stay secret for a long time. Either way, I'm settling into life in Dallas, and looking forward to things to come. I'll be attending Concept Art's Reverie Workshop this weekend, hope to see some of you there. Take care.

real horrorshow

I was approached to do a piece for a Kubrick Anthology being put out by a European publisher, and immediately wanted to do something for A Clockwork Orange. 

Last year, I'd intended to do a book cover for Clockwork Orange as part of my thesis, but I felt like it would be almost impossible to compete with the movie. Also, I've seen some other neat book covers for Clockwork Orange, (here and here) and it was too overwhelming to try and compete with all that. The movie is so engrained in our culture that no other depiction of Alex really felt right (even though he's like 14 in the book and is played by a 28 year old actor).

When I decided to do a piece about the movie, rather than the book, I wanted to do something other than the few famous scenes everyone knows. I didn't want this thing to be a Hot Topic poster, after all. One of the funniest scenes to me is Alex picking up the two oblivious girls in the record shop, and all the ridiculous sexual imagery and sillyness that ensues. Not my usual fare, but I had fun all the same. Enjoy.

err'body matte paint

Someone asked me what a typical workday is like, so hopefully this is an interesting post. I get to work on a really wide range of stuff so there's no short answer.

I work on whatever they throw at us, and in this case, it was matte painting. I didn't particularly like doing matte painting, but it was a learning experience at least, and it never hurts to have another thing in your skillset. It's more photoshop trickery than illustration, but I sure honed my stamp brush skills.

So, it begins with this commercial for Home Depot and Nascar. Pretty standard feel good whatever.

Get it? FANS.

That last 7 seconds when the two people are looking at the ENDLESS HALL OF FANS really looked something like this though

The people were going to be composited in later, so I just had to make it extend 5 times further back in space, fill the shelves with products, lower the ceiling, fix the lights, repaint the floor, add an endcap, and whatever else would make it believable. So we end up with this.

Now, since the people and "Fans" sign aren't even showing, you can see some of the areas I kinda dismissed (check out the extra row of reflected lights, yeeeah). The hardest part was the shelves, as Home Depot doesn't really have a standard way of shelving anything, and having a really limited amount of product photography to work with didn't help. 

Here's everything kinda fake comped together

During this project, we'd have daily meetings where I'd meet with the art director, producers, and inferno artist and we'd nitpick the crap out of this thing until it felt believable. Commercial projects are pretty fast, and it's rare that I spend longer than a week or two on one.

Now that they've figured out that they can use me to do matte painting, I've been painting mountains for a beer ad all week. But, that's been a bit more fun.

Actual art stuffs soon :)

entanglements

A friend's kitchen

This is how the kids dress these days, those crazy kids. I swear I saw this kid at a Starbucks.

Someone asked me to draw a monster attacking a city and it kinda looks like Thiel.

February has been busy and hectic and exhausting, but exciting. 

I've added some more prints to my Etsy shop, mostly book cover work that people had inquired about. 

Hope all are well.

girls n guns

Friday sketch at work this week was "my uzi weighs a ton" and I have little to no interest in drawing guns, so I went to Erin-Default-Awkward-Girls-Without-Pants mode, and voila. 

I'm in the middle of reading Then We Came to the End, and being that it takes place at an ad agency during a recession and layoffs, the issues ring true to my own experience here. I liked this passage-

We had a toy client, a car client, a long-distance carrier, and a pet store chain. We did TV, print, direct mail, and internet. We had a business to business division. We drank too much on the weekends. We had the great fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war. If we had been recovering from the aftereffects of a significant campaign, we might have been grateful to be where we were. Eager, even.

Mustache

Friday Sketch at Reel FX this week was "Magnificent Mustache"

Civil war facial hair can't be beat.

Canvas for a cause

I did a painting for tonight's Canvas for a Cause show at Reel FX. Quilts and girls are default for me, it would seem.

all my wherefores and whys

Parka Twins

(about half watercolor half photoshop)

This was my first drawing of the new year, and probably the best drawing I've ever done of Drew. I captured his essence.

Bookstore drawrin

A girl in a pleated skirt

I drove about 2500 miles in the past 3 weeks. Dallas to Florida. Port Richey to Orlando, a handful of times. Florida to Dallas. I did not find myself dreading the time spent on the road. I welcomed the chance to clear my mind, put on some music, and do a thing that had to be done. Florida was good to me and I was sad to leave this time. But, I feel recharged, and ready for these next few uncertain months.

either or

  

Few little sketchbook watercolor things.

I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas. I'm looking forward to getting some new work done and enjoying the mild Florida winter for a few weeks.

Merry Christmas Y'all

This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about

Sketchbook page

Have you seen the thumbs commercial? I got to work on our pitch for the thumbs commercial, it was entertaining to say the least. Weird to see it on tv though. It's as creepy as I expected.

These are all from a project I can not talk about but I'm allowed to show some stuff. This is about 1/50th of the amount of work I did for this project, and it was all in illustrator. I learned a lot about illustrator. Anyhow, soon enough you'll probably see more of these, for now, enjoy

 

Not even an hour after this was posted on a Publisher's Weekly blog, I sold out of Penelope prints. A couple people mentioned that they were librarians, and a few asked me to send the prints to their library. Having been a librarian for 4 years, I was happy to oblige. I've put the shop on vacation though, I'm driving to Florida tomorrow and can't take all my printing/packaging stuff with me. Hope everyone has a great holiday. :)

flamenco

Reel FX had a flamenco dancer model last night at figure drawing, I like drawing big ol' poofy dresses. I tend to draw quickly and get impatient, so I drew the above pose a few times.

Towards the end of the figure drawing session, it started sleeting, and finally, snowing. They don't warn you about how surreal post-college life is. All of sudden you're in Texas and it's snowing and you're drawing a flamenco dancer. Life is pretty strange.

In other news, if you aren't done Christmas shopping, I'm selling some prints on Etsy :) If there's something of mine that you like but that isn't on there, shoot me an email. Take care!

Thai

Spring Rolls - I didn't get a picture of the one I made because I ate it :]

So, yesterday I took a Thai cooking class at Central Market in Dallas. I've always loved Thai food, and I've attempted making a few things at home but nothing ever came out great. The class was so much fun, and now I feel like I can make this stuff with more confidence.

Red Curry with duck, eggplant, tomatoes. 

This is a shot of the kitchen where we worked, this is only about half of it though. The mirrors up top were cool because we could easily watch everything that was going on.

Clockwise from upper left, two woks of pad thai, panang beef curry with homemade curry paste, tom ka gai, and the red duck curry. We also made spring rolls but like I said, I ate mine before I got a shot of it, so I had to do a watercolor in homage. And to justify posting all of this on an art blog :)

It's starting to really cool off here, and cooking always makes my apartment feel cozy.

How to fix our troubled economy...

I recommend printing a bunch of these and trying your luck.

To explain... I can finally show you something I did at work because this was cut from a commercial I worked on. 

We were doing a series of stop motion animation commercials about recycling, and so logically, me constructing tons of paper props was the best way to be environmentally friendly :) Since I think it's illegal to scan and print money, (even as a prop?), I did a cartoony one to fit the style.

The stack down there is about 1/10 of the amount of tiny fake money I made... printed... glued, bound, and then glued into stacks, and then the client decided against it, so... I know how animators feel when their shots get cut. But, at least I was left with stacks of tiny fake money to leave on co-workers' desks.

And then... cats.

My sister is getting married in June, and I've agreed to do all her wedding stationary, starting with Save the Date cards, which will feature her and her fiancee's three cats (yes seriously). I wanted it to not be crazy cat lady-esque, hopefully I succeeded. This is just what I have done on the kitties.

And, a sketchbook page/lil painting.