The Sunset Inn Meets Godzilla

Getting towards the end of the series I've been working on over the last year. Hoping that they'll all be on display here by September or October so people can see it all in order. This piece came about after I spent some time up in my hometown last summer when I was getting a mental break from the city. Not to get too depressing but driving and biking around made me realize how much the look and feel of some areas have changed almost to the point of being unrecognizable from my childhood. From boarded up windows, vacant store fronts and empty lots that used to be the site of a busy restaurant, it all kind of hit me for the first time. 

The Sunset Inn was an Italian American restaurant that we frequented when I was younger but as the strip malls and chain restaurants creep their way through the rural towns of America and small business owners want to retire to spend time with their families after grinding for decades on 60-70+ hour work weeks, these type of places are becoming a rare sight in small towns.

One of the other casualties of modern convenience was the downtown movie rental store Home Video. It was the place where I first was introduced to the cinematic masterpiece, Bambi Meets Godzilla. Bet Netflix doesn't have this one. But you can watch it on Youtube if you're really curious as to how this plays out. I decided to put these 2 childhood memories together and keep Godzilla as this destroyer of something that doesn't stand a chance against him. Kind of as a symbol of a force like big business in small town economies or just the passing of time.

I was playing around with the idea of illustrating this like a used placemat at a restaurant but felt like it was too many ideas trying to say the same thing. But I would like to revisit this concept for something else down the line.

Breakdancing in Quarantine Times

"We Gotta Breakdance to Save The World"

14.5 x 19.5"

This is the last of 3 new pieces I made for a spring show at Homegrown Skateshop in Ithaca, NY that, sadly, is not going to happen for the foreseeable future. Some of the scenarios happening in this drawing actually happened while we skated the park in our younger days, and even happened as recently as last year. I'll let you decide what is fact and fiction. Hopefully we can pull a show together for the fall so people can actually see these bad boys up close. 

I originally was going to have the gas station at night be the setting of this piece but decided to save this for another piece.

Haunted Brown

Another Halloween is approaching and you know that means the Haunted Brown Latte Throwdown is upon us. My good bud, Trey, the great coffee slinger, film-maker, father of the century, and super inspiring human hit me up for a quick poster to promote his great event. We wanted to take a little inspiration from Evil Dead for this one but after a couple sketches we decided to make it not so obvious. Check out the link----> COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE for all the details and keep those evil saxophones blasting into the night!

Godzilla versus Barkley: A Love Story

Godzilla vs. Barkley was such a big deal for me as a kid. I had the poster and a shirt of it. Never had the shoes though. I've been working on getting some time to do this piece and finally got that feeling to throw it down one day. Maybe it synched up when the newest Godzilla film last year came out but I was feeling nostalgic and I wanted to pay homage and to one of my favorite advertising campaigns/illustrations of all time, and add my two cents on how this whole thing would've really gone down. But, there's one thing that has bugged me about digging through this old stuff and that is I can't find any information, anywhere, on who the illustrator was that did this for Nike. I want to thank them. And credit them so I don't get in any trouble for this piece.

This is the original image. It's amazing. It has to be one of the early major factors in making want to be an illustrator.

The Predator. Again

A solid scan. Took me a little while due to the size of the piece.

The Predator

I haven't drawn the predator since I was 11 or 12 so I decided to give it a go again and see what happened. I probably have hundreds of sheets of paper filled with drawings of these guys but I hardly ever drew their faces. It mostly tended to be with a mask on. For this one I wanted to go all out for all those years of hiding the face.

NYC's Gritty Children of Film

Travis Bickle gonna blow you away with some Gimme! Coffee. I altered the quote slightly, so don't jump on my case if you notice it's not verbatim to what he says in the film.

all of these characters/movies played a role in my fascination and subsequent move to NYC. While they're all portraying negative sides of the city, I couldn't help but be drawn into the world that would create them. Plus it was only 5 hours away from where I was comfortably viewing them on my mom's t.v! I'm not sad that when I moved here, these worlds didn't exist, because who really wants to be worrying about getting eaten by a C.H.U.D. all the time? Just day to day life here is stressful enough. But, I think the energy and creativity of the city that spawned them is what I really came for anyways. 

However, I can say some of that alienation and loneliness of Travis Bickle's world is still around. I think the popularity of OKCupid is proof enough of that.

Creature from the Blog

Started with this sketch. 

Then started making my way through something bigger.

Then ended up here. One of my favorite movies as a kid. I still need to get the trilogy. When I was looking up reference photos I was psyched to see the insane amount of fan art of the creature. I feel like he was always overshadowed by the other Universal Monsters, or maybe that's just me, but either way it's nice to see a devoted following for this movie.