News & Blog

Back in February I received and email from David Rondel Cambou, a good friend of mine who runs the Paris-based design agency Hellohikimori, telling me HKI were working on a project for Diesel. David and his team were assembling a list of artists and designers they were hoping to commission and asked if I could participate.

The project turned out to be an online art installation as part of the advertising campaign for Diesel’s new fragrance Only The Brave.
The concept consisted of virtual rooms where the invited designers interpreted the concept behind the fragrance — “Do you have what it takes?” — that is key to the product and the campaign. After working out a schedule I committed to the 2nd wave of the site, to be launched in June.
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Autumn’s here:

• Hellboy — The Wild Hunt #6 (of 8) (Dark Horse Comics)
• B.P.R.D. 1947 #3 (Dark Horse Comics)
• Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder #3 (of 5) (Dark Horse Comics)
• Fantastic Four #570 (Marvel Comics)
• Ultimate Armor Wars #1 (Marvel Comics)
• Ultimate Avengers #2 (Marvel Comics)
• Captain America Reborn #3 (of 5) (Marvel Comics)
• KICK-ASS #7 (Marvel/ICON)
• Giant-Size Wolverine #1 (Marvel Comics)
• Batman and Robin #3, 4 (DC Comics)
• Hellblazer #259 (DC/Vertigo Comics)
• No Hero #7 (Avatar Press)
• The Darkness/PITT #2 (Image Comics)
• Hotwire #4 (Radical Publishing)

I just got an email from my friends at Mekanik Strip, one of the coolest comic shops in Europe (where I had the pleasure of working and spending money at the same time!), that they are hosting the first solo European exhibit of underground artist extraordinaire Glenn Barr starting later this month!

So here is the cut & paste info bit. Feel free to spread this news far and wide —

Painter, illustrator Glenn Barr ( Detroit, US) is one of the most celebrated and succesful underground artists of the moment.
His paintings have appeared in galleries from Seattle, Melbourne and San Francisco to New York.
Glenn Barr’s paintings revolve around myths of the city. The dark side of city life, the laneways, clubs and secret interiors are the backdrop to his world.
Glenn Barr’s work is therefore mentioned being the visual equivalent of a David Lynch film.
 
Barr’s work has been featured in a variety of comics and graphic novels such as Mad, DC comics and Paradox press.
His contribution to animation include background styling for the Ren & Stimpy show, Bjork’s ‘ ” I miss you ” video and the new Woody Woodpecker show.
 
Barr’s paintings have been reproduced in art journals like Juxtapoz, Erotica and Film Threat magazine.
 
Glenn Barr will be exhibiting at mekanik gallery, Antwerp.
‘Haunted Paradise‘ is his first solo expo in Europe.
 
Opening night ‘ Haunted Paradise ‘, September  25th,  2009.
 
Haunted Paradise
art show, Glenn Barr
25 September – 30 October 2009
 
Galerie Mekanik
st. Jacobsmarkt 73
Antwerp, Belgium
+32 3 234 234 7
 
Info: Linda Torfs +32 (0)478 294 685

Published between 1980 and 1986, Epic Illustrated was Marvel Comics’ answer to Heavy Metal Magazine and adult comics. For 34 issues, Epic provided a platform within Marvel Comics for artists and writers to go beyond the usual work-for-hire mainstream boundaries and explore adult-themed genre fiction (mostly fantasy and SF) whilst maintaining the rights to their work. Personally, I’ve always loved Epic slightly more than Heavy Metal. Maybe its because the material published was just slightly different, more US centric than the French legacy that permeated Heavy Metal at that time. The unique thing about Epic was that, because Marvel owned it, you sometimes found the odd super hero story in it — most famously the unfinished Last Galactus Story by John Byrne — where creators were free to explore characters outside continuity. For the most part though, its pages served you some awesome sci-fi stories (never been much of a fantasy guy personally, although P. Graig Russell’s Elric adaptation is beautiful) like the surreal Abraxas and the Earthman by Rick Veitch, The sacred and the Profane by Dean Motter and Ken Steacy, Generation Zero by Pepe Moreno and Archie Goodwin to name just a few of the serialized stories (not to forget Jim Starlin, Kent Williams, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith,…).

Twenty years on, Mam Tor: Event Horizon™ (1 and 2) would recapture that energy that Epic had created — if only for 2 issues.

Here’s a few of my favourite covers (a full list can be seen at Cover Browser)
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Here’s a confession: I don’t own a game console. Coming from a male designer that must sound pretty weird. Almost every guy I know owns one — well, at least one. Especially my fellow web designers/developers. I’m more of a comic book guy (d’uh). I do get the appeal though, and often entertain getting an X-Box, or a PS3, but I don’t have the patience to sit through a whole game. I can take racing games or a beat-em-up like Street Fighter, but thats about as long as I last. When my brother Tim got his PS1 all I did was sit with him, watch him play and look at some rendered cut scenes. I like my computer games to be simple, just like when I vegetate in front of the TV: for a little time I want to have a mental rest and just let information or entertainment wash over me before I crawl back in front of my computer and stress the few brain cells I have left. The only time I really played games was on the NES, with its simple side scrolling 8 Bit action.
So here are (in no particular order) my all-time favourites:
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Earlier tonight Liz asked me to help her with some preparations for a photo shoot she’s doing tomorrow (shooting some horribly expensive bling bling watches) and she needed me to write product facts in little notebooks and agendas to serve as props. In itself its not that weird, usually when someone I know needs ‘fancy’ (or legible) handwriting they’ll ask me to do it. However Liz asked me to write some notes in cursive (hand)writing… and I struggled like a 7 year old in grade school. I really had to pace myself and consider the movement of my hand and carefully draw the letter shapes. All because I’ve been writing in block capitals for the last 20 odd years or so, just like my dad.

See, my dad (an interior designer) wrote exclusively in capitals. And when I learned how to write, he’d take me to his side and explained that type and letterforms, like everything else, are constructed out of the 3 basic shapes (circle, square, pyramid for those just joining us) and therefore he’d show me how to ‘draw’ letters, instead of simply banging out cursive text so I’d learn to pay attention to the specific shape of each letter. And so I slowly started to mimic his writing and draw little pyramids instead of A’s and after a few years of practice I managed to bastardize his writing into my own. I still take great pleasure in handwriting, even though I don’t write long letters by hand, I will often doodle and practice writing the alphabet, numbers and random words to see if I can further optimize the letterforms.

Muller — Graphic Design, originally uploaded by helloMuller.

This weekend I finally had some time to give the site a slight refresh and add some new content. The past few weeks I’ve been considering the idea of using the Cargo platform as a way to make a quick “sample” portfolio (i.e. just comic work for example) that I can send to people and swap out whenever needed.
While customizing the Cargo CSS, I realized that even though it is a great and elegant system, its not for me.
For lack of a better description, I don’t want to follow the herd and have a site (even if its just a sampler) that looks vaguely like everything else.

Instead, I decided to give my site a small makeover and restructure some things. Something I had planned to do for a while was to expand the grid from three to four columns, so I can start adding larger images (going from 560px to 750px) and generally create a more flexible layout. The most drastic changes are visible on the homepage, information page, and projects index, where the updated CSS and structure comes into full effect: reorganized content, bigger titles, larger images, etc…
Aside from the blog, the whole site is still hard/hand coded, which might seem a bit backward today — but I like the flexibility it gives me to customize parts of the site, and while I probably spend a bit longer manually adding new pages to the site, its still 100% my own design.