I’ve been working on many concepts over the past week for layouts and logos and I think I’ve come up with something that I actually  would like to go with.

To signify thinking we’ve been batting around a few idea like: lighting bolts, brains, thought bubbles, nothing at all, everything in existence, and gears. I think we’ve finally settled on gears. As for LOUD: I think were ignoring that part in the logo design, lol. Not too loud, right?

I’m going to attach a few little ideas that have been running through our heads.

Here is one concept we’re working with. We had hundreds of logo concepts to go with too, but in the end I think we’re going to go with the one in the above header.

I’ll post a few ideas that were very rough:

A couple of these include a concept I forgot to mention. We messed around withe idea of a loading bar to symbolize thinking too. In the end we thought that it sucked much too much!

On top of that I’ve decided to actually keep all of you up to date with my on going projects, not so much to show you what it is, but so you can give me feedback. I would really appreciate all of you to tell me exactly how you feel about every single piece of work I produce.

The new website is a more sleek design and makes use of social media techniques. And it also makes use of an actual portfolio, which I’ve always had but never utilized due to laziness. The portfolio is pretty awesome actually and I like it a lot. I just need to go dig through some art work to make sure decent pieces are in there.

I’m posting a few screen shots of the new site too.

Acrylic on Canvas 24 x 36
Some India Ink as well

I’ve been working for the past year on ideas that run with the Gaea and the Mechanics of Nature theme. I’ve been having a lot of fun juxtaposing gears and mechanics alongside nature and for the first time I put some color to it which I think really brings the concept to life.

I chose not to name this piece at all and call it number eight because I want to leave it open to 100% interpretation of the viewer.

Hope you enjoy it. I’m considering creating a complimentary piece of a spirit from the mechanic world reaching out to save a cog drifting towards nature. I guess that’s the opposite.

I’m beginning to work on the Gaea and the Mechanics of Nature book more often and hope to finish that within my lifetime. Hopefully. I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve with it

To make the place feel at home I got a large 18′ x 7′ canvas and draped the back wall with it and have started painting an Ink Method logo on it. I have no doubt that it will evolve into something insane by weeks end.

I have a few pics here taken with my blackberry so I apologize for the shitty quality. One day I hope to get a tripod and a camcorder to record all work and put on youtube in a time lapse format.

I now have proof that I’m not wasting the couple of weeks of free time that I have. I’ve finally been able to put the final touches onto a piece of canvas with some acrylic. I actually started working on this back in February I believe and basically just sketched the idea out on the canvas and added a few base colors. I then proceded to let it collect dust in my room. However I felt it was worthy of a finishing touch and did that throughout today.

My latin is extremely subpar, but I do remember a line from the movie “Event Horizon” that stated “Libera Te Tutemet Ex Inferis,” which meant, or is supposed to mean or something “Free yourself from hell.” So my thinking on this was Free yourself from Tyranny. I have no doubt in my mind that they syntax is horribly wrong but I liked the idea of using the movies quote, but altered. If anyone knows the exact wording I’d love for you to tell me.

So, what we have here is the bars of the American flag serving as the bars of a prison imprisoning our symol of freedom, the bald eagle. Instead of an olive branch for piece  and arrows for war, or the ability to defend oneself, the arrows are broken symbolizing a lack of desire to fight or basically having no idea that one should be fighting to begin with, a brainwashed person if you will. The olive branch is replaced with the key that has dollar sign in it, which is supposed to symbolize that the key to freedom is to have money in order to be above it all. You know, the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. The canton is dripping blue, like blood and the stars are made of skulls. I guess its supposed to suggest that we are dead inside.

I really don’t know if any of it really means all of that… I just made it up on the spot.

I plan to get at least one more painting out and about within the next week before I get to having a schedule and the such… lame.

Oh by the way, if any of you want to buy this… gimme $200 and I’ll mail it to you.

Odd tidbit of info… I don’t like birds or anything especially, but this is the third painting I’ve done of one… thats like 43% or something.

I wanted to work on another  Calendar for the coming up year… so I went ahead and got started. This time, however, I wanted to go the route of having real tangible art that could be held. I never have done any water color stuff ever so I’ve decided to experiment with this new medium. I bought a Strathmore 400 series spiral of water color paper that has exactly 12 pieces of paper, which happens to be the number of months in a year as it turns out. This means this tablet will have a collection of everything I painted in order to create the calendar. I did the first one, which happens to be January… I like to work in order apparently… and as it turns out I don’t really much like it.

Since I don’t have any control over how the paint mixes, etc I wound up having to use India Ink in order to get my picture to jump out of the jumbled mess of paint… Not to mention I had no plan what-so-ever about a topic, or theme, or even a character to go with on this one. I just slopped paint down, saw a shape and outlined it. While this style I actually like, I don’t particularly like looking like I mimicked another artist… in this case Alex Pardee. I love his work and he specializes in this style… It can be clearly seen that his work had some influence in this piece of work of mine… That is what I hate. I don’t feel it is unique because of this. But from here on out on the rest of the months I’m going to try and work out an idea before I apply the paint… Maybe this will prevent me from creating something too similar to someone else’s work.

Another thing I hate about my drawing of tentacles is that Alex Pardee does it too. And since he is much more well known than me it appears as if I ripped him off. This is clearly not the case. I have been using a squid as my logo for quite some time because of a story I am writing (in which a squid is the antagonist) and I use these tentacles in almost all of my work to suggest that this character’s evil is able to traverse the globe wrapping it in his tentacles and injecting his evil-filled ink into everything, a sign that suggest that everything is corruptible even something beautiful as it is expressed in much art.

So, looking back now, I think it is safe to say that this collection of paintings will consist of many different types of styles and zero theme. By the way… If you want to check out my last years, 2009 Calendar, you can still purchase one here