Voice of the City

Hello, my name is Craig and I like hand rendered type.  

Thought it was high time that I actually fess up to it after years and years of protest I have done far too many hand rendered text pieces in my career to say that I don't like it.  Like this one for The Voix de Ville pop up theater and cabaret.  What's this, you may ask. I like to describe it as The Muppet Show, Laugh In and Carol Burnett Show, Cirq du Sole, The Tiger Lillies, all things Vaudville,  all combined into this tiny tent that can show up almost anywhere and POW, entertainment!  Started by a couple of friends of mine, Jason and Danielle, aka Pinch and Squeal (yet another piece of hand rendered text)

and it's going to be debuting at this years' Ingenuity Fest in Cleveland Ohio.  There's a TON of stuff this wonderful, little project could use some help with and that's where you come in (if you are so inclined)!  We've started a kickstarter to raise money for stage equipment (including a stage), paying the performers AND a bunch of new art done by ME!!!  Check it out HERE:

The Voix-de-Ville: A pop-up theater and cabaret 

Thanks for checking out the work and thanks for your support.  And don't forget, when you come to Ingenuity the RBMC will also be there slinging some paint, doing LIVE ART all weekend.  Come by and say hi!

Much Like Galactus, My Daughter Is On Her Way

Hey folks, Randy Crider here.  For Father's Day I wanted to show off the upcoming birth announcement for my daughter: Aurora Grace Crider-Wicks.  In lieu of cigars, I'm printing this as a 3x3 sticker once she's born along with any pertinent stats on the backing.  The backing will also include a password for a photo blog I'm setting up, since she's not old enough for facebook just yet.  Being my daughter, I suspect every major event will come with it's own set of DIY marketing materials.  She's going to hate her prom. 

The sticker is a riff on the Mercury-Atlas 7 flight patch, call sign Aurora 7.

Since I've framed it in a space context, I plan on making rocket noises and saying t-minus a lot during the birth.  I really hope the hospital has some of that space ice cream. 

In the past few months, my social time has diminished, choosing studio work over drunken revelry. I can only expect that to continue once Aurora is born, even if she is living with her mom. To that end, the safe bet is to get some addresses from you folks instead of meeting up at the bar. If you're family, friends, or just someone who digs what we do on the blog, it would mean a lot to me if you showed this sticker off. She won't know it at the time, but it's a nice welcome for someone new to the planet.

So, if you would, Email me at: randycrider@gmail.com with your address and I'll get something out to you as soon as Aurora and the stickers are printed. I'm also throwing a donate button down there if you want to throw a coupla duckets my way to cover printing and shipping.  Cynthia (mom) says that babies eat boobs but from where I'm sitting it looks like they eat money. 

Thanks Pals. 

Up..up...and away!!

Good morning...Reverand Jim here. I've been handed the duty of tackling Fridays here at RBMC central. Mr. Friday you can call me. Or MF...wait..no...bad idea. As I was saying, I'll be posting on Fridays while the group and I work our hectic summer schedule. So be on the look out.

I thought I'd post a Superman cover a bunch of local artists are doing to help celebrate Supes 75th birthday...but more importantly, his heritage, his birthplace here in Cleveland. It's for an upcoming event at Carol and Johns Comic Shop. This is the initial pencil sketch I did, directly on the cover. Now originally I was going with a 3/4 profile view of Supes handsome chiseled features. But I opted out for a full side profile, liking the epicness of of his stance.
 However there was something wrong but I couldn't quite put my finger on it....I proceeded with colors hoping it would eventually pop out for me.

 Working so much with comics, where I work in black and white, I struggle with color. I typically work with acrylics or marker and chose the latter in this case. I started working with grays first. Going from light and working in my darker shade. It's always easier to go darker than to try and lighten. I then began laying in color. I wanted the figure to pop, so I went with a yellow background so the cools of Big Blues suit would pop. I'm a traditionalist when it comes to superheroes and went with his original suit and emblem. It wasn't until I neared completion that the eyesore popped out for me. I never adjusted the ear from 3/4 to profile. Kids...if you're paying attention, the ear is always placed half way from the back of the head to the front. Now I could have just started over, scrap this cover and begin again. But...our own Erin Schechtman once taught me a valuable lesson...one I've never forgotten and repeat often. "Every painting...every piece, goes through an ugly stage." And I was there. So I went back in, penciled and placed the ear where it belonged, went back in with ink and white paint marker, then overlayed color pencil to blend the ear into the piece. And I ended up with the final shown at the top of this page. The important lesson here is to, one pay attention to details such as basic anatomy and two, never feel that something can't be fixed. Even if not by computer. Hey...it's only art. What's the worse that can happen? You start over.

Look at Tim's doodles

Well, it's Thursday, and here on the ole' rustbelt blog we have decided to allocate the Thursday posts to me. So, for my first "Thursday Post" I have some process shots of some old work to show you.

This illustration was part of a larger project designing characters for a possible videogame and comic book. It was intended to be a finished final illustration of this character; and for various reasons, it never got there. It is however at a point that I feel that I can show it without hiding my face in shame, and I have a few process shots that somebody might find interesting.

The idea was to illustrate this character looking sexy/tough/badass leaning against a brick wall in an alley, surrounded by all sorts of graffiti, neon lights, and basically kinda riff on a "Blade Runner" aesthetic. Yeah it's defiantly not an original idea, but... it's fun none the less.

Figuring out the pose took a bunch of tries, a lot of thumbnails and reference (you can see the hand ref' placed on the image), also knowing that I wanted a brick wall, I created a grid in photoshop to get the perspective believable.

 

Next major step was to render the image in a greyscale, at this point I was only planing to use the one direct light source from the upper right, so that's all that I rendered. This proved to be a huge mistake later as I wanted to add light sources further in the illustration, and I wished that I had drawn them in this phase, because the more I work on an image, the more I get tired with it, and major changes become a headache later on.

At this point the rendering is "finished" monochromatically, and from here I started to add color on separate layers using photoshop's color modes (multiply, color, overlay). By the time I got to this point in the image, I had worn myself out, and just begun to realize how boring the overal image was, and how much more thought I should have but into designing the background/environment in the original composition.

So basically, what I ended up with at this point was a half finished illustration, and a pretty solid lesson in the importance of having well thought out sketches (a lesson I still am learning the hard way). Other outside factors contributed to this drawing going nowhere (the rest of the project kind of fell through at right about this spot in this drawing), but the poor compositional planning is on me.

I do like this image, and where it was going, and maybe someday i'll finish it on my own, but in all likelihood, I'm so far away from this drawing and project, that i'd probably be better of just starting over with a similar idea. 

-Tim

Gold Floats

Erin here! I've been showing my mixed media work in galleries a lot this spring.
Here is a little peek into the process behind my largest piece this season, called "Gold Floats":

 I started with a large tin ceiling tile and a pound of beeswax. Applying the wax so it is perfectly smooth took a lot of time, hard work, and blowtorch fuel! The blue on the tile is what's left of it's original coat of paint.

 

Starting on the fish. Normally my 10 x 10 tiles feature only 2 fish. Figuring out a composition for multiple subjects was a difficult trick! 

I wasn't happy with the location and compositional shape of this grey fish, so I hit it with some heat to see what would happen. Blowtorches sure do some funny things to oil paint!

 

 

Final Tile!

 

""Gold Floats" • Encaustic, Oil Paint, Handmade Paper, & Gold Leaf on an Antique Tin Ceiling Tile 

May 2013 • Approx. 23 in x 23 in • For sale for $350

Ben Loves Retro Videogames!

At the time of this post, E3 2013 is in full effect with the world being introduced to the next generation of consoles to make their ways to their living rooms.  With the hardware being pushed onto shelves these days, its easy to forget the "bleeps", "bloops", and far more simple beginnings of videogames.  Luckily, plenty of designers remember and cherish that late 80's aesthetic.  Vintage Hero is retro platformer being released on XBLIG and I had the great honor of working with Frog The Door Games on their cover art.  It was a lot of fun taking the original concepts and representing them in my own style.

Look for more art and general nonsense over at my personal site: www.NeedYourDisease.com

-Ben

The once and future Lad

Thinking about this off topic post I came across a vector I did a few years ago.  I, for better and for worse, am a old school, table top, sit around once a week with your friends, multi sided dice, RPG player.  I've been playing since college but before that I was the guy other players would come to to draw their characters.  Don't remember why I never got into playing then but I always enjoyed learning all the fantasy races, monsters, adventures, all the detritus that was similar to and at the same time somewhat foreign to my beloved comics. Finally, about 10 years or so ago the comics and the RPGs met for me.  My friends that I play with have been playing together for I think around 20 years together.  They have played it all but the one game they continue to play is Marvel RPG, the same game, off and on, for years!  Ball Bearing Being (formerly Ball Bearing Lad) robot super hero, is one of the longest played characters of this game.  A ball bearing shootin, flying, super smart sentient machine.  Such a fun character I had to draw him up, like I always do with other people's characters.  I also did these:

Ball Bearing Lad, Ball Bearing Being © Mike Benchoff

© David WIlliams

Little silly, sure, but it was fun to do.  Enjoy!

Monster Internship: Day 1

Our first ever collaboration with young artists got off to an amazing start this weekend.  The Rust Belt Monsters were joined by 3 students in the creation of a new mural.  Each artist added their own special flair to the mural which will be completed June 15th at Bay Arts's Annual Art and Music Festival.  Scroll down for more photos.