Crazy 4 Cult 5: I'm Too Old For This Sh*t!!!!

*******************************************************************************
***UPDATE*** Because the internet is awesome, this Dr. Horrible design is now officially licensed merchandise! You can buy it for yourself and all of your loved ones over at Quantum Mechanix by clicking HERE!

*******************************************************************************

It's like Christmas in July! Gallery 1988 is having their 5th annual "Crazy 4 Cult" show in Hollywood on July 8th, 2011! I am more than honored to be a part of this show for the 2nd time.


Crazy 4 Cult has become a summer tradition in Hollywood. Every year a group of around 100 artists come together to celebrate our love of cult movies. There are always so many to choose from and this year I had a hard time deciding which movie to choose. I was torn between 2 different films. Well, technically, one was an internet film, but it has quite a cult following nonetheless.

Last year I had chosen a film that I felt was very under-represented but loved by a very vocal and awesome group of fans that call themselves Browncoats. While I was creating "River Tam and the Fireflies" for last years show, I knew I had made something special... but I had no idea it would take off like it did. The internet was very kind to me and that artwork took me on a strange adventure over the course of the year.

I made some new friends:



I got a lot of press coverage on some of my favorite websites. I sold a few T-Shirts, and received quite a few justified complaints about a missing Shepard.

Last week I was asked to participate in an awesome event called "Can't Stop The Serenity" here in Los Angeles. More on the event can be found by clicking HERE. I had donated some artwork to be auctioned off for a charity called Equality Now. I made a few more friends at the event:


I was able to show Joss, Nathan, and Felicia the new artwork I had created for this years Crazy 4 Cult show. I was a little nervous showing them but it seems like they enjoyed it!


They each requested some of the artwork, so i'm currently putting together some special gifts for them. This was an amazing opportunity and I thank Gallery 1988 for allowing me to be a part of their show. For this years show, i'll be contributing two pieces to the Crazy 4 Cult show. I'll be writing another blog about the 2nd piece, but for now, here is my artwork submission for "Crazy 4 Cult 5: I'm Too Old For This Sh*t!!!"



I consider this to be a companion piece to the "River Tam and the Fireflies". If you're not familiar with Dr. Horrible, then you owe it to yourself to pick-up this movie. It's a 45 minute musical set in 3 acts. It was self-funded and produced during the writers strike a few years back. The writing is fantastic, as usual, but the music is the real star of the show. I'm a big fan of musicals, and this short film doesn't disappoint. A framed album will be available at the gallery. Unfortunately the soundtrack wasn't released on Vinyl, so i've included another record in it's place.


Here's the back of the album:


And the framed album that will be available at the show:


The album's Front and back prints will be available exclusively through my etsy store. To purchase high-quality water color prints, all you have to do is click HERE!. Signed prints of the album front will be available exclusively at the gallery and online through Gallery 1988's Website.

If you love film and you love artwork, you won't want to miss what is becoming THE gallery event of the year in Los Angeles. Come on down to Melrose, see some awesome artwork from some amazingly talented people, and then go across the street to Pink's Hot Dogs and get one of the best tasting dogs of your life!

Crazy 4 Cult 5: I'm Too Old For This Sh*t!!!
July 8th, 2011
7020 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
http://gallery1988.com

Crazy 4 Cult Book Signing!

It's that time of year again when Gallery 1988 puts on their annual "Crazy 4 Cult" show, more on that soon. This year they have decided to put a book together with a lot of artwork from all previous "Crazy 4 Cult" shows and in honor of that, they're holding a book release/signing party!


Come on down to Gallery 1988 for what's sure to be a fun time. My "River Tam and the Fireflies" artwork from last years show is featured in this book along with work from some amazing artists including Shepard Fairey and Scott Campbell.

As for the book, I haven't seen it yet, but the reviews are starting to roll in and it sounds like an awesome collection that film fans will surely want to pick up. The first review can be found by clicking here.

Gallery 1988 celebrates 10 years of "Wet Hot American Summer"

I loved the Mtv show "The State" when I was a teenager. The show lasted 3 seasons with a total of 26 hilarious episodes, with great characters like Louie who wanted to dip his balls in everything, Doug, who was outta heerrrreeee, old fashioned guy, and this gem:

Well, 10 years ago, these guys decided to make a movie. Wet Hot American Summer is a comedy that is sitting at a cool 30% freshness rating on Rottentomatoes.com. I wasn't even aware of the movie until Gallery 1988 asked if I was interested in being part of the gallery show celebrating it's 10 year status as a cult classic. Once I googled it and found out it was the guys from The State I was in.

Having never been to camp (aside from a horrific weeklong trip to "outdoor school" in 5th grade), It was hard for me to relate to a movie about camp life in the 1980's. What wasn't hard to relate to were some pretty funny characters, in particular Keith Stat from Millburn, New Jersey who really only had this little bit part in the film:

So for the show I decided to illustrate my tribute to camp nerds everywhere who loved D&D and a good ol' fashioned home-made cape.



So if you have $240 worth of pudding, be sure to head down to Gallery 1988's Venice Gallery.

Defenders and Destroyers of the Universe Now in T-Shirt Form!

Earlier this year I submitted my "Appetite For Eternia" design to teefury.com and I was blown away by the success of the sales! Teefury.com is awesome! They also recently printed my "River Tam and the Fireflies" design. I love making t-shirts, so I submitted some designs to a few other shirt sites.

Nowherebad.com is a brand new t-shirt site similar to Teefury and Ript. I will be featured as their third artist, which is pretty awesome. Shirts here are $15 with free shipping, and are available for 3 days as opposed to the usual 24 hours of some of the other shirt sites. They have chosen my VolTRON design which is a loving tribute to two awesome 80's icons of Tron and Voltron. The shirt will be on sale Monday through Wednesday, May 16th - 18th for $15. This will be the only place to get this shirt, so I hope everyone that wants one will find out about the sale!



Also going up next week is my loving tribute to Cylons with "By Your Command". I had to alter the design a bit from the original but hopefully BSG fans will still love the design. This shirt will be available for 24 hours only at Riptapparel.com for a low fee of $10! This shirt will be available Tuesday, May 17th only and then gone forever (or possibly brought back to life on Ebay).



A special thank you to both Nowherebad.com and Riptapparel.com for featuring my artwork, and thanks to anyone that orders a shirt or two!

Leftovers from Springfield

Back in 2006 I worked as a Concept Artist on "The Simpsons Game" for Electronic Arts. I've recently been backing up some files when I came across a few images that I had created for the game. I'm not sure if these even made it into the game. I know for sure that "The Shims" was cut because, as I learned when I moved to The Sims team at EA, they weren't very pleased with the image and didn't give it the go-ahead.

One of my producers on the project had tasked me with creating some images that would appear either at the Game Stop store in Springfield or somewhere in the game later. So I decided to take some of my favorite games as well as some beloved EA Franchises, and "simpsonize" them. Here are a few!

I believe this one was a dual effort of mine and another artist. I basically took his rough sketch and cleaned it up.


I'm a huge Half-Life fan, so I would take any chance to squeeze in a reference to that series. Flavin!


This was my attempt to remind the fine folks at EA that they used to have an awesome football series that didn't include the word "Madden" followed by a number. I'm not a sports guy at all... I avoid sports like the plague, but I LOVED "Mutant League Football" on the Genesis. I would happily take an XBLA reboot of Mutant League Football.


This was an interesting one. I had moved onto Dead Space after wrapping up work on the Simpsons, but the game was still in development for about another year. I had some downtime on Dead Space, and I was lent out to The Simpsons team for about a week. I drew this up for the studio as an homage to what I knew was going to be a great classic game. The problem was that the Simpsons Game was going to be released before Dead Space was even announced. I'm not sure if it made it into the game or not, but they did turn this into a poster that was hung up around the studio for a while.

The Frakkin Toasters

In honor of my shirt sale at Teefury , I have created another image in a similar style to the River Tam and the Fireflies piece. This time however I set my sights on one of my other favorite Sci-fi series in recent years, Battlestar Galactica.

I had so much fun trying to work Battlestar into an album cover, but there were so many characters... and they're ALL awesome!



I wasn't sure which direction to take it at first, so I started with a name. I had thought of a few that weren't quite working for me, and when I wrote down "The Frakkin Toasters" I knew I'd found my direction.

Of course it's a sorta punk-new wave-metal band. I imagined they would sound something like "The Network" but instead of Billie Joe's vocals (you're not fooling anyone Green Day) Caprica 6 would handle lead singer duties. And as much as I loved the Centurions from the rebooted BSG, I still feel the Original Cylons are much more iconic.



Once I had the band name and the album cover sketched out, I needed a catchy title. Since it was a cylon themed image, it was pretty clear what the album should be:


Here is the album cover:


I love doing all of the design work, but I also really enjoy coming up with songs that would be on an album such as this. It wasn't until I started doing some research for song titles did I find out that Caprica 6 has a phrase that she repeats multiple times throughout the series. When she meets a human for the first time, she asked them, "Are you alive?" which in both deep and awesome, so that's definitely the song to open the record with. I also learned that the term "CYLON" was an acronym created for the re-booted series, and if there's one thing I love, it's acronyms! The 5th song on the album is called "The Final 5" for pretty obvious reasons. As for the rest, they're pretty straight forward. Okay... maybe not, "End of line" is awesome because I look at is like a Tron reference, but it's also often spoken by the Hybrids in the weird Cylon bathtub. I thought about including the song title "All Along the Watchtower" but that song really pulled me out of the fictional world on the show, so I decided against it.



I'm hoping that Teefury will turn the design into a shirt. I've submitted it, but have yet to hear back from them, so if you happen to come across this site, feel free to visit http://www.teefury.com and send them a friendly message of what you'd like to see. Also, as always, prints are available on my Etsy store, just click here :)

Live long and prosper... oh wait, wrong show.
-Joey

Happy Valentron's Day!

For that special someone in your life who loves Tron almost as much as you do...

Save Ferris! The Nintendo Game That Never Was

Last year I had great success with Gallery 1988's Crazy 4 Cult show in Los Angeles. They were kind enough to invite me to contribute work to multiple shows this year, the first being "The Road To Shermer: A Tribute To John Hughes". I'm a little bit different then most kids of the 80's, as I really am not a big John Hughes fan. I have seen his movies, and some of them I really like, but i've never been a huge fan of Sixteen Candles, or The Breakfast Club. But there's a reason for that, and that reason is video games.

I was born in 1980. When I was 5 years old, a brand new shiny Nintendo Entertainment System came into my life one Christmas morning, and me in all of my 5 years of life knew that things would never be the same. We had an Apple II as well as an Intellivision, and they were great, but something about the squatty little Italian plumber and the simple 2 button controller really spoke to my 5 year old sensibilities. Also, it came with a robot that I could play with when my brother wasn't around.

So movies of the 80's came and went, and I saw and loved a few here and there, but I was a video game fiend. It came time to create a piece of artwork for the John Hughes tribute and I had a bit of a hard time coming up with a concept. I started to think about what it was that his movies main draw was, and I thought about the great characters he created that became cultural icons. I quickly drew a comparison to the old Lucas Arts adventure games. Tim Schafer was my John Hughes. Games like Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Sam & Max had characters developed as deeply as any in a film like Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club. But those games came out in the 90's. John Hughes movies exemplified the 80's, and so I would need a more 80's theme to the art piece.

There were some awful Licensed games released for the NES.
Exhibit A:


The thing I love about those old NES boxes was that the artwork was really representative of the gameplay.



Then somewhere down the line someone in marketing decided it would be cool to imply amazing graphics with the box art because you should always judge a book by it's cover:



For a tribute to John Hughes, I thought I'd like to make a game based off of my favorite of John Hughes movies, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". It would have to be an action game set in chicago. It would also need Cameron's dad's Ferrari. Inspired by the Super Mario Bros. box art, my goal was to create a fitting tribute to both John Hughes and Nintendo.



and the finished image:



But as I learned with my "River Tam and the Fireflies" piece, if you build it, they will come. It's cool to have artwork, but it's cooler to create a collectible, one-of-a-kind item. So I made the box:



And you're gonna need a game cartridge and instruction booklet:




(The cartridge doesn't contain an actual Save Ferris game, it was however at one point my copy of "Back to the Future Part II")

All of this and more can be yours if you come down to Gallery 1988's new location in Venice, CA on Friday February 11th. There are 50 artists participating in the show and Gallery 1988 always puts on a fun gallery opening.



Prints will also be available both at the gallery and online in my Etsy store.

P.S. Gallery 1988, how about a "Tribute to Tim Schafer" themed show?

Masters of Paradise City

Finally, i've figured out how to combine my two favorite things from the 80's!!! I HAVE THE POWER!!!!!
Prints available soon from my Etsy store.

Getting Up and Leaving

It has been quite some time since my last blog update. I had attended the SCBWI conference in LA and it was an excellent experience. I met with quite a few people that were able to give me some great feedback on my work. It was my first venture into the world of Children's Books and the publishing industry, and it was very informative. You can hear me sum up my experience in 32 seconds right here on youtube

Since the conference, several great opportunities have come up. First of all, I recently signed with East West Literary Agency. They are representing me as both an author and an illustrator and i'm very excited to be working with them. I have already started work on two books, and it's been a great experience so far.

Earlier this year I was in a gallery show at Gallery 1988 where I entered a piece based off of the cult tv/film series "Firefly" and that thing caught internet fire and spread like a bad case of herpes... or a good case of herpes... This clip came to mind when I started seeing my name on the internet



anyway, my work was featured on many of my favorite websites. The actual artwork itself was purchased at the gallery by Seth Green He is awesome! Kenny Fisher, Scott Evil, Oz, Chris Griffin, etc. etc. etc.



It was awesome having having Seth Green buy my artwork and meeting him. I didn't think it would get much better than that. About a month later I got an e-mail from River Tam herself, A.K.A. Summer Glau. My girlfriend Kristin and I had a chance to meet her, but I'll save that for a whole other blog post. There's some exciting things happening that I can't share yet, but it will be awesome!

As a result of the success of that gallery show, i've been invited to 5 gallery shows next year for Gallery 1988 that i'm pretty excited about. Most of the shows have excellent themes that I'm really looking forward to doing something for. More on that later as well.

I've started working on two new books. Last year I spent quite a bit of time working on my first book, and while it was a great learning experience, I think of it as more of an exercise in storytelling and illustration as opposed to an actual product. I've put it in the vault for now, but here are a few page layout sketches.

Next Chapter Please!

Over the past 2 years, work in the videogame industry has been a roller coaster of opportunity. One minute there's an opportunity to work on a great project, and then a month later, it's shelved with little explanation. I experienced this first hand at the end of 2008 when a game I had pitched to EA had seen quite a bit of interest from the powers that be. In the interest of the studio going a different direction and eventually becoming "Visceral Games", my game was killed before it could even take it's first steps. Too bad, it would be awesome! Sorry Joey, you're just not Visceral enough.

I have always felt that my work was more geared towards children, and well, most game companies don't make games for children anymore. As a result, I've always had an itch to work in the children's book industry. As a concept artist in games, I really enjoyed creating establishing images... images that can tell a story. I decided to make the move over to trying to do more of that with actual storytelling in children's books. Back in January of last year I wrote a story that I felt conveyed a lot of emotion, a great character arc, and an opportunity to explore some illustration styles that I just wasn't allowed to do in video games, and it felt great. It felt like I could finally breath and not be concerned with whether or not adult males 18-34 would find it "cool". I want to do more of that... a lot more of that. Earlier this year I joined the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators And now i'm ready for a dose of reality of starting over

I'm very excited for this conference. I've been working on a portfolio geared towards children's book illustration work, and I'm happy to say there's not a Photoreal image to be seen for miles and it feels great.

For my portfolio I wanted to create some images that told a story in a simple and easy way. I had so much fun working on this image, I think I laid it all out in a day, and then finished it on day 2.

I'm both nervous and excited about my new adventure, I learned the hard way that no matter how many plans you make, NOTHING ever goes according to plan, so I feel a little bit like the kid in my painting above. I'm walking the plank, but smiling the whole time. Hopefully there are some mattresses to catch me if I fall.

Crazy 4 Cult: 4

It's that time of the year again! Gallery 1988 is holding their 4th annual "Crazy 4 Cult" gallery show. I have participated in several previous shows at Gallery 1988, and they were kind enough to invite me to participate in this show.

Crazy 4 Cult is a gallery show celebrating the unique love for cult movies. According to Wikipedia, "A cult movie is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans.". They kindly provided me with a list of movie suggestions, and as I went through the list, I felt that a lot of them didn't necessarily add up to cult status. Most of them were films that I loved, but I felt there was a sub-genre of space western missing from the list.

I remember seeing the ads for the show Firefly but I can't say that I ever watched it when it was on the air. I guess I wasn't alone in this because the show sadly didn't make it past one season. The show left on somewhat of a cliffhanger, and luckily there was a rabid enough fanbase that someone somewhere at Universal decided it would be a good idea to greenlight the movie "Serenity"

So, when I sat down to think about what movie I wanted to illustrate for the show, I decided I wanted to join the Browncoats . As with the show, I didn't see this movie in it's initial theatrical run, but instead on DVD... which i immediately purchased after blowing through season 1 of Firefly over a weekend. Anyway, one of the things that always seemed unique about the show was the opening theme song. It's a great little ballad written by show creator Joss Whedon that sets the tone perfectly for the entire series. Apparently the NASA astronauts are fans of this song as well, in February of this year they used it as a wakeup call on one of the last shuttle missions. Click HERE for a cool little article about that, including video from the shuttle!

A few years ago I got into collecting Vinyl records with artwork on the front. I've never really had a chance to design an album cover, and when I started thinking about what would be a fun illustration to do for Serenity, I thought since music was such a strong component of the show, that an album would be perfect. I was always a fan of old vinyl art of children's music so I wanted to incorporate a retro feel. It is a known fact that River Tam is a badass, but for now things have taken a lighter direction with "River Tam and the Fireflies"

And here's the back of the album

and the record itself

Since the soundtrack to Serenity wasn't actually released on vinyl, this record contains something special for whoever decides to purchase the full item from the gallery. Here's a quick shot of the finished product

Prints of the cover art will be available to purchase through the gallery as well as my etsy store HERE

So if you're in town July 9th and want to come check out some great artwork by over 100 artists, do yourself a favor and come check out the gallery opening for Crazy 4 Cult at Gallery 1988. Kevin Smith will be there as the host for the evening as well

Crazy 4 Cult: 4 "the case of the redundant number"
July 9th, 2010
7020 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
http://gallery1988.com/

p.s. I got to meet THE creative genius Joss Whedon last year at a comic-con party... and I just wanted to share this picture because it's awesome! Beards unite!

Let's go away for awhile

I was working on an environment test for a new game project. I spent a few hours struggling with a different image and composition and I just wasn't feeling it. I quickly realized my problem... It was an environment I didn't want to spend any time in. If i'm going to dedicate some time to a painting, I want to be able to enjoy my time with it. So i threw that painting away and started to think of a place I'd like to visit. I wanted the organic areas to have a pretty saturated color palette, while giving the rocks some character to their design. Once I started laying in colors it all just kinda flowed.

Team Jacob

I'm a big fan of stories that have two equally strong opposing forces. Jedi vs. Sith, The Fellowship of the ring vs. Sauron, Freddy vs. Jason...

More recently, people have been asked again to choose a side. Teenage girls (and, judging by the screaming crowd of thousands I was surrounded by at Comic-Con last year, Teenage girls at heart) have taken sides between a certain sparkly vampire and a werewolf that always manages to find a way to lose his shirt

But now with the last season of Lost upon us, we're asked to pick a side yet again. Will Jacob win out? or will Smoke-Monster Locke finally make his way off the island? Let's just hope it doesn't end up like Gilligan's Island



T-Shirts anyone?

I love you, Sun-maid Raisin Girl

Behold! The greatest work of art in the history of time! "Genius" and "Masterpiece" aren't words that I use lightly... but when I came across this Genius Masterpiece from my days in art school, I realized I shouldn't hide this from the world. I should have gone into marketing because i'm pretty sure raisin sales would at least double if Salma Hayek was the Sun-Maid Raisin girl. I'm currently having this painting archived and will be housed in my private collection for limited viewing engagements if you're interested.


And Salma Hayek, if you're reading this... I love you. Please come back to 30 Rock

Kevin Smith show at Gallery 1988!

A few weeks ago I was invited to contribute an illustration for a Kevin Smith show at Gallery 1988. Each artist got to do an illustration based off of the podcast that Kevin Smith does with his friend Scott Mosier. My podcast moment was a conversation about Kevin and Scott wanting to erect a statue to caveman sex...


If you're a Kevin Smith fan, you'll definitely wanna come down and check it out... and if you're a Kevin Smith fan you probably like comic books... and right next door to the gallery is Golden Apple Comics one of the last great comic book stores in southern california.