Afroskull Album!

It's been a busy several months on the creative front. Probably one of my best creations/collaborations to date was with my wife - we welcomed our second daughter into the world on October 6th. Leading right up into that was finishing up the album artwork for some good friends of mine in the band Afroskull. To Obscurity and Beyond is their 2nd release – it's a mind blowing followup to their debut album, Monster for the Masses. You can purchase the new one and hear tracks here: LINK. Just find a comfortable cushion to sit on and make sure to wrap your head in duct tape so you don't lose your grey matter. Check them out if this doesn't scare you: New Orleans Funk + Black Sabbath + Frank Zappa + a giant horn section.

More Brushes

More experimentation with Brushes. Getting the hang of it now, although it's interesting how different it looks on the iphone/ipod touch. It seems to be crisper and have more definition in the "brushiness"detail on the smaller screen. It seems more watercolor-like when I bring it into Blogger and see it larger. I do have to say that I am enjoying the program a lot, and it's great for when I want to be creative and don't want to disturb the wife while she's trying to sleep. If it's nothing more than for doodles, it's a good way to capture studies, ideas, experiments, etc.

There's a great flickr site of other people who have mastered Brushes: http://www.flickr.com/groups/brushes/pool/

Brushes

So it's not much and it's just a quick doodle, but this is my first
foray into Brushes for the iPhone and iPod touch. It takes a few
minutes to get used to but once you get the hang of it the interface
is surprisingly intuitive. The hardest part is not having nimble wispy
fingers. Surprising potential here especially with the ability to have
transparent color. I am really looking forward to exploring this app
more!

Email test post

So I'm late to the party in a few respects. First - I knew that I was able to email content to Blogger and have it post immediately on the blog, but didn't really have a good reason to. Second - I just inherited a first generation iPhone from my sister. So I'm finally catching up with the rest of the pack on all the things that the iPhone can do. So here is the collision of two potential forces. I can take a semi-ok photo of whatever with the iPhone and post that image up on the blog immediately. I suppose this could also be true of using Brushes, or other painting/drawing apps for the iPhone. Not bad... Now actually DOING that is a different story, but at least the potential exists! Ah, the 21st century....

From the Vault

I found some "oldies" cleaning out my flat files. It's always interesting to see work from awhile ago to see how much you've changed and also how much you've stayed the same creatively. Or what things still remain constant interest-wise...

The painting is probably from 2002 or 2003, and the Robot madness is from 2001. I did a series of screen prints called The Curious Predilection of Robots - this was an "outtake" test print.

Head Studies

These were some explorations of both style and execution for a project I'm working on. It was nice to play around with some illustration for a change at work - something I don't usually get to do. It was a nice change of pace...

New website!

So I haven't officially launched it yet, and I'm not finished with it by any means (have LOTS to organize/tweak), but I thought I would float it out there and solicit feedback in-progress. I signed up for Apple's Mobile Me this weekend (thanks, H!) and put together a portfolio site using iWeb. I'm still new to the whole site-dev thing but I did successfully arrive in the 21st century by purchasing some domain names and I now have at least something up and running, even if it's popsicle-stick and glue style...

I am curious to know if the interface is intuitive and seems aesthetically pleasing (I thought minimal would be a good approach to let the work speak for itself) or if it just looks slapdash. Obviously Apple makes it easy to grab and go and it's incredibly convenient for me, but I'd love to know others' opinions looking at it fresh.

The site is solely for portfolio and resume, so don't expect any fancy flash games or scantily clad vixens. Sorry. Hopefully once I get this thing figured out I will put together a separate illustration site.

Thanks in advance for your feedback! Hope you're all having a great summer.

Site: www.jayrodesign.com

UPDATE: So apparently I'm not as savvy as I thought. Not surprising... I guess the site doesn't work on browsers other than Safari. I will look into it and see how to address that. Sorry!

UPDATE UPDATE: After speaking with Apple support, it appears that Firefox 3 will support it, so it was an upgrade issue. All should work fine if you have the latest versions of your browsers.