The Larsen Project

Every year I make a Holiday card to send out to clients that I have worked with in the past year. It's a great excuse for me to do something whimsical and fun as a "thank you" to the nice folks I have had the pleasure to work with. The longer I have done these, the further away I seem to get from actual "Christmas" themes. Now, it seems, as long as I hint at a possibility of snow, the card feels appropriate. ^^

This spring, I was asked by the folks over at Strange Kids Club to contribute to their Halloween anthology. I wracked my brain over a short story that would involve their main character, and inspiration finally struck when I came across a sketch of Hel (the Norse goddess of the underworld) in my sketchbook. Thus the idea for "Helheim" was born. I've decided to post up some pencils and inks to wet whistles until the release of the book...enjoy :)

Digital file for a 2 color screen print. This is my piece for the "Dead and Dreaming" Lovecraft Show at Paradigm gallery this fall. Curated by the talented and macabre Sam Heimer . And the inks alooooonnnne... Bu-bu-but why are these inks in 2 colors? Good question! Read THIS POST for the answer.

Even though I spent the better part of my first 4 years out of college as an art monkey for a commercial screen printer, I don't think I've actually pulled a screen in about 10 years (back when I was a college freshman...you do the math). In any case, I finally bit the bullet and printed a set of posters for Southwork , a band that my friend is in. Screen printing is something that I've always wanted to do but never had an excuse for, so I gave myself a reason to do it...

In an attempt to do more editorial-type work, I have been keeping an eye out for stories in the news that I find particularly interesting...France's new Anti Veil Law is one of them. If you're interested in seeing the story, here's CBS's take. I caught it last night on NBC's Nightly News, but couldn't find the clip. Here is an alternate color scheme, because I can never settle my mind on anything... And this is the original ink on paper. I colored most of the line art...

I was recently asked by Ape Entertainment to do the back up stories for their upcoming Kung Fu Panda 2 books. This is page 4 in that 8 page story. The process for these pages is obviously much different from my usual fare, but I learned a few new tricks that I will definitely be incorporating into new work... Here's how they were done: I started with black and red line art (done with a mixture of rapidograph pens, micron pens and brush for the large fills). I wanted the lines to be even, and doing the art in 2 colors helped me to separate out the lines to color them (see this post for details on that technique). I then painstakingly colored in the flats and the line art, making sure to color the lines outlining the characters so they matched the fill color, giving the art a flat, "Samurai Jack" feel. I then selected sections and started laying in gradient layers to add subtle variation in color for the FG rats, darken the BG rats and color the sky in the first pan...

Because I've been asked about my coloring process before, I thought I would lend some insight to you folks who enjoy using linework and flat color... click any image to enlarge Above is a scan of my original line art. I use black and red ink, so I can more easily separate out the line. I then use the selective color palette to change the red line work to magenta, make the white pure white and the black pure black. I will usually need to repeat this step four or five times to make sure the line work has been converted to pure colors. (It is imprtant to do this when your document is in CMYK mode) After I have my pure colors, I use the channel mixer to separate out the magenta and black line work. I then have 2 documents that I convert to pure black lines by making the document a bitmapped document... black magenta I paste both documents into my template before I resize them (I select both layers and scale them down, as I do my inks at about 200% of final size). I still will use t...