Opius - alt metal friendship and the Art/Rock Nexus

Years ago, my friend Scottie Matthews taught me about rocking a guitar nice and hard, Black Metal, noise rock, and a bunch of other skills and ideas that fall squarely under the heading, 'Radness.' Scottie has always been, and will continue to be, a thunderbolt of guitar prowess and metal erudition. Since those fateful days of my early twenties, Scottie has moved his family to Madison, WI, put together a truly talented group of dudes to form the band Opius, and has almost finished his full length.

Scottie needed artwork for the full-length, and I had waited the better part of a decade to make him some rockin' images for whatever band he was steering. This included front and back art, as well as developing their logo. At some point I would like to post an in-depth process of illustration for this, but for now the final pieces:

Opius official band logo, painted in MyPaint (I only rock open source these days). Next, the album cover:

And finally, the back cover:

Once again, any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! I will do my Montana best to address all comments posted. Thanks!

Elephantitus of the Punks

Missoula=music=bands. Simple equivalencies aside, I have to give props to my friend Joey Running Crane - who, if more bands = more radness, would have to be a giant playground of raditudes for the number of bands he fronts or plays in around town and indeed the country.  The list:

Goddammitboyhowdy!, Gretchen, Holy Family Mission Band, Bird's Mile Home, ex-Bridgebuilder, and now King Elephant!!!!! I'm sure I missed some other bands in there, and he jams a mean one-man banjo band thingy as well. When does he sleep?

King Elephant has everyone's overalls in tight, excited twist with the rockrockrockpower they bring to both their live shows and recorded material. Also, for having been together such a short time, they've wrapped their tentacles all around the US, having already toured, recorded, gone to New York (New York City?!?!), and finished a Kickstarter project to tour again with a documentary filmmaker!!!

Here's the humble logo, expressly done black metal style at their request:

I can't wait to wear this t-shirt (hint hint, Joey). I wish them all the best of luck, the finest of gas station hot dogs, the least amount of van troubles, and the most fun out of anything ever.

Foul Beastie for a Good Friend

Here's a piece of concept art I rendered back in March for Robert Parker's "Rogues and Reavers" blog, where he simultaneously dives off the deep end into the Old School Gaming Revival (OSR) and builds his own swords & sorcery world called Krul.

Mr. Parker has lived and breathed gaming and weird fiction for the better part of his life, and when he asked me to develop a critter for Krul, I happily accepted. You can check out his full description of the Varmints here; for now, gaze your eyes on this nasty little nightmare-eating beastie.

If you'd like me to mock up some monsters for your campaign world, game development, or story ideas, just drop me an e-mail; I would be happy to work within your budget or for trade. Check out Rogues and Reavers for a dose of pop culture sword & sorcery analysis and some old school gaming. Thanks!

Attack Formation Delta: Iron Image Retools Its X-Wing

All hail! I've decided to take Iron Image in an entirely new direction, seeing as how my livelihood has shifted from screen printing to illustration, graphic design, and concept art. I hope you'll follow me down this new hard rock tunnel,  as significant advances have been made in a short amount of time.

The screen printing biz here in Missoula, MT, has been heavily overloaded due to two factors. 1) The pro market is saturated in the valley, with more shops and indie printers springing up than any one of us cares to admit, and 2) low-tech screen printing methods have spread like wildfire across the DIY community, meaning that anyone you meet has an equal chance of owning a guitar, a screen printing rig, or both! I love printing; however, I don't think its in my best interests to run this particular rat race, as fancy and as talented as the cute and fuzzy rodents (me, too) might be.

Instead, I have chosen to take the plunge and teach myself how to generate concept art. I started walking down this road in February, and have already come into some modest success! I intend to publish finished works here, discussing methodology and ideas while presenting some of my more successful pieces. Feedback, discussion, and critiques are all welcome in a constructive environment, and I expect my abilities to continue to grow and evolve. Thanks again and stay tuned for more - this blog is about to blow up activity-wise.

Exhibit Design Mobile gear

We finished EDM's gear last week and we think it looks pretty darn slick. Nathan Herbaly started EDM with some of his co-workers at the Seattle Art Museum, and their job is to craft historical installations for public education around the greater Seattle area. Three cheers for history! We hope to see their installations pop up all over Seattle this year. Props to them!

Zebulon Kosted rocks new black metal album and Tight Merch

Howdy folks! My long time friend, Rachid Abdel Ghafour, is about to launch his new black metal album under the name Zebulon Kosted, "Swords of the Hordes," and I was fortunate enough that the he honored me with the task of designing his new logo and printing his shirts!

Rachid rocking his new merch at KBGA in Missoula.

The logo at the top of the image was built in the open-source vector program Inkscape, and was crafted using the backdrop of Triple Divide Peak up in Glacier National Park. This logo you can see at the top of the shirt image. The skulls and swords drawing was scanned in from a good friend of his in Indonesia who gave it to him when Rachid toured there last spring (lucky dog!). I halftoned the image using the GIMP's 'Newsprint' function under Filters>Distorts>Newsprint, which I set to input DPI of 300, output LPI (lines per inch, which is the mesh count for my screen) at 160, and went with the default dot size for that. The resulting halftone was a little large, but worked beautifully with the vector logo.

The combo raster/vector had no problems printing at size as an EPS file, so my next experiment is to build color channels and assign them swatches in GIMP, the import to Inkscape and see if the swatches remain. If so, that means a pre-press technician should be able to output individual color layers from Inkscape much like you would a .DCS file from Adobe Illustrator. If anyone has a good line on a PostScript device for use with outputting color seps in open source, I would love to hear about it. Stay tuned!

First Week Down, More To Come!

The shirts came and went, the ink flew like magpies (at the very least), and we put out some killer merch for local hard rock band, the Balboas. Presley and his bandmates play super tight and work really hard to put on a good show for the kids. They played the Dark Horse (metal bar here in Missoula) with out-of-towners 3 Pill Morning and it was a blast. Here's a shot of Presley singing along with his merch spread.

Bandanas, black unisex T's, and ladies' T's - the guys were stoked!

This coming week, we'll be printing black metal t-shirts for Zebulon Kosted as well as Exhibit Design Mobile, a mobile historical exhibit building unit out of Seattle. More pics to come. Part of the Zebulon Kosted job will include documentation for outputting halftones for screen with The GIMP, so hopefully other print-minded folks will find that information useful for their own workflows. We will continue to post pics of new jobs as we run them. Thanks!