Old Portfolio

Back when I was a lowly aspiring Industrial Design student I drew this picture of my Jordan I's:



The drawing turned out pretty well, even though the flash of the camera is reflecting pretty bad off the paper, and I need to go back and fix the red and black squares so you can't see the ink strokes. Other than that, a pretty good drawing of 100 dollar shoes that last two months.

Axis of Evil Part I

Here's as peek at a little something I'm working on. Clay Bennett, everyone:

More Banners

You can check out some more of my handy work over at Deadspin here, here, and here. The banners were not my best work, but they turned out pretty funny and if you read the comments to those articles you'll see they were pretty well received.

On a totally unrelated note, here's a graphic I did for a personal project:




This was for a translation website that I did awhile back. My major is Spanish Translation, and I was hoping to actually get some experience in that field. After putting up the website, which you can visit at www.stwtranslation.com, I quickly got distracted by school it has been in the background ever since.

As far as the design goes, I really liked the overall feel of the website. It's clean and crisp, very sharp looking. Check it out when you can.

Basketbawful

This whole thing started a few weeks ago when I decided to create a new banner for the NBA blog Basketbawful. I sent over the following:
For the playoffs I came up with a couple different banners, which you can see here, and here. In the end Matt liked this one, featuring an Emperor David Stern, the best:
You can check out the player key here:

More Hoops

The other banners for the Eastern Conference Previews can be found here, here, and here.

The Western Conference Preview banners turned out significantly better. Here's my favorite:


Here we see Pau Gasol holding (and probably caressing) Carmelo Anthony, assuring him in his soft, lispy Spanish accent that, "Todo te saldrá bien, hijo mio."

On a side note, does anyone know why Pau thought it would be a good idea to go from this:


. . . . to this:



He looks like the unibomber on crack.

NBA Playoffs Abound

I've been doing a little work for Matt over at Basketbawful, which has been fun. He asked me to do a series of images for his playoff previews that are being featured over at Deadspin. Someone in the comments asked if this first one was the poster for the next Steven Segal film, which means I must have reached an appropriate level of cheesiness.


More coming later . . .

Filipino Martial Arts

One of my good friends is a Filipino Martial Arts Guru. I'm not entirely sure what that entails, other than knowing about 1,000 different ways to kill a person with a sword or knife. I helped him out a little bit with his website, which you can find here, and this is one of the things I came up with:


John is a great guy, and should really be doing choreography for Hollywood fight scenes, or training athletes or something. He's just looking for his big break I guess, so if any of you have any connections, hit him up!

Myspace? No thanks.

When I posted the picture of Chali 2na on his Myspace, I got a few messages from people who really liked it. One of them was a DJ who calls himself Dregen. He doesn't have a website really, just this myspace profile. Anyhow, he wanted me to do some sort of poster/album art for him for an album called "The Subjective Nature of Sound." He was pretty ambiguous actually. So I came up with this:


The guy seemed to like it ok. I don't think much came of it though. It's buried somewhere on his Myspace layout, amidst about 4000 other posters/promotional graphics. The lettering and roots I did by hand, and I like the way they turned out mostly.

Art, Blogging, and a Rapper Named 2na

Hey everyone, my name is Stephen, and I started this blog in an effort to showcase some of my art and design work. The blog will hopefully keep me motivated artistically, and provide opportunities to help others with logos, banners, or general web/blog design.

That's the idea at least.

If you like anything you see here, please feel free to leave comments or questions (this means you, Mom and Dad and the 3 other people who read this!). If you've got a blog or website that you'd like to have spruced up, or if you have any other art projects in the works and you're looking for a helping hand, let me know.

I'm going to start by posting some older stuff. This is an illustration I did of former Jurassic 5 rapper Chali 2na:



This was done in my early days of exploring Photoshop and Illustrator, so it was almost entirely done by hand. The lettering was first done by hand on paper, then scanned and traced using illustrator. I originally posted this on Chali's Myspace, and people seemed to respond well. I was hoping that he would want to use it for posters or t-shirts or something, but I never heard back.

Such is the life of an artist, I suppose.