Creature of the Week submission 01

So for Conceptart.org's Creature of the Week challenge I came up with this nasty little bugger.
The idea for the creature was "Cthonic Psychic Sucker". That's all you had to go on so above it the final and below are the initial steps I took to get there.

Here's a description of this guy too:
"One of many creatures that are birthed from a greater Cthuthian creature that produces various offspring fit for gathering psychic energy. This leech-like creature works as a receiver and carrier of psychic energy. The worm finds a host rich in psychic energy. I first latches itself to the host, using it’s upper and lower tentacle-like areas. Protruding from the opening at its head are psychic sensitive mandibles that extract bio-electrical energy. It receives energy through the bulb located at the center of its frontal orifice. That energy is then held in glands on either side of its upper body. Once enough energy is received, it leaves the host alive or dead then returns to its “mother” and unloads its found energy. After unloading its energy to the “mother” the rest of its organic matter is then reabsorbed and recycled into another Cthunt worm. "


my first sketches, just fooling with ideas

the sketch that I felt was about right

this was phase 2, placing colors

phase 3 tighting colors and details

Drift Art Show

Drift - an art show at the Cafe Racer. Opening Thursday May 14th 2009.
Read more about it on the Stranger's Slog!

This show is going to be cool. The Friends of the Nib got together and put in a bunch of really great drawings and some paintings. These are going to be put up all over the front area of the Cafe Racer as if it was our studio. Ideas abound! Good or bad, thrown all over the place so that one's eyes can pinball around the room and be totally over stimulated. Most everything will be up for sale with prices ranging from $5 to $50. So please stop by and get eye full.
So this will make the 3rd art show I have work in this month! I'm all over the place. I tell ya' though, it's like feast or famin. First it was APW's On the Record, then Muppet Rawk and now Drift. Each one will be displayed till the end of the month.
Below are a few pieces that I came up with today for the show. I referenced some photos that happened to be taken by Coop. I was just searching for "girls holding things" on Flickr. and found some hot women holding vinyl toys. Who'd have guessed it was Coop who took the pictures?

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Cheap Thrills with Muppets Rawk

So after weeks of preparation, research, sketching, inking and coloring... I'm finally done with my piece for the upcoming Muppet Rawk II group show at Ouch My Eye Gallery.

View LARGER HERE and with notes that link to the Youtube clips I used as reference.

For this show artists had to take an existing rock album cover and re-image it with Jim Henson's Muppets. You could use any Muppet and it the art had to be 12" x 12".

When I got to join in on this I searched a little bit for some cool covers. The previous show had some gems in them see here. I knew that I had to do something really cool. So when I ran across Cheap Thrills over and over in lists of the "best rock covers ever". Someone had to do this cover with Muppets! I wasn't sure if I could really do it, but I thought I'd bite off more than I could chew and do it myself.




Last month was the busiest I've ever been. I chose to paint 5 vinyl records by the end of the month and do 4 weekly comics, plus I threw on a cover for a demo CD for the Seymours. On top of all that recreate Robert Crumb's Cheap Thrills cover with Muppets. What the hell was I thinking? Whatever it was it worked. I made it and I feel fucking great about it.
Currently one of my own favorite pieces and one of the most ambitious pieces I've ever done.

I want to THANK:
Tom Dougherty (for leading me to this event and all the encouragement that he gave me along with the great pat on the back when I was done), Ouch My Eye Gallery (for even having this great idea for a show), YouTube (whom without all those references would not have been made possible. I like the Muppets a lot, but I didn't know enough to fill all those titles and word balloons), Angela Stork (for loaning me her original Cheap Thrills album cover for me to make transfers from. Have fun out east.), Annie's Art & Frame (for framing it for me quickly and cheaply), and obviously Jim Henson and R. Crumb who have always been influences.

"Art on Record" APW gallery pieces

NOW AVAILABLE FOR SALE ONLINE!

At the tail end of last month I was invited anonymously by APW gallery in Long Island to participate in their "Art On Record" art show. The deal is, you paint on a vinyl record. Nuff' said. So to represent myself the best I can, I chose to do gross weird erotic mutant women. Why? I don't know. I'm a weird-o... I had other ideas but I ran out of time. I'm also doing a re-creation of a famous album cover with Muppets. So I had to knock something out by the 27th.

Music to Mutate By...

All pieces are acrylic on vinyl, measuring 12" x 12".

Below are the original drawings that I did. I drew them in my sketch book and it turned out they were the perfect size for the records. So after laying down the gesso on the vinyl I covered the backs of these drawings in pastel and transfered them on to the record. I had to do this twice, once for the original outline which I filled with a flesh tone and then again so that I could get the details. I used photos of a beautiful model named Jenya D for reference. She's one of the most terrific MET-ART models out there. I appologize to her and the photographer for creating such gross versions of their work.

And... this isn't my first mutated erotic women set. I did some strange art on glass a few years ago that featured similar things. Take a look at my Flickr page for pics of those.

CD cover for the Seymours

My good friend Satchel Jones out in New York, has a relatively new band called the Seymours with his friend Becca. They're getting ready to promote they're new demo and Satchel asked me to put out some artwork for it.
They say that they're very fond of skunks and old rotary telephones. So with that in mind, I came up with the above image.

Covered Blog Submission

I found the Covered Blog via Drawn.ca and it got me really excited to do one of my own. So I looked through some covers at Cover Browser. I had thought about doing something with monster or superheroes but then I found Girls' Love Stories. These were just classic and different from what had already been "covered". So I chose issue 139. I liked the colors and instantly imagined how I would keep it stylish and then highten the realism. I like the Mary Jane Watson looking girl on the original but wanted to have a cuter, less melodramatic female. I also made the decision to make the towel blank. I like the design on it, but I felt that it was just way too happy and distracting from the color scheme.

I went at this recreation with everything I had. I did pencil drawings of the girl, the background folks, then pieced them together and colored them in Photoshop. I then traced all the graphic aspects in Illustrator.

I thought I'd throw out the original sketches as well.

VHS Cover Redesign 03 - From These Roots (1976)

For my third cover redesign, I picked a VHS box that had barely any sort of box art at all. It was really necessary that I do something respectful for it.
It comes from Scarecrow's Harlem Renaissance section, titled From These Roots. It's directed by William Greaves and is a nice short documentary about the Harlem Renaissance during the "Roaring Twenties".
The image for the cover was inspired by one of the visual artists, Aaron Douglas that was featured in the film. His art had summed up the Renaissance and I felt that his work would be best featured on the cover. So I found the piece below "Creation" and did a vector drawing of it in Illustrator. I then embelished it for the back cover and added text. I was trying my best to do something like what I've seen come out of the Criterion Collection.

Toothy Design Makes it in Top Submissions

So I was invited to submit a t-shirt design to a Artsprojekt LABZ 0001 contest. I slid it in just under the wire and even though I didn't win, I was put into the Top Submissions catagory. Which is pretty good. Out of 1000+ submissions that appear on their Flickr set, there were only 320 chosen for the Top Submissions.

Here's what I put together for them.

The template given out to put your design on didn't allow you to move the long sleeve out of the way from the front of the shirt. I didn't want to manipulate the template, in case they were fussy. So that's why it looks funny above.

The Toothy Laff design was based off of this drawing that I did at a Friends of the Nib meeting where we had to do a drawing based on the word "Toothy".

VHS cover redesign 02 - Wild Party (1929)

For my second cover redesign for Scarecrow Video, I went with Dorothy Arzner's 1929 The Wild Party. I had watched this film early last year and when I concidered doing this cover project, I knew I wanted to do one for this film. The VHS copy we have isn't that great of a copy. I'd love to see a quality transfer of it on DVD, but until then...

This is what I came up with after testing a few different inking styles (below). I really wanted to show off the awesome showgirl like costume that ends up getting Clara Bow into trouble in the movie. Instead of rendering it exactly like it was in the movie I used the lightning bolts to heighten the design and work well with the simple drawing.

I really had no idea what I was going to do at first, so when I got the right style of drawing the rest was easy.

This is the original sketch that I did based off of a found photo.

My first ink was super tight and detailed. I don't mind this one but I was really unconfident about whether or not it resembled Clara Bow. She's beautiful and people would be able to recognize her if it was done well. If not done well, then it's just a drawing of some girl.

So with my second inking, I tried to loosen things up. A bit too much I think.

This third and final ink was WAY looser and more fun. I liked the minimal lines and I was able to get the curves that I wanted. For the final design I took out all the crappy lightning bolts and digitally colored it in Photoshop. I just went with my gut on the colors for the cover. It's a black and white film, but I wanted the cover to be nice and appealing. Blue is calm and helps keep the design looking clean and fresh. From what I've seen in posters, Clara Bow had shocking red hair. So this was a nice becon of contrast for the center of the design. The likeness isn't what I'd like it to be, but I think the drawing gives the impression that she's cute and the "Wild Party" isn't a sleazy deal. Here's the original art on day glow pink paper. It's not horrible, but I liked this movie so I was happy to make up something new for this film.

VHS Cover Redesign 01 Kamen Rider AMAZON! (1974)

So as an employee at Scarecrow Video I get to see a lot of films, and a lot of cover art for movies. Many of them are brilliantly designed, some of them are amazing paintings, a few are terrifically horrible and have a beautiful quality of their own. Most of the video covers that I see are bland and/or just rotten. Lazily constructed from production photos and over-used Photoshop effects.

With nearly 100,000 videos in the Scarecrow inventory, there are covers at the store that have no "real" cover art at all. Someone printed out the title of the film, maybe with a found photo from the Internet onto a sheet of day-glow paper. It's then put into a plastic VHS or DVD case and put on the shelf. There's really nothing appealing about this and only if you're searching for this title would you be interested in even touching this case.

As a designer and a critic of cover art, I'm taking it upon myself to design some covers for these lost covers. This gives me the chance to design covers with all sorts of freedom. Scarecrow doesn't care that I'm doing this, so they're not going to edit what I do. They'll hopefully gain some more turns on these rentals. I'm not getting paid anymore to do this. It's more or less an exercise for me. To get my designing muscles stronger and maybe land a real job designing this type of thing.

The first cover I tackled was for a VHS that we have with some episodes of Kamen Rider AMAZON! This Japanese television show from 1974 was priority for me to design a cover for. I recently chose it for my monthly staff pick and the previous cover was quaint, but I knew it wasn't going to rent. So I came up with what you see below.

I researched pictures of Amazon and found a set of photos that were taken of the highly detailed action figure that was produced by Medicom. So I found the picture that I thought would be the best on the cover and repainted it using Photoshop and my WACOM tablet.
This was my first redesign so I didn't put a lot of creativity into it. I was mostly interested in having a realistic image of the character on the cover, I concentrated on rendering the digital painting well enough.

photo: copyright modxtoy.com

Here's the original artwork that was in the store for years. Yeah, it was made sideways.

Dinosaurs Fucking Robots!!!

CLOSE YOUR EYES KIDDIES!!!

That's Right!!! I've lowered myself one more step into human sludge by creating another obscene illustration. Damn me and the sick sense of humor that I have.

Inspirational quote by: Myla Kabat-Zinn

When I was sent a link to Dinosaurs Fucking Robots I knew that I had to submit an illustration. I don't remember having the intention to make it as elaborate and work so hard on it. BUT... I'm happy with what I came up with. Not exactly the best for a portfolio, but worth the effort to get more digital painting experience.
Thanks to Team Tiger Awesome for creating this brilliantly funny blog and allowing my submission to reach the eyes of the people.

Notes about the piece: I originally drew this with pencil on paper at roughly 8.5" x 11", then I scanned it at 300 dpi and colored it using a number of layers in Adobe's Photoshop 6.5 (I work oldschool. That's what the poor folk do.) with a WACOM tablet.

30 in Thirty Full Color Book Available!!

NOW FOR SALE!!!

Marc Palm's 30 in Thirty!!

My latest full color art book. This one is a collection of 30 paintings that I did in 30 days as a challenge for the Blank Space Gallery here in Seattle. The 30+ paintings and illustrations of monsters and other creatures here in this book are full sized reproductions of the original paintings. The book itself is full color, 70 pages perfect bound, and measures 8.5" x 11".

Ever since the completion of the paintings I wanted to make a catalogue of the whole set of paintings. All based of off creatures that I created originally for my daily comic (Lair of the Psychic Creature) I planned all thirty paintings to be seen together. And... since half of the original paintings have been sold, they'll NEVER be seen together EVER AGAIN! So catch them while you can here in this paperback collection.

I would like to think these colorful acrylic paintings should entertain anyone with a childlike appreciation of creatures and monsters as well as children.

Let Me Draw My Stuff For You!!

Alien Portrait 01 - pencil on brown paper 2009

So to kick off the new direction of my Blog I'm posting this drawing. Which will be the first of many original drawings that I'm going to offer for sale. Mainly these will be for sale via Etsy.com but feel free to contact me directly. Some direct contact might lead to a better deal for you. Also if you're interested in some previously posted work ask as specificly about it as you can.

I'm open for commissions as well. So feel free to throw an idea and an offer my way. I'll get back to you with my decision and questions about the specifics. You can get an idea of what I'm able to do by looking through this site or my flickr.com sets.

Thanks

Marc "Swellzombie" Palm

Valentine's Day Art Show 2009

Hearts, Candy, Love, Blech...

Super nice poster designed by Dalton Webb.

Art Show at the Cafe Racer with your ever adorable Friends of the Nib!!!

That's more like it!

"The Ladies Who Play with Hearts" thirteen 3" x 4" paper cards ink and watercolor. Frame not included $50.00.

Here's a facsimile of what I entered into the show. I added the text to this image, but left it off of the original piece.