I just finished the second in my series of illustrated-photography pieces based on my dreams, and it is called “Cinder”.  Click above or here to see it! (NSFW)

Catching up, part 2…

In late May, shortly after arriving back in Michigan, I took part in a group photo shoot at Collingwood Arts Center in Toledo, OH.  I’ve just uploaded photos from my four favorite shoots of the day… Sitha Lam, my good pal Beau, Latacha, and Kayleigh Marie Studer.

Catching up… I did a blitz of shooting right before leaving California, and a blitz right after getting to Michigan. I’ve been pretty busy with web design contract work for another startup this past couple months, but when I haven’t been doing that, I’ve been editing photos! To start, I’ve uploaded photos from my shoots with the lovely Kylie in late April. The first shoot entailed her wearing one of my mom’s dresses from the ’60s, which you can see here. The second had her wearing her own awesome wardrobe of a horsehair dress, a crazy golden feathered headdress she found, a feathered collar, and a black slip that I provided. Check those out here!

Hey kids. I’m a few days late in posting this, but “Prison for Bitches” – the new zine by my best buddy Ryan Sands (and the multitalented Michael DeForge) – is now available to buy online and at select stores! If you like Lady Gaga, indie comix, illustration, meaty articles, photography, or any of the above, I bet you’ll dig it.

This is the zine that I created the “Lady Galaxy” piece for, and features so many goddamned talented people that I don’t even know where to start! For example: Michael Kupperman, Johnny Ryan, Hellen Jo, Derek Yu, Lisa Hanawalt, etc etc etc!

So yeah, get yet credit cards / cash / buffalo hides / space bucks and go to the website and buy it! Trust me, there’s a lot of good stuff in those pages.

Okay, it’s definitely been a while since last post, but here’s something brand new and very shiny…

It’s called “Lady Galaxy”, and is my piece for the upcoming Lady Gaga fanzine “Prison for Bitches”, being published by my best buddy Ryan Sands and our friend Michael DeForge.  This was a lot of fun to create, and since I’m really into Lady Gaga, it’s exciting to be in on the zine. I’ve posted the full-width version, but if you’d like to take a look at the square format version that will appear in the zine, click here.

I guess you could say that it’s the second in my series of musician-inspired pieces, following “Lionheart“, my Kate Bush inspired piece from 2006.  Special thanks to the lovely Raven Le Faye for modeling for it.  We shot five different shoots that day, so look for more work with her in it over the next couple months.  Here are some details from the work:

So in other news, believe it or not, I’m moving back to Michigan again for a few months.  Times have been tough, money-wise, and I have to help my parents get their house ready to sell (lots of painting and varnishing), so I’d rather just do it now when the weather there is really nice, and while I have no career commitments in San Francisco (other than occasional freelance work that I can do remotely).  Of course, it’s very hard to leave my friends, my girlfriend, and this beautiful part of the country, but I don’t have much choice about it really. The plan is to help out as much as possible, make as much art as possible, and come back to California in the fall – more than likely to LA this time. We’ll see though… I’m trying not to think too far ahead this time, since life is anything but predictable.

Anyway, I’ll be on the road starting this Saturday, and will be busy at first, but look for a lot more art soon, as I will be much less stressed-out this summer hopefully (stress does not equal good art for me).  Ciao for now cats and kittens!

Here is my latest illustrated-photography piece, entitled RESET.  It’s more personal in theme than my usual work.  The last few years I’ve been having some problems with depression, and the way it tends to hold back my ambitions in life.  I’m hoping this year to change a lot of things about my life for the better, and sort of hit the “reset button”.  I am almost 30 years old, and want to start off the next decade of my life feeling good, like I did the first half of my 20’s.

Anyway, the model is yours-truly, and I am accompanied by a toy space gun and about 30-40 different flowers that I shot pictures of around California, Michigan, and Ohio.

Here are some details of RESET.

Well, my productivity got curtailed for a bit there, as I was in Michigan until yesterday, but the motherboard on my laptop decided to die a few days before my return to SF. I’ll have a new illustrated photo up within the next couple days, but in the meantime, a little catch-up. I just posted a photoshoot with Dawon, and a photoshoot with Raphye in the People Photography section. Go check them out!

*whew!*

I’m finally done with the revamp of evanhaydenart.com. As I mentioned, there may be some bugs here and there. If you spot anything, please let me know. Here’s what I’ve changed…

• Design and layout. Fancier looking now, more colorful, and with darker accents. If you get nostalgic for the old look, you can take a peek at it here.
• Added the Music page. Not much on it yet, as I’m just getting back into making music after a long hiatus.
• Simplified some of the pages.
• Moved the blog here, and replaced the main index page with a fancy landing page.
• Made things load better on mobile devices
• Fixed a lot of the problems with how things load on Safari & IE.

I also added several new (and a couple older) bits & pieces to the gallery pages… To the Illustration gallery, I added “Ting Terng” (something I did for the “covers” art jam on the Electric Ant blog), “Happy Birthday Will” (an illustration for a friend-of-a-friend’s birthday), and “Blind Beast” (NSFW! A piece I did for Electric Ant issue 2). To the Design gallery, I added some examples of my graphic design and layout for Electric Ant issue 2, and from the vaults, I added “The World of Same Hat!” (the cover to a sampler of Same Hat!, a blog I cofounded with my best friend Ryan.) Yay!

Known bugs:

• For some reason on all pages except the blog, if you hit ctrl+click (for example to open a link in a new tab), or hit right-click on the mouse, the page will redirect you to the index landing page. This is an annoying bug, and I’m hoping one of my more seasoned programmer friends can help me fix it. *hint hint*. For now, just hit back in the browser if it does that to you. I’m hoping to fix this asap.
• On a smaller note, I need to tweak the way the outline formatting is on the thumbnails on the gallery index pages. I’m very sleepy now, but I’ll try to get that cleaned up in the next couple days.

Special thanks to Ryan, Melinda, Dawon, and Jason for helping me to test the design on a variety of resolutions, operating systems, and browsers!

Anyway, enjoy the new site! I have a couple new illustrated-photo works coming in the next couple weeks, so look forward to that

Okay, I’ve uploaded the new site, and it’s functional, but there are some cranky bugs to zap. Most notably the links page, and little aesthetic bits on the gallery pages, bio, and blog. I should have as many of these bugs as I know how to fix (remember, I’m more of an art guy than a computer-science guy) taken care of within the next couple days, then I’ll announce an “all clear” when I feel confident with it. Hang in there!

Hey kids. I apologize for the grievous amount of time since my last post. My life ended up getting thrown into a tizzy in November when I found out my dad needed heart surgery, so I came back to Michigan to be there for that. Since he also has needed help around the house during recovery, I have been here in MI since then, and will be going back to San Francisco on January 19th. Dad’s doing great now, so that’s awesome, but I haven’t had much time for art-making lately.

In other news, what I have been working on in my free time is the revamped version of this site (version 2.0 if you will). I’ll be posting that online at some point this coming week, and since I don’t claim to be a master programmer, there will undoubtedly be some glitches here and there at first (ie: missing graphics, dead links, messed-up CSS). If you spot anything weird, please let me know. The good news is, once I get the new site finished and the bugs zapped, it should load better and look nicer than the current site. It will also be a little more streamlined in functionality (I think I bit off more than I could chew when I relaunched my art site in ‘08). There will also be a new section, and certain pages will run better on mobile devices.

The other big change – and this might sound counter-intuitive – is that the blog is going to move from the index page to a dedicated blog page. I know it’s more the standard now to have a blog be the landing page for one’s art gallery site, but I sort of miss having the old splash page fanciness I used to have. Plus, frankly  it’s embarrassing to have a three month old blog post at the front of my site in busy, chaotic times like this. So… what does this mean to you if you subscribe to my blog? It should mean nothing really. It looks like Wordpress is pretty good about moving the address of a blog without cancelling out people’s RSS subscriptions. That said, I’ve never done it before, so if it doesn’t work, you might have to manually change your subscription address. I’m going to tentatively have the blog at www.evanhaydenart.com/blog (but I’ll keep you posted)

Anyway, new site coming very soon, as well as two new illustrations this coming month (one’s almost done)! Happy 2010!