Category: site news

Sherbet Time!

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Sherbet Time!

Hey all you cats and kittens. I’ve just uploaded a new set to the People Photography page, and you’ll notice right away that it’s pretty different than my usual work. Namely, it’s my first serious venture into pinup / nudie photography, and also my first set to be published on Zivity. It’s called “Sherbet Time” and features Raven Le Faye – one of my favorite models to work with, as you can tell from how much she’s been on my site lately! click the above image (or here) to see about 40% of the set. The rest of the set is on Zivity, here. Note that you have to be a Zivity member to see that last link. I should also mention if you can’t tell yet, this photo set is pretty NSFW, so if you’re at work, underage, or a prude, don’t look! Otherwise, enjoy!

 

Not along ago, I shot another set intended for Zivity with a beautiful Florida model I met through Raven. I’ll be posting that soon as well, both here and on Zivity. Also stay tuned for more pinup work in general from me, as it’s a pretty fun and potentially more lucrative direction I’ll be continuing. If that’s not your bag, never fear, I’m still doing a ton of other kinds of stuff!

 

Side note, you’ll notice that I reorganized the People Photography page to better separate my fashion, product, and pinup work .It’s also set up so it will pretty hard for you to accidentally view the naked pics if you don’t want to (unless you’re not paying enough attention, of course). Anyway, I also uploaded a ton of other things to other parts of the site and did general site tweaks a bit. More on that in my next blog post, coming up in 3… 2… 1…

“A Love Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self”

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Guess what kids, I’m not dead. Although I would forgive you for thinking that due to the conspicuous lack of updates around here lately. Let’s just say that life punched me in the face, but it wasn’t a TKO, so here I am posting some new art! At last! You may remember in my last blog post (6 months ago, argh!), I posted a little sneak preview of this in it’s very early stages (after only 2-3 hours of illustration / compositing). Well, 60+ hrs of work later, spread out over several months, here it is:

 

A Love Letter to My 13-Year-Old Self

In the midst of an epic battle, twin psychic school girls deal a decisive blow upon a towering giant robot. Pretty much my magnum opus thus far… It’s the third in my giant robot series, but there’s more to it than just that. From my middle school days until the early days of college, I was a huge anime nerd. I also read a ton of manga. These two mediums have had a profound effect on my art style, techniques, and favorite themes to this day. Though I am still being a big manga fan, I don’t watch much anime anymore. I got sort of burned-out, and didn’t feel like I was seeing enough variety in the modern-day anime (with the exceptions of auteurs such as Satoshi Kon, Mamoru Oshii, and Katsuhiro Otomo).

 

Despite the disaffection with modern anime, I still have a strong love of the stuff I grew up on, tracing back to being a 4 year old and watching Robotech with my older brother. That had a profound effect on me. In this piece, I pay tribute to that, as well as Mai the Psychic Girl, Gundam, Domu, Project A-Ko, Cutey Honey, and other bits and bobs of Japanese pop culture that I grew up with, as well as a little dose of Transformers. Basically as you can see, giant robots and psychic battles are two of my favorite subject matters!

 

I shot this (the girls and part of the background at least) with one of my favorite models, Raven Le Faye, in Berkeley over a year ago. The robot is made up of over 20 different cars that I shot in Michigan and California. I shot the distant background in Los Angeles. Lots of stuff going on in this… I’m very pleased to finally be releasing it into the world after so long.

 

On a semi-sad note, this is going to be my last “super epic”, super detailed piece for a while.. It took me too long to make (over 60 hours) as I work much slower in Wacom than anything analog. Most of my illustrated-photography pieces take me between 15 and 30 hrs, which is also a long time, but this one was ridiculous. Just the robot on it’s own would have normally been a piece on its own, but I decided to take this piece farther. That said, I really need to buy a Wacom Cintiq, for a more 1:1 drawing experience – as opposed to the disconnect one gets from drawing on the desk and looking at the screen. I think this would speed up my workflow considerably. Problem is, I’m broke, so until I can scrape together the extra cash, I’m going to have to stick with more simple pieces for a little bit, otherwise I’ll only get one new piece done every several months, which is not enough for me. Good to pause this era (for now at least), with a BANG! (literally, in this case, hence the explosion)

 

the making of

I decided since this new work is particularly special to me that I’d throw in a little bonus. Click the above image, or here, to see a detailed “Making of” / behind-the-scenes for this work.

 

Special thanks to Raven for modeling for this. You’ll see her in a couple other works on the site, and you will be seeing her in more work soon! For example, another illustrated photography piece, a much more simple one that I’ll be getting to soon… Also, she modeled for a pin-up / alt / fetish / nudie set that I’ll be submitting to Zivity soon. That’s very new territory for me, and was a fun experience. Once I get that posted, I’ll direct you there (all of you over 18 yrs old, at least!). Also, I’ll be posting an EGL shoot I did with her soon (and if you didn’t see these really cute pics from a year ago, you should!) Thanks also go out to Ryan Sands, David Murray, and Dawon Kim for giving me feedback at various stages along the way of the creation of this beast! Also thanks to Lady Gaga, Skrillex, Wham!, Dschingis Khan, Arabesque, and the TalkRadar and Gamespy Debriefing podcasts for supplying background sounds for the big push this past week.

 

In other news, I have more stuff to post soon. Other stuff that I’ve been working on over the past few months, but haven’t had the time to organize into gallery pages yet. A shoot with Beau (some of which is edited and done, some note)… Also the ongoing product photography work I’ve been doing for my buddy Seibei / David Murray, and also product photography I did for Babushka Designs / Tatiana Jimenez. Both of those coming soon (or you could just look at those links and buy some awesome stuff!) You’ll also notice that I upped the font size on the last stuff I uploaded. I’ll be doing this throughout the site soon, I’m just super lazy right now. the old text looked great on lower-resolution screens, but I’m finding it hard to read on my 22″ Samsung, and I’m guessing you might too! Okay, gotta get a little sleep now! It’s after 7am and I’ve been in a creative trance!

things keep happening

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things keep happening...Hey dudes and dudettes.. Yes, it has been a long time since my last post. This summer was pretty crazy busy, and fall got busier. Since my last post, I moved to Los Angeles in early October. I’m here possibly temporarily, hopefully long term. It just depends on how my job hunt turns out. I’ve also been applying for things up in the Bay Area, so I could end up back there. Or I could end up back in Michigan again if I don’t get something stable set up here by the time I run out of money. Maybe I shouldn’t be so forthcoming about that stuff on my art blog – perhaps it makes me look unprofessional – but hey, just being honest. It’s a rough economy out there for everyone, and a time when there are a lot less opportunities for us creative professionals. Let’s just say that for every graphic design or photography job I’ve applied to, I’ve applied to two retail jobs. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I’m just hoping to get something stable enough out here to stay, and keep working towards… THE PRIZE.

 

Anyway, despite not getting much real art done this last four months, I have been making some stuff. The problem is that a lot of it is freelance graphic design for secret projects, or for internal corporate documents & presentations. Not as exciting as making big colorful illustrated-photo pieces, or comics, or fashion photography, but it does pay the bills when those fun things are hard to rely on in an economic pinch. Anyway, I should be able to show some of that work sooner or later…

 

I did actually make quite a bit of changes to the site, both in flow and mechanics. A lot of it you won’t really see, but trust me, it helps. I guess you could say it’s evanhaydenart.com, ver 2.1. Since coding is not second nature to me, I had some big bugs that had been waiting to be squashed since the site overhaul. The last bit of them involved problems with the CSS involved in my links. So if you saw visited links showing up as white on white (not very user friendly), that’s why. Usually it’s as simple as changing a style property, but this was a unusually complex problem, under the surface. I wanted to extend my gratitude to my buddy Vivian Hui – an amazing graphic designer and web designer – for helping me fix this problem!

 

Other changes around the site include:

  • New background on all pages but the intro page. I love the way the colorful pink & purple splash background looks on the intro page, but on the regular gallery pages, I thought things were looking a bit too busy, and that the background distracted from the content. The new background is darker, which should help the content stand out more, and still has that eye-trickery that I like… If you stare at it too long, it starts to get a bit of a moiré pattern to it…  I apologize for any headaches it may induce!
  • Shuffled around some of the Illustrated-Photography and People Photography pieces. Deleted some of the old stuff, and took some of the old or less-potent stuff and moved it into archive pages. Basically these archive pages have work that I’m still fond of in a way, and want you to be able to see if you so desire, but don’t have the same punch as the newer and/or better work that I wish to showcase. If you want to see the archives, they are linked on the bottom of their respective galleries.
  • Simplified code throughout the site. Many of the pages should load faster and cleaner now. There was a lot of redundant/junk code that Vivian pointed out, and I tried to strip away a bunch of it. Also, since the new background is about 10% the file size of the old one, that should load faster as well.
  • Rearranged the links page a bit for better visual parsing.
  • Took the links to all my different automotive Flickr sets out of the Automotive Photography page. You can still access them, but I realized that I didn’t need them all listed there. Took up a lot of space, and was too much to maintain every time I made a new Flickr set (which I do often). So now just click to check out the collection, and go from there…

 

As for things still on my checklist, I realize it’s been two years since the new site launched, and I still don’t have a proper shop set up for prints. I’ll get to that soon, hopefully, if my life stabilizes anytime in the near future. What originally held me back was when my hard drive died in ‘08, and I lost the originals of a lot of my work. I had to redraw a lot of them to sell any prints, and I now feel that those redrawn ones, in addition to my new work since, has given me a good base to work from, when I do get the store set up. In the meantime, just email me (skeletron  AT  gmail  DOT com) if you wanna buy some thangz. Also, I know that the music page is pretty barren. I’m still on a music hiatus. I want to get back into it soon, but again, life has been too hectic, busy, and unstable this last couple years.

 

In other, more exciting news, see that pretty face up there? The one with a few outlines, but still none of the nose? That is a very tiny segment of my next illustrated-photo piece. It’s going to be a very epic one. I’m about 4 hours into it, and I estimate it’ll take another 40 to finish. It will contain a lot of different themes that I enjoy, all jammed into one big piece. As for those themes, I’ll keep them secret for now… I will just say that it’s my first illustrated-photo to contain an explosion! Also, the theme could be referred to as “a love letter to my 13-year-old self”. I’ll keep that vague for now. It’ll all make sense when it’s done. Anyway, adieu for now. Hopefully less than four months will have elapsed by the next time I write.

VERSION 2.0

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version 2.0!

*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” (an illustration for a friend-of-a-friend’s birthday), and “Blind Beast” (A piece I did for Electric Ant issue 2. NSFW!). 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 🙂

 

caution: wet paint

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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!

watch out for falling debris during construction!

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things are changing...

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!

bizzayy

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busybusyBUSY

Ooof! A month has elapsed with nary a post. Sorry ’bout that…

 

I’ve been working like crazy on a freelance graphic design project for a new startup, and that’s been soaking up all of my creativity lately. Probably about another couple weeks and I’ll be done with it, and back to making stuff to post here. I’m looking forward to cutting loose again. Also, I think I’ll be redesigning my site soon, when time allows… After being spoiled with cable internet since 2000, I’m currently stuck with DSL (for now) at my new apartment, so I’m starting to see the site from outside the high-speed internet bubble. (well, DSL is technically high speed compared to dial-up, but feels horridly slow sometimes, and my site loads slow on it.) Stay tuned…

Are you there internet? It’s me, Evan.

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evanhaydenart.com first post

Hi everybody. I’m Evan. I live in San Francisco CA, and originally hail from a suburb outside of Detroit, Michigan.

 

My main artistic focuses are photography and illustration, and particularly a hybrid of the two. I also occasionally make comics and my day job is in graphic design, so I thought I’d show a variety of things, since I love making a variety of things.

 

I’ve had my art online on various sites since 1997, but I decided that it was time to launch a new site, one with fancy-shmancy web 2.0 bells & whistles to get my web presence out of the dark ages and into 2008. This began a couple months of racking my brain, trying to learn some CSS and PHP stuff… Now keep in mind, programming is not my forte (err, art is, hence the website), so if you find any broken links / bugs / etc, let me know! (PS: here’s a screenshot of the old site, in case you’re feeling a bit nostalgic.)

 

Anyway, it’s almost 2AM and I must get some sleep…. I’m hoping to update the blog part of this site fairly regularly, but if there are gaps in content, rest assured… I’m busy making new art to show you.