Author: Evan

Tangled Up in Blue / Another change of location

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Chelsea Christian - Tangled Up in Blue

Hello everybody out there. As I mentioned earlier, I have another Zivity pin-up shoot that I had shot, and it is now online!

 

No relation to the song by Dylan (just borrowing a good title!), this set features the beautiful Chelsea Christian. I met her via Raven, and it was a pleasure to shoot with this awesome Floridian. I only regret that we didn’t get a chance to play some video games while she was in town, as she is a fellow avid gamer! Anyway, this involved about 100 yards of dark blue and light blue ribbon, which I thought matched her hair quite well. I’ve posted some of the pics here on the site (or click the preview pic above), but if you want to see the rest (and hopefully vote for them!), you can check out the full gallery on Zivity. Again, this set is NSFW! (lots of nudity)

 

In other news, it’s looking like life is bringing me back to Southeast Michigan again very soon (January 2012). Maybe it’s not the best idea to mention this on my professional-art-gallery-check-this-shit-out-site, but this recession has been pretty tough on me (as it has on most people). My artistic output has dropped dramatically the last couple years (even the pics you see above, I shot six months ago, and only just editing recently).  I think it’s time to go back to Michigan to regroup, save money, keep doing freelance work, and just relax a little. I think this will open up my life better to being able to make a LOT more art… photography, illustration, design, music, comics, illustrated-photography, etc. I know from experience that I can’t make good art when I’m always stressed and under the gun. It’s one thing to have an intense, stressful art deadline. That motivates me. But the constant stress of worrying about covering my expensive bay-area rent, going into debt, and living in a crappy part of said bay area, has been making it hard to focus on creative projects and has diminished my creative spark. I know it’s living within me, dormant, and it’s come out to say hi during times of less stress. I think it’s time to clear my mind, lets the spark flourish, and make my best work ever. Sure, I’ll be back in a comparatively boring part of the country for a while, but I’m a firm believer that one’s home needs to be a sanctuary, and I could use that a bit while I “recharge my batteries”. I hope this doesn’t make me seem unprofessional, but no one is resilient forever, and while some artists thrive on living a tortured existence, I am the opposite.

 

I probably won’t be posting much on here for a little bit, until I get resettled (or recharged here in the bay, if a job comes together in time). Stay tuned however, and enjoy your holidays, whatever kind you celebrate!

Odds & Ends – November 2011 edition

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odds & ends...

Okay, in less naked news, I added a bunch of… well, odds & ends to the site, mostly to the Design page, but one to Illustration as well. Mostly stuff from the past year that I for some reason forgot to upload, but also a few brand new things.

 

 

In other news, I made a bunch of subtle tweaks all over the site. Now all the copyright dates are correct. Well, let’s rephrase that. I get lazy about going through the whole site each year and changing all the dates, and I’m not enough of a coding wizard to install a site-wide auto-updating line of date code. Thus, now it just says “© Evan Hayden” instead of  “© YEAR Evan Hayden”. It’s my copyrighted work, regardless of the year anyway. I can see you falling asleep from here, so I’ll get onto the other site tweaks… I also redid some of the thumbnails on the Design page to better reflect their content, mostly notably in the album packaging (square thumbnails now to give a quick preview of the whole album cover), and in the logos (thin borders on the thumbnail boxes now to make everything more cohesive). The other change I made was in taking most of the text on the screen and bumping it up a size. In my opinion, this isn’t as pretty as delicate small text on the page, but it’s more readable in general, and I was getting tired of leaning so close to my monitor to read my own dang site! (and others mentioned to me that the old font was too small as well). So in general these tweaks mean better accessibility for others, and less updating headaches for me!

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…

Catching up…

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catching up...

Hey kids. Long time no type. Life has been keeping me busy lately, the day job and the freelance work both. Anyway, I uploaded a bunch of semi-recent photoshoots to the Photography gallery:

 

  • A chemistry-themed pinup that I shot with Beau.  –>  find those pics HERE
  • A small sampling of the many product shots I’ve done over the past year for my buddy SEIBEI’s clothing label.  –>  find those pics  HERE
  • …and speaking of product shots, a sample of the clothing shots I did for Babushka Designs.  –>  find those pics  HERE

 

Macro - Sugarbrain3

In other news, I’m FINALLY back to making music again, after, errr, a six year hiatus. I’m in the middle of rebuilding the Macro site right now, but in the meantime, click here or the image below to go to the download page for my new all NOISE EP. If you’re not a very adventurous listener, stay tuned, my next proper album of real “music” will be coming along soonish. YAYY!!

“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.

Kylie

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Kylie

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!

Prison for Bitches – on sale now!!

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Prison for Bitches

Hey kids. “Prison for Bitches” – the new zine by my best buddy Ryan Sands – 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.