Store status update

Hello everyone (anyone?)
Just wanted to let you know that the store/shop/emporium is in a little state of flux for a while. I decided to strip all but ten of my works from Society6 (will likely be closing that eventually), and plan on migrating things to a different / more artist-friendly storefront in the future. Stay tuned for that later on! Also in the meantime, there will be links on certain gallery pages to for-sale stuff that is no longer for sale. I’ll update that when I am less tired. (Heck of an anticlimactic post here, huh? I’m posting about taking away stuff, rather than adding it!)

Anyway, be good to each other and I’ll see you later on, when I have more updates.

Lots of manga lettering!

Lots of manga lettering!

Hey everyone! A couple years ago, I added examples of my manga lettering work to the site. Since then, I’ve done a lot more books (I’ve lettered 60 manga volumes to date!), but never really had the time to show examples of that newer stuff here. Well, I just posted a TON of samples of my lettering work, showcasing a wide range of techniques. You can see the extremely complex and challenging lettering tasks I’ve taken on on Real Account, the large amount of hand-written work I’ve done on Forget Me Not, the all-by-hand lettering I do on Land of the Lustrous, the crazy action-packed sound effects of Ninja Slayer Kills, and other fun stuff! Also, check out the work I’ve done on dream-come-true projects such as Akira (for the upcoming 35th anniversary box set), Die Wergelder, and The Osamu Tezuka Story. I’m still in disbelief that I got to work on Akira. I’ve been a big fanboy for that series since I was 13 years old! Also, feel free to take a look at some of the pages for manga that I’d previously posted here, such as Sankarea and Maria: The Virgin Witch, since I overhauled the pages and added new examples. I think in general, the stuff I chose to share gives a good example of my range as a letterer, and I’m excited to finally have something convenient to show to family and friends who are curious what I do. Oh and btw, I went out of my way to avoid using images that are spoilers, so if you’re a manga fan, don’t worry about having stories ruined for you when looking. While you’re checking out the samples, feel free to follow the links on each page to buy the books from their respective publishers! More manga selling means dinner on my table.

 

Anyway, you may notice that I’ve changed the location of my manga lettering pages from the Design gallery, to the Comics gallery. Even though I do plenty of design work as part of my manga job, as a whole it seemed like it would fit in better in the Comics gallery, not to mention adding a little life to that page (since I never seem to have time to make my own comics.) Go ahead and check out the Comics gallery to see everything, but if you want a handy little list of all the titles reflected there, here you go!:

 

Akira  |  Barbara  |  Cat Diary: Yon & Mu  |  Complex Age  |  Die Wergelder  |  Forget Me Not
The Ghost and the Lady  |  Land of the Lustrous  |  Livingstone  |  Maria: The Virgin Witch
Ninja Slayer Kills  |  The Osamu Tezuka Story  |  Panorama Island  |  Real Account
Sankarea  |  That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime  |  Tokyo Zombie

 

PS: I also relettered a volume of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order a couple of years ago (another dream title, seeing as the original Battle Angel Alita is what introduced me to manga in the first place), but since I just handled dialog balloons, I figured there wasn’t too much to show of that.

 

What else is new? Since last I typed here, I had a crazy busy month of work, then a lot of preparation for my wedding, then the big day itself, then showing my parents around Japan for a couple weeks during their first visit here, then a couple weeks of recharging my batteries, then more work. I’m in a brief time of respite at the moment, then back to more work soon. I have another post ready to share with you soon, however, about another neat comic-related thing I worked on. Stay tuned!

Tatemae / 建前

Tatemae

Hey everyone! I’m, uhhhh, not DEAD. I finally made a new illustrated-photography piece. (Well, I made a quick one two years ago in ink over inkjet print, but this is my first digital one since 2013.)

 

Honne (本音) and tatemae (建前) are Japanese words used to describe the contrast between one’s personal feelings (honne) and the facade that one presents to the world (tatemae). While it certainly depends on the person, in Japan it’s often difficult to get past the wall that people put up and get to know someone’s true feelings. Generally this “wall” is a friendly one, mind you, but sometimes not genuine. I don’t think this is a uniquely Japanese thing, and I think we all conceal parts of our true feelings. I thought I’d explore this idea a bit since I find it both fascinating and frustrating.

 

One thing I often found unsettling while teaching English in Japan was how many of my students would wear a mask, not just when they were sick, but in general. Some kids wore it every day. Once in a while, during flu season, I’d walk into a jr high classroom and every single kid would be wearing one, and I’d be unable to fully “read” their social cues. I think for most people it’s a matter of stopping germ transfer when a bug is going around, but for the folks who wear them every day, it seems like the tatemae mask takes on a literal form.

 

Anyway, as usual these days for a lot of my art, you can pop on over to Society6 to order a print of it, or cell phone case, pillows, tote bags, whatevs!

 

In other news, this has been a crazy busy year so far with manga lettering, but pretty front-loaded. From now on I’ll have a bit more free time here and there to make more art and hopefully music. One of these days, I badly need to update the lettering section of my design page since it only reflects four of the 17 different manga series I’ve lettered, but that’ll have a wait a bit more. Right now, after a nice stay-cation, it’s time to get to work on the next book.

 

I will say, I got to work on a dream project earlier this year. I got to re-letter Akira for the 35th anniversary boxed set that Kodansha is putting out this fall! It was amazing! I’ve always deeply loved that manga, and it was a huge inspiration on me growing up, and to be able to observe Otomo’s art with the level of intimacy that working with it on my own computer brought, was a truly special experience. More on that later.

VERSION 3.0

evanhaydenart.com version 3.0 is now live!

Hello world!

 

It’s finally done… After five years I finally gave my art site a complete overhaul and it’s now online. This is my biggest site redesign yet, and I started over from scratch. Here are some of the changes I made:

 

  • New aesthetic design. The theme could best be described as “rainbow”.  Each gallery section now has its own unique color scheme, for example purple for Illustrated-photography, blue for Photography, and so on. If you’ve been visiting my site for a long time, the background may seem familiar. I always liked the random jaggy thin-line pattern background of the old pre-evanhaydenart.com days, so I brought it back, but in this case, it’s a different color in each gallery. Also making a return is one of my favorite typefaces, Herb Lubalin’s “Avant-Garde”, making up the navigation section lettering. It’s a more sedate usage of the typeface than he did, but I think it works fairly elegantly for the nav boxes. Speaking of typefaces, I stopped using Lubalin Graph (Another Lubalin classic. He was an amazing designer!) since I used it to death on version 2.0’s design. I’ll still use it on blog post promo images, because it is my favorite typeface, but for the main site, I went with something a little more familiar… Georgia! Yep, everyone has this font, and maybe it could seem boring, but I like it a lot, so hey… In other news related to the new design,  all the thumbnail images and text is a little bigger now, to account for larger monitor sizes and resolutions, and to make for easier viewing on mobile devices. Also, the page headers still show a different image upon each page load, but now they’re color-matched to the rest of the page. So many different files were made for that…
  • Flashier index page(s). Speaking of rotating images, the new index splash page is definitely splashy! A new background loads upon each visit to the page, and fills the screen. I’m sort of picky about the new trend of GIANT leader images for articles and whatnot, but I think for a gallery front page it’s fine. I also tried to make this page work a little better on mobile devices.
  • New, wider layout. I ditched the two-column design for a single-column design, allowing me to use bigger images (seems fitting for an art gallery site, right?) The navigation is now at the top of the page, under the header.
  • Big big big! About those big images, I apologize for anyone on slow internet connections, but I decided to go all-out this time… Each gallery page has big 1000px wide images for the artwork, and in the case of some pages where the art is a series of pictures, several of those big images. I feel that for an art portfolio site, big splashy images is good, and enough people have high-speed internet these days that I feel pretty comfortable designing for that now. It might be a headache on mobile networks if you’re at 3G or below, and I know that’s where a lot of people view the internet these days, but I firmly believe an art site is best viewed on a decent sized monitor.
  • Mobile-ish. On the topic of mobile-internet, I haven’t yet figured out how to make a totally mobile-friendly site yet (I’m not a programmer, I just struggle my way through each redesign when I absolutely have to), but even though some of the images are pretty big now (which load just fine on 4G), the layout this time around is at least a bit better for mobile. There’s some text you need to expand to see better, but the site doesn’t totally fall apart when viewed on a cell phone like my old site did. If I had the time, I would make a separate version of the site just for mobile, and have the code redirect you there when you view it on a phone, but I’m way too busy with work right now to do that, so please hang in there until I can 🙂  This site took long enough as is to redesign (a couple hundred hours, easily) so I may have to wait until I can afford to hire a designer to make a more mobile-friendly version for me.
  • my Society6 storeOther changes… I reorganized the site. After seven years apart, the fashion / portrait photography and automotive photography pages have been consolidated back into a Photography page. Since I haven’t been doing many proper shoots of cars lately, that page seems a little flimsy to warrant its own separate gallery. Also, all the separate gallery archive pages have been consolidated into one Archive page. Another change now involves the bio, links, and store pages being consolidated into an About page. I added some stuff to that about page. The resume / biography is still there, as are links. I added a FAQ page, a Contact page, and a proper Store. The FAQ exists to try to handle some of the questions I get repeatedly over the years… the Contact page is pretty self-explanatory, and now doesn’t involve me having to divulge an email address (thanks Foxyform!)
  • Store! Finally! The store is the big addition… After, oh, seven years of promising I’d add a store to my site to make it easier to buy prints, I finally did, with Society6. Part of what caused the delay for so long was my 2008 hard drive failure, which caused me to lose a lot of original art. Once I rebuilt my portfolio and had some good stuff to sell, it was a combination of being busy and being honestly a bit intimidated by the whole thing. Society6 should be a good solution because I don’t have the time right now to print and send orders myself, and doing so from Japan is its own kind of headache. Society6 fulfills the orders for me, and they have a good quality to their work. So yeah, finally, if you want to order prints of my work, or other stuff (pillows, cell phone / ipad cases, laptop skins, leggings, duvet covers, shower curtains, etc!), please check out my store!
  • NSFW-avoidance, if you want it. I separated the NSFW / 18+ only artwork a bit more from the rest of the content. I don’t want to censor myself, but given the nature of my day job, teaching kids, I wanted to make it a little harder to stumble across stuff that might not be suitable for the office or for younger eyes. Now, when you go to certain galleries, such as Illustrated-photography, the subsection with nudity or violent images is clearly labeled as such, in English and Japanese, and separated from the other content. If you’re using the back / forward buttons to navigate from page to page, it will stop when it gets to the NSFW content, sending you back to the main gallery, and you’ll have to click the thumbnail of the NSFW stuff to see it. No passwords or any stupid stuff like that. I just wanted to keep things accessible to those who want to see it, but stuff harder to have an “oopsie” moment and see it when you weren’t expecting it.
  • I mentioned Japanese… One thing I was planning to add to the launch, but decided to wait on a little bit longer, is Japanese translations for a lot of the major content. I already did them, in my mangled Japanese, but I have a friend who’s helping to smooth them out, so I’ll add said translations soon. The site is still prominently English-language, but at least for the main gallery indexes, there will be Japanese as well. For the individual artwork pages, there will be just English, but those are more about the imagery anyway, and I type too much sometimes, so maybe I’m actually sparing my Japanese viewers a bit!
  • New blog. As mentioned in the last blog post, the Blog has been 100% redone. After I bungled things and lost my blog archive, I took the time to redo all the old entries based off of salvaged data from the Internet Archive (but lost the comments, sadly). I also added some “from the future!” content to some of those old entries, ie: photos from events that happened. The new blog works much better on mobile devices. Well, to be honest, I used some WordPress trickery to make the site load a separate version for viewing the blog on a cell phone, and it’s not super pretty, but at least it’s not broken. It’ll do for now, until I can figure out how to customize it to make it have a bit more in common, design-wise, with the desktop site. new art!
  • What else? I added a TON of new artwork to the site… The Illustration gallery now has a section dedicated to educational art, of which I’ve been making a lot at my day job. This section includes an in-depth look at the “Hello English Picture Dictionary”, which is a publication I designed, edited, and illustrated. Also featured are worksheets I’ve made art for, and the “Word-of-the-Week” whiteboard that I draw each week for my students. Go check all that out! The Photography gallery has a new “Etcetera” section now, with photos of cats, birds, urban wreckage, night photography, and other things! Also added to the Photography page is some of the photos I’ve shot over the years of mangled and neglected vehicles and more robot photos! Growing up in the rust belt made for many such opportunities. I added new art to the Illustrated-photography gallery – an ink one, my first such piece like that in eight years. It’s of my lovely girlfriend Miwa. Finally, I added some new stuff to the Design gallery, including more mix CDs with custom packaging, more flyers, and a more depth look at my manga lettering.
  • B-B-B-BONUS. One thing you’ll notice on many of the artwork pages, is a lot more bonus content. More details, more behind-the-scenes, more more more! Also for each artwork that is available to buy on Society6, it’s linked within the page, and for manga and zines, there are links to buy the books from their respective publishers.

 

Okay, I think that about sums it up! Jeez, sorry to type a novel here, but this is the biggest update ever to my art site and there was a lot to cover! I’ll have more art coming soon, so stay tuned!

Panorama Island – out now!

Panorama IslandIn other news, “Panorama Island”, a manga that Ryan Sands and I adapted into English is now available! It’s being put out by Last Gasp, and is now available to purchase in lots of different places, such as directly from Last Gasp, or via Amazon, for example. It was a dream project to work on, since it’s a Maruo comic, based off of an Edogawa Ranpo story. The book came out beautifully, and is a nice big hardcover. Here’s what Amazon has to say about the story.
On a remote and mysterious island, one man builds a playground of hedonistic excess – replete with waterfalls, grand palaces, and gardens – a backdrop for his decadent feasts, orgies, and dark secrets. Set in 1920s Japan, The Strange Tale of Panorama Island follows the twisted path of failed novelist Hitomi, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the son of a rich industrialist family. Hitomi learns of the rich man’s sudden passing and creates a desperate plan. He fakes his own death, digs up and hides the other man’s body, and then washes himself up starving on a beach near the home of the dead man’s family. After successfully impersonating the now-dead son, Hitomi takes over all aspects of the industrialist’s life, including his company, his fortune, and eventually his wife. The failed author soon redirects the family’s wealth to his own perverse aims. A graphic novel based on the revered novella by Edogawa Rampo. Rampo was the godfather of Japanese pulp mysteries. Stunning artwork by master manga artist Suehiro Maruo deftly illustrates this Japanese pulp classic in fine detail. * 13th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for New Artist

 

I handled the lettering, touch-up, and book design, while Ryan handled the editing. Ryan and Kyoko Nitta did translation. Pick up a copy and enjoy it 🙂

Tangled Up in Blue / Another change of location

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!

Sherbet Time!

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…

things keep happening

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.

Prison for Bitches – on sale now!!

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.

come to APE!!

Hey kiddos, it’s that time again! Alternative Press Expo is almost upon us, and you should come and visit my table! I will be there with my buddies Ryan Sands, Hellen Jo, Derek Yu, Calvin Wong, Anthony Wu, and Ryan Germick, and we will be selling all kinds of comics, zines, prints, and other goodies. Keep reading for info…

 

APE 2009

INFO…
Saturday October 17th, 11am-7pm  &  Sunday October 18th, 11am-6pm
at The Concourse (620 7th Street, San Francisco CAView Map

 

Here’s a map of where we’re gonna be in the building (we’re called “Bang Gang”, and are at table #418)

 

APE MAP 2009

 

This will be the debut of issue 2 of “Electric Ant” – the comics & literary anthology zine that I do with Ryan Sands. Several of the contributors in the book will be at the show, so be sure to come. Come on by, say hi, and buy some shit!!!

 

EDIT (from the fuuuuuture!): Click this photo of my buddies and I to see a ton of photos from APE 2009!

APE 2009