catching up with the Deathscape Navigator

Deathscape Navigator

Added some recent album packaging designs, one from this past summer and one from last year (belatedly). Above, you’ll see the cover and back cover of my album “Deathscape Navigator”. Click above, or here, to see the rest of the packaging art! Below, you’ll see the cover and back cover for the mix CD set I made for Ryan last summer. Click below, or here, to see the rest of that compilation’s art!

 

Catching Up...

Party on!

“Silence is Golden” – revisited

Silence is Golden - new art

Recently, I made a box set of my music for my friend Ethan, before he moved to Tokyo. For each of the six included albums, I redesigned the packaging and added some new art.I’ll make a post about more of that later, but to start, I wanted to share with you the two new illustrated photography pieces I made this summer for “Silence is Golden”, my 2006 LP. In addition to the original cover and back cover, I used two more photos from my shoot with Dawon to make an inner sleeve to hold the disc, one of which is a track listing. It was fun to revisit this photo shoot and make something new from it. Check out bigger views of this art in the Illustrated Photography section and see the packaging design in the Design section!

199X

I posted a new music track that I’m quite proud of, as well as artwork to go with it! It’s a tribute to the future, how we used to view the future back in the ’80s. It’s sort of like a space hip hop wall of sound and has a lot of moody atmospherics. Best listened to on good headphones or speakers with BASS  🙂   If you want to see more about the visual art, go to this page in the design section.

 

As a bonus, here’s a nice big wallpaper of the fake Famicom label I made for the video.

Amethyst

Amethyst

Howdy boys and girls! Here’s something I whipped up recently… The release image for my single “Amethyst”. I put it in the Illustrated-Photography gallery, even though it’s about 90% illustration, 10% photography (as opposed the roughly 50/50 split of most of that work) because I thought it fit in better thematically. Not manga-ish like a lot of my pure illustration work is…

 

I’m sort of fascinated by crystals, in terms of their shapes, and also with polygon graphics and early computer graphics. I decided to put these themes together for the rather surreal lady you see here. If you want to listen to the track that I made this for, check out the video below:

 

MACRO is back!

Macro

 

Oh yes, and another thing… I finally redesigned, revamped, and REVIVED the Macro site! (Macro is my music). Click the above image or here to go visit the site. There are about 30 mp3s on there for you to download (including a whole album!), a few videos to watch, and lots of pictures! Also, I’ve been messing around with new music, of course. Here’s a new track, “Novo”, my first new song in six years!

 

 

I’m excited to come out of my music hiatus…

Odds & Ends – November 2011 edition

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!

Catching up…

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!!

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.