“Bluebird”

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After a year’s hiatus from my illustrated-photography work, here’s a new, and quite cheerful one! A lot of my work, as you’ve maybe noticed, revolves around themes of sci-fi, horror, surreal scenes, and general dark & weird stuff. For this piece, I decided to make something cute, and loosely in tribute to the Disney movies I watched as a kid. Thanks to the always photogenic, always creative Raven Le Faye for modeling for this. Hard to tell it’s her with the wig, huh? That makes four illustrated-photography pieces in a row featuring her (to refresh your memory, here are the – previous – three.) If you guessed that she’s one of my favorite models to work with, you wouldn’t be wrong!

 

Anyway, to go to the gallery page for this piece, and check out details, click the image above, or here.

Alicia & my Fiat

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Alicia & my Fiat

Right before I left for LA, I got a chance to do a proper shoot with Alicia Echevarria. (I’d previously posted a quick one-off shot I took of her back in August, btw.) It’s too bad that I didn’t meet her earlier in my time back in Michigan, as I would have loved to shot more, but I’m happy we managed to fit this shoot into that last week of packing and scrambling. Anyway, she’s super photogenic, so I think you’ll dig these photos! I’d been meaning to do a shoot with my beloved project car, a 1975 Fiat Spider that I’ve been working on since I got it in 2010, so I figure I’d let the green machine guest-star in this shoot.

 

Alicia & my Fiat

I tried to go for a ’70s vibe for the photos, to match the car and wardrobe (especially the green dress, which was my mom’s in the late ’60s), and opted for a slightly hazy look, with selectively muted colors and sun flares. I’ve always loved the way 35mm photos from the ’60s-’80s looks, and I’ve been chasing an elusive goal to try to achieve that look via digital tricks. (I guess I could just use Instagram like everyone else, hur hurrr). Oh! Here’s a little behind-the-scenes shot:

 

Alicia & my Fiat

Anyway, thanks again to Alicia for posing for the shoot, to my mom for supplying the wardrobe for the second half of the shoot (she had some killer style back in the day), and extra-special thanks to my friend Peter Stylianou, owner of Cozy Corner Coney Island, for letting me use the yard behind his super-delicious restaurant!

 

Click here or any of the shots in this post to see the rest of the photos!

Raven’s Fan Service

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Raven -

Hello folks! I’m typing this to you from Los Angeles, where I’m now living for the foreseeable future. I just added a few shots from a couple of Zivity sets that I did with my frequent collaborator, the lovely Raven Le Faye. These have been up on Zivity since early summer, but I wanted to share a few of my favorites here. Raven has quite a bit of fans on that site, and wanted to do a set to oblige some of their requests. You If you click the above preview, or here, you can see the shots I posted on this site. If you want to see the rest, you’ll have to check them out on Zivity (set 1 & set 2)  As is the case with all my Zivity sets, they are NSFW, and for 18+ only, due to copious nakedness.

ZONE SYSTEM – remastered

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Zone System - remastered

As promised, here is the remastered version of my 2006 comic “Zone System”. I gave this one a more extensive overhaul than that of Webby Crunch. It’s now a page longer than the original (21 pps now), due to rearranging some of the panel layout and flow to allow for some of the content to have more room to breath. I also redrew half of page 7, as well as making all kinds of nips and tucks to the rest of the artwork. You’ll also see a ton more tones in this one, as well as new lettering and some script rewrites. As with Webby Crunch, I changed the page layout dimensions from its original US comic “floppy” size, to the wider A5 manga standard. Anyway, enough technical whatzits, go read it!

 

Since I’m back on a comics kick, I’ve been getting ready to work on a new one… I actually have two in mind that I want to do – a shorter, black & white one, and a rather long full-color graphic novel. Needless to say, I’m putting off the graphic novel for a while, as it’s a bigger fish than I can fry at the moment, but I’ve been plotting out the shorter one, and am hoping to start making it soon. I have to get in the right head-space though, as it’s going to be a pretty depressing story… but one that is appropriate for our times. Anyway, I won’t make any promises right now on how soon that’ll be done, but hopefully reasonably soon!

WEBBY CRUNCH – remastered

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Webby Crunch - remasteredWell, I decided to “pull a George Lucas” on one of my old comics, and make some modern-day tweaks. (hopefully my tweaks are more meaningful than Ewoks who can blink)

 

In 2005, I did a short comic called “Webby Crunch”, and passed it out at the San Diego Comic Con. It was a little project to get me back in practice with making comics, which at that time, I hadn’t made in five years. More recently, after lettering a few manga localization projects (more on those later!) I got to thinking that I should re-letter my old comics, as I’m better at it now, and have a much better-looking dialog font I use these days. As I started looking at the old pages, I found other things I’d tweak, if given the chance… The problem was, the full-size files of my 2005 / 2006 comics were all lost when my hard drive died in ‘08, and all I had left, digitally at least, were the low-res page files that have been on this site. I decided rather than just lettering those, that I’d rescan the original art pages, redo every digital thing that I’d done previously (hopefully better), replace a couple panels that I was never happy with, and rebuild it at 1200DPI, so it can be printed again. I also changed the page format to a more standard size (A5), and did a lot more with dot-tone and a lot less with the sketchy cross-hatching that pervaded much of the original.

 

Anyway, click above, or here to check it out!

 

Next up, I’ll be doing a remastered version of my 2006 title “Zone System”, and will be posting that in due time. I’m also preparing to do an all-new comic soon. Not a horror story like these two, but pretty dark in realistic ways that I haven’t really covered in comics before. Stay tuned!

PROBE + more new art!

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Probe

Hello everyone! I’ve just posted a bunch of photos from an extremely enjoyable photo shoot I did in Detroit last month.  I’ve been Flickr buddies for a long time now with Tyler Linner, a transportation design student at CCS. Recently he purchased a winter beater car, a first-gen Ford Probe, and has been customizing it into a hyper-miling aero art car (complete with dazzle camouflage!) I knew, once I saw it, that I would have to photograph it!

 

Probe

We found a suitably angular backdrop, and were joined by the lovely Amanda Faye Cain for some avant-garde photo fun-time. She did an amazing job, and I’m hoping to work with her again very soon. Special thanks to the folks across the street at Threat Management Center, for providing me with power for my lights.

 

Probe

Anyway, click on one of the above images, or here, to see more photos. If you want to see even more photos from the shoot after that (27 total!), check out this Flickr set.

 

In other news, I snuck some other new work on the site recently… Some new photography and some new illustrations. Let’s stay on the photography topic for now.

 

Shower

A friend of mine posed for some pin-up photography a few months back, and she approved of me posting a couple of our more interesting & abstract shots, on the condition that she remain anonymous. Click here, or above, to check out both of them. Perhaps you’ll see more from the shoot further on, if she gives of the OK, but for now, enjoy these steamy (literally in this case) photos. (sort of nsfw)

 

I also did some illustration. We’ll stay on the topic of nsfw for this one, although it is also quite tasteful…

 

Loona

Recently Electric Ant posted a collaboration between a good bunch of indie comics artists, many of which are buddies of mine, in honor of the recently departed Jean Giraud, aka Moebius. I loved his art, growing up, and was saddened to hear of his passing. For this tribute, we all picked an image from a collector’s card set that Moebius made, and did a “cover” of the image. Click above, or here, to see my interpretation of “Loona”. Also, be sure to check out the post on Electric Ant, to see a ton of AMAZING art by other Moebius-lovers!

 

One last piece to update here… A collage / illustration that I made out of shipping labels:

 

shipping labels collage

Just something fun I whipped up in 20 min in my journal. Click above, or here to see the whole image (it’s not NSFW, but I sort of like this sneak preview format!)

 

Anyway, I hope you cats and kittens enjoy the new stuff! I’ve been absolutely swamped lately with two big freelance book design / typersetting gigs this year so far, so it’s cut down my workflow on other things, but hopefully I’ll post some more fun stuff here again soon, before the next century!

coloring pages!

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Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month coloring pages

I’ve been a busy boy since moving back to Michigan. Three big freelance gigs at the same time. Two publishing projects, which I’ll go into more detail about later, and a series of coloring pages and craft/project photography for Education.com. You can see the coloring pages (seriously, how fun is this freelance gig!) on the Illustration page. Click above, or here to see the series I did for the upcoming Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, and here to download the PDFs! The series features IM Pei, Michelle Kwan, Ichiro Suzuki, Kristi Yamaguchi, Larry Shinoda, Apollo Anton Ohno, Maya Lin,Duke Kahanamoku, Jeremy Lin, and Dan Inouye.

 

I also posted a few shots I look of Katie while I was visiting LA in December. Check them out here! Here’s one of them:

 

Katie

More stuff coming soon… I’ve been back in MI for a couple months, and have been alternating between crazy busy and crazy chillaxing. I have an exciting and avant-garde shoot scheduled for this coming Sunday, and I hope to be having a mini-renaissance of art-making this spring and summer!

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…