MidwestLove Art & Design

Super fun t-shirt illustration for Kid, You’ll Move Mountains based on my wife’s recent, awesome thrift store find. This idea was initially pitched to Butch Walker, but ultimately rejected. Kid was cool enough to find some merit in it enough to want to buy it as their own. They requested the first few lines of the immortal Moby Dick to be what appears on the floating page as a tie in to their recent full length, Loomings, which shares it’s title with the first chapter of the big whale book.

This was initially designed as a three color with some nice cream and yellow offsetting the blues, but Kid requested we take it down to a single color as they’re planning on screening them all themselves and one color is much easier to wrangle.

Let me know what you guys think. Also, keep your ears to the ground, as there is some big news coming up. What’s that? A MidwestLove store that sells limited edition prints, perchance…? We shall see.

-marky

One more for Paramore… This one will be sold internationally. He’s called Mr. Banjo. Let me know if you see any of these being sold anywhere.

-marky

Here’s a tshirt illustration that I put together for my band Venna. It was an attempt at mixing my own interpretations of traditional Norwegian folk art and 50’s kitch. It was done with pencil then inked and scanned and cleaned up in Illustrator. I’ve recently discovered these “Identipens” at Michaels that are cheap and seem to work really well for inking the more detailed illustrations. I know that’s probably not what I should be using to ink illustrations, but most of what you see up here is trail and error. Any suggestions on good inking pens? I have a $50 gift card to Hobby Lobby that I’ve been saving for some new art supplies.

And here’s what it looks like in print-

Beautifully printed, 1 color on chocolate brown by the always top notch RedWall Prints.  Just look at how the detail came out. Every line is perfect. Big thanks to Jeff at RedWall.

PURCHASE HERE on ETSY - $12

-marky

There aren’t very many straight up, rock-your-face-off-without-being-cute-or-ironic bands out there anymore. Most bands are trying so hard to be liked that they forget that rock n roll is supposed to be dangerous. A Dance Between Giants is one of the rare bastians of that old school mentality of rock that says that it’s ok play your songs loud and hard, yell when you can’t quite hit the notes, look like you just rolled out of bed from a hangover, and still take what you do seriously (and expect everyone else too as well). Personally, I miss that in rock n roll music. I wish more young bands weren’t so image conscious, didn’t worry about the mass-accessibility of their songs, wrote what they wanted to, and just plain kept the cute out of the “rock”. There’s nothing dangerous about watching a bunch of guys with straightened hair bounce around stage for half an hour in matching neon hightops. That being said, I made A Dance Between Giants a shirt with fairy tale characters dancing under big pink letters. Oh well.

It was drawn in Illustrator, and it looks like this in print-

Printed 2 colors on Charcoal Grey by RedWall Prints

-marky

Just wrapped up CD packaging design for FL natives (and 1 Milwaukee transplant) Transmit Now. They wanted something bright and oddly whimsical to represent their flashy, smirking power-pop. This was a fun mixed media project incorporating inked illustrations, water colors, photography, and digital layout. I got to draw a bunch of animals with transmitters for heads (not radios, mind you… very original and legal transmitter heads) and throw paint all over them. Here’s what came out of it.

I think this guy is my favorite…

I was also asked to work up some apparel designs that corresponded with the CD art… this was my favorite of those. All the vine work is hand drawn and inked and the animals were lifted from the CD packaging.

This one had nothing to do with the CD art, but I just really liked how it came together. All the lettering was hand drawn, and the squid monster was drawn in Illustrator. Thank American Apparel for the model.

-marky

If you check out Ace’s new webstore, you’ll see a couple MWL designs. Try and guess which ones they are!

Also, Geffen artist Charlotte Sometimes has a bunch of new apparel in her webstore based off of the “Charlotte Girl” illustration and Logo work that was done for her a while back by MWL.

-marky