Sailor Jerry

Spring '09 Sailor Jerry Catalog

I dropped by the Sailor Jerry store today in Center City because I was looking for some inspiration on two Valentine's tattooed themed designs that I'm working on. For those of you who don't know Sailor Jerry is a legendary American tattoo artist who specialized in nautical art with a touch of Asian style inspired tattoos.
There's a flagship store in Philadelphia that sells merchandise featuring his artwork, the store is beautiful and it has a great vibe. When you walk in you immediately get visually hit with a ton of really great and inspiring art. What I like about Sailor Jerry's style is his use of color and shading, his style of drawing wasn't the most precise or perfect but that gritty quality and the imperfection is precisely what gives it a great non-mainstream quality.

The Spring line has some really beautiful and surprising items compared to what this brand has offered in the past. These were my favorites.



Jumper $138


Pin-up Dress $130



These are adorable! They had these in the store today, the purse costs $42 and the wallet $24.


Women's Cardigan in Grey and White $74

I have a weakness for cardigans, which has resulted in me owning one two many gray cardigans BUT I really love this one and I kinda want it. If you visit their website you can see that the clothes I've featured here are a far cry from the lame stuff on their online store lol. At least this brand hasn't been completely bastardized like the work of Sailor Jerry's protege, Don Ed Hardy.

A lot of these items haven't arrived on their online store as yet, so check back later if any of these caught your eye!

February Goals

Blooming Love

Part of my February goals is designing some Valentine's Day cards. I started out with a traditional pink and red design, but then it kind of made me nauseous so I made this instead. Somehow it doesn't seem Valentine-y enough, I've been brainwashed to associate only the traditional red and pink tones with this day. However I'd like to think an unconventional woman would like to receive this more non-traditional version. Plus I think it can serve for an all occasion card that loved ones can exchange regardless of the date, or it could one friends exchange too lol.

Design Goals

I. 2 Valentine's Day Cards
II. 2 Get Well Cards
III. Owl Illustration
IV. Deer Illustration

I tried working on the owl illustration the other night but it just wasn't working D: I need to do some sketches and return to the computer later.

Cherry Blossom Girl

World of Whimsy

I was reading the latest issue of Bust magazine and they had a write up about this French fashionista blog called The Cherry Blossom Girl. Its curated by this young woman called Alix, she has a really great sense of style and accentuates her outfits by photographing on locations to add an air of whimsy. She has a great eye for color and and gorgeous Chloe shoes. I love the mood she creates with each photo session, it lends a less superficial air to fashion and shows her passion.

The best part is that quite a few of her outfits are from stores like Zara and H&M, so they're not completely inaccessible to her readers. But unfortunately not all of us can afford fabulous shoes like these Chloe ones!



Check out her blog if you need some inspiration or to get lost in a whimsical world of fantasy.

Snow

I took these at 1 a.m in the morning. I was working on a new piece in Illustrator and happened to look out my window to see about 2 or 3 feet of snow on the ground. I love how serene and quiet it gets when snow falls. The tree bows look great.

Batman Haunted Knight

Batman Haunted Knight


The first time I browsed through this graphic novel I wasn't sure I liked the artwork, but I ended up picking it up again a second time a few weeks later and read through the entire thing and ended up finding the art inspiring in it. Its very loose and kind of gritty, it has a certain raw quality to it that lends well to the stories being told.

There are many great panels that visually draw my attention because I find the illustration style kind of unique for a comic book. These two panels in particular really stood out to me the first time I read it.

The way they rendered motion in this one panel stood out to me because usually comic books show movement in side to side panels, but I loved the take on it here. Its kind of a static approach to how you'd render hand drawn animation. I hadn't seen that in anything prior and I've found it inspiring for an illustration I want to do.





This panel has a really beautiful interpretation of Poison Ivy, I love the minimalist interpretation of the leaves, they give this long standing Batman villain a really unique visual look. I think if they make another Batman movie, Poison Ivy should definitely be a villain in it because environmental crisis is a very pertinent topic to our times. However I think the screenwriters of the new Batman movies would need to learn to write some female characters who aren't victims or love interests. Then again I find the Bruce Wayne of the Nolan movies rather vapid himself, now movie Tony Stark has some personality lol.

Koi Red

Koi Red by ~bakrsa on deviantART

Design goals update
I - 3 Birthday Cards
II - 1 Blog banner
III - 1 Koi Spring illustration
IV - 1 Deer Spring illustration
V - 1 Thank you card

Wahhhh this took a long time to do because of all the detail in the fish scales but I love how it turned out. It looks like a more fleshed out version of the previous Koi illustration I did. I might go back and rework that one.

This piece started out from a sketch I did back in December that was inspired by the work of legendary Japanese tattoo artist Horiyoshi III. I really admire all the detail in his work and I find it inspirational since its only recently that I've started to include more detailing in my work. Its time consuming but the end result is worth it.

I'm obsessed with Koi tattoos but I'm excited to get to work on the Deer illustration. The way how I envision it in my mind isn't necessarily spring themed, it might end up with the same color scheme as the piece in my blog banner, but the composition I have in mind was inspired by a panel in a Batman graphic novel. I need to go buy it because the artwork in it is truly amazing.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Rockers to Swallow

I was browsing through last.fm yesterday and came across the Yeah Yeah Yeahs page. I never got into them when their huge hit Maps was out, but I listened to some tracks from their IS IS EP and fell in love with this song and Down Boy. I ended up buying the EP off of iTunes for $4.99 I love how raw the vocals sound at times, the tracks are really great overall.

Second koi piece is about 99% done, all the detail work in the fish scales took like 8 hours total to do or something ridiculous. It looks a million times more detailed than the previous koi pieces that I've done.