Special Guest Christian Perez!

Some shots of Christian's visit. We will post video of him doing the first sitting of an awesome Geisha tattoo on our podcast this fall. Thanks for looking!
Keith

Christian's scratchboard for the Hyperspace Studio's show and book.

Sex and Science....

Sex and Science....
Here's my finished painting for the "Sex and Science" show at Bear and Bird Gallery. Watercolor and gauche on cold press board. 7x10-ish.... Prints available.
Thanks for looking!
Keith Ciaramello

Back to School Clothes...

I know it's gay, but we dressed up the dog....
Dino "McLovin" goes back to school..

Scratchboard

Scratchboard for Hyperspace Studio show

AN-I-MAL!

Here are some shots of the piece I did for the Muppet Rawk show that went down last night. If you didn't know already, the theme was to take an album cover of your choice, and replace it with muppets. I'm a huge Grover fan, and was pretty hell bent on doing a painting of, who I think, is one of the most underrated comical geniuses of our time. I thought, cool, I'll do Grover in place of the Eddie character from Iron Maiden's Piece of Mind cover. Done.
Not quite.
When I flew out for my art show at Keith's tattoo shop over the summer, I was telling him about the Muppet Rawk show, and the idea I had for the cover I wanted to paint. Immediately Keith was like, "No man, it has to be Animal!" As he was going into more detail about it, I started to get a mental image of it right away. I couldn't argue with the guy. He was right on all points. That cover was tailor made for Animal. Sorry Grover. Your time will come.



The pencils for this were pretty loose. No need to get detailed, because the thought process was already kind of done by the original artist that did the cover. Derek Riggs. The shading and palette work is already figured out, all that needed to be done is add Animal. Easier said than done, but still fun to execute.

I know it's hard to find an 80's album cover that doesn't have chains in it, but I'm telling you right now, no more paintings with chains for a long time. I didn't realize how much detail went into the original cover until I started really picking it apart. Derek Riggs is a madman. I left out half the detail he put in. Every link in the original was totally rendered out and had a secondary reflective light source. Yeah, real good idea Keith. Thanks. Ha!

'Till next time.............

Muppet Rawk

Reposting some pics from the Muppet Rawk show that Keith and I were in. Enjoy.

For those that didn't make it out to the Muppet Rawk show last night, here are some pics for you to check out. Lots of people came out to Ouch My Eye gallery to check out the art, and considering that people were still there around midnight, when I left, it looked like everyone had a good time.


The guy pointing the camera in the above pic is Lawrence Ruelos, one of the art pimps responsible for putting together the show. The other art pimp that had a hand in putting the Muppet mayhem, together was Dev Madan. That's him below, um, pointing me to the bar, yeah, that's what he's doing.

What kind of show update would this be with out the obligatory, overhead, gallery shot? You can just make out the projector in the top left corner. They were showing Muppet show clips all night which added to all the madness.



Most of the art was 12"x 12". (album cover size of course) Besides myself, only one other artist did 24"x24" paintings. You can kind of make out my painting on the left wall on the end.
I didn't get good pics of all the pieces, so here are a few shots of just a hand full of the paintings.



Here's Jordan Kotzebue riffing on a G'n'R' album cover with the Electric Mayhem Band. Easily the most represented set of characters of the night.


Todd Lovering did a great piece by painting right on the actual album cover. The colors were so perfectly matched on this thing. Todd is a madman.

There were also a handful of digital pieces. Travis Kotzebue did his take of a Hendrix cover.


Dev and I were the only ones that did Iron Maiden covers. Here's his take on the self titled Iron Maiden with Bert in place of the Eddie character that's always on their album covers.


Jaime Burton did a killer AC/DC cover with the Electric Mayhem.



I was glad to see Grover represented in the show. Karin did a killer job on this Def Leppard cover, High 'n' Dry.



Keith, from Kustom Kulture Gallery in New York did a cool digital piece of Kiss's Rock and Roll Over.


Jay Z (no, not the rapper, duh) threw out some Purple Rain action. Just glad he didn't bring doves to the show for the unveiling of his painting. If that was the case, I would hope that they would be muppet doves.

Bill McEvoy did a cool Elmo vs Motorhead peice. Apologies to the artists who's names I don't know. Except for Ricky's Police cover with digital representations of his muppets.


I was talking to Joe Kresoja about his Dio cover, and I think he agrees with me. Next time, NO COVERS WITH CHAINS! Sucks to draw, and sucks to paint. You'll see what I mean when you see the Maiden cover I did.

Another digital piece done for the show was Memo Diaz doing GnR. Robert Williams did the original cover. I thought Memo was crazy for taking that on, but he came through. Hard to see form the pic, but there are little Zoot characters flying around Animals's head.

All in all, a great show. Thanks to Ouch my Eye, and everyone that came out for the show. Always good to see some new and old faces. I'll post the piece I did for the show soon. Still putting together the scanned pieces. Not easy scanning a 24"x "24 painting on a tiny scanner and then piecing it together. Check back soon for that...........

-A

Itchy-Scratchy

Itchy-Scratchy...Scratchboard for Hyperspace studios show 5x7.
Thanks for looking!
Keith Ciaramello

Muppet Show...

All Done!Artists were given the opportunity to take famous rock covers and replace them with the Muppets!
Thanks for looking!

Fresh Paint

Bonneville Speed Week

Rock and Roll Molars..

Almost there....Work in Progress for the Muppet show. Artists were given the opportunity to take famous rock covers and replace them with the muppets!
Thanks for looking!

Sex and Science WIP

Messing around with the lighting in Photoshop. The BG is watercolor. I'll finish with acrylics I think. Thanks for looking!
K

In Progress

Here's an "in progress" shot of something I'm working on. I'm planning on adding texture to the alien head and a couple of little things to the background.

Something lil' different

Same trpe of art just tried a different medium

Rat City Rollergirls Poster

Well, until Keith tells me to stop posting stuff, I'll keep trying to remember to put up these works in progress.

Been dying to post this latest piece off the drawing board. Got asked to do the Rat City Roller Girls poster awhile back. I finally got my copies of the screen printed poster last night at the bought. I didn't think they'd be that big. They ended up looking pretty good coming in at twenty four inches tall. Not too shabby.

They asked for a Tiki themed poster. Here's the b/w version above, done with pigmas.



After drawing all the little sketches below, I sketched up the rough sketch above.


Not sure if you can make heads or tales of all these little preliminary roughs, but that's pretty much where the initial poster ideas were worked out, before it went to the final colored stage. I'm a slut for art books and love seeing the early rough sketches, so I thought I'd post a few here. Enjoy.

Scratchboard practice run

this is done on a scratch board, which totally messes me up. I'm not used to doing things backwards. but anyway, it's still worth sharing.

Had to see for myself...