Dreamosaurs in Technicolor

It's not often that I feel compelled to do color work on my black and white drawings, but something about Dreamosaurs just called for some color play.  The original idea was to do a sepia tone over the full image just to add another layer of value, but once I got going on it I felt like a deep dreamy blue made more sense.  Photoshop makes it so easy to play with variations and layers of value.  The 'replace color' option is invaluable for me during this process, as I can drag the slider bars and see different palette options in real time without doing any permanent damage to the original.

All that said, I still have the itch to do a sepia version of some of my other black and whites.  In so many words, I'd like to push my illustrations a little further without making a jarring switch to full-color. Monochrome is just too beautiful to me!

Prints of these are available at my Etsy Art shop

As an aside and in the interest of scary children's media, I have to repost a quote by Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) that my good friend and illustrator Aja Wells shared... 


"...from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustration as best they can.  And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis.  It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things." - Maurice Sendak

Dreamosaurs / Dinos & Dogs

Norman Rockwell said "if it isn't working, put a dog in it."  After my menacing 'Tar Pits at La Brea' piece, I wanted to do something a bit less intense and generally more accessible.  There's definitely an interesting, different energy juxtaposing the massive menace of a T-Rex with the cute and cuddly west highland terrier.

At 18"x18", this is one of my bigger pen & ink efforts.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that, with 3 or 4 coats of gesso as a base, I can use my scraper tool much like I would on a claybord piece... pulling up ink to make corrections or value adjustments.  It takes more time on the front end to get the board prepped, but it certainly offers a versatile alternative to pre made scratchboards.

Kettle Art 'Know Show' on the Deep Ellum Art Walk

I'm showing some recent scratchboard & silkscreen work at The Know Show @ Kettle Art in Dallas.   It's a one night only show, and we're the premiere stop on the Deep Ellum Spring Art Walk.  Don't miss it!

Featuring works by Brad Albright, Kasey Jones Parker, Cheryl Baker, Tyson Summers, Dan Colcer, Frank Campagna, Clint Scism, Corey Godfrey, Brian A Crawford, Cabe Booth, George Wallace III, and more!

Saturday, April 21st, 6-10pm

2714 Elm, Dallas, TX 75226

Kung Fu Strike - Master Mo Munny custom vinyl toy

7Sixty Games recruited me alongside Dallas artist/illustrators Cody Phillips and Jason Chalker to design custom Munny toys to help promote their new XBOX Live game, Kung Fu Strike: The Warrior's Rise.  

Following the claybound madness that was my custom Donkey Kong sculpt for Vinyl Thoughts 2, I wanted to bring the best of both worlds and do just a bit of custom sculpting over the blank vinyl Munny base.  This was a hell of a lot of fun, actually, and I'm anxious to keep working in this vein for my vinyl toy shows.

Click the picture below to see the Facebook album of all 3 of ours...

Albright's April Art Wall at Buon Giorno Grapevine

 

Come visit Buon Giorno Coffee House in Grapevine, TX for April's Art Wall, featuring 18 Brad Albright original pen & scratchboard illustrations.

Featuring fresh coffee from around the world, roasted right in the shop, Buon Giorno Coffee House in Grapevine features open mic Tuesdays at 8pm, live music Saturday nights at 8pm, and monthly rotating art displays featuring local fine artists. 

Silkscreening Posters

I've finally made the leap from screen-printing on textiles to paper!  

I have two designs ready-to-roll as limited-edition, signed and numbered prints.

These are printed white on black, with waterbased ink on 100% recycled, acid-free paper, and are available on my Etsy Shop. 

I'm really enjoying this so far, and am looking forward to keeping it in my quiver as a creative outlet.  It also seems like a really logical way for my to translate my original black and white drawings into something that can be displayed and sold at a lower price than an original drawing or scratchboard piece.  Being hand-printed, they manage to retain a sense of originality.  Plus it's just fun to put out a series of limited pieces.

I'm also displaying and selling these in matted frames at a few shows in Dallas... 

Deep Ellum Arts Festival and Attack of The $50 Art Show to name a pair.

Finally, here's a link to my previous post about DIY screen printing and my home setup..

Life-Size Mariachi Illustration

This is a life-size mariachi illustration I completed recently for a nation-wide, multi-brand marketing campaign for Cinco De Mayo and beyond.  The client will be able to customize the boards with their various alcohol brands and have customers take their photo with it at restaurants, bars, and retail stores.  I'd done a number of these in the past for Saint Patty's day, 4th of July, etc, but this was the first to encompass two figures and stand a full 6 feet.  Fun!

Donkey Kong Un-Tied - self-promotional illustration

This is a self-promotional piece that I drew up as a companion to my Donkey Kong sculpture for Vinyl Thoughts 2 in Dallas.

With sculpture and vinyl toys being new creative avenues for me, I thought I'd take the opportunity to tie it all back to the line art drawings I consider my primarily discipline and make double impressions at the show.  So while I worked on my Donkey Kong sculpture I also drew this up in my signature pen on scratchboard style to print on self-promotional postcards and hand out at the show.  I had a lot of fun with this one!

Donkey Kong - Custom Sculpey Toy

Here's my final custom Donkey Kong piece for Vinyl Thoughts 2: The Next Level-- video game themed art show in Dallas, March 17th.

Most artists worked on a blank vinyl character base, such as a Munny, but I crazily decided to sculpt mine from scratch.  With little sculpting experience to speak of, it proved a lengthy process for me.  But the challenge was well worth attacking, and so far as I could tell, the piece was well received at the show!

I built up the 11" figure with a wire and foil armature, primarily to save on clay but also to give it a structural core.  To retain a small sense of 'toy' in the piece, I left a bit of the flexible wire armature extending from the body so that the head would be able to reposition and look in different directions.

I used Sculpey Firm polymer clay to build up the surface, and after some debating, I decided to leave the surface smooth rather than giving it a ridged fur surface.  That served both to stay true to the vinyl toy theme of the show, and to allow me to use my signature style of pen and ink shading to give it more detail once I painted it with a brown/grey acrylic base coat.

All in all, the process took me far longer than I expected (and longer than I care to mention), but now that I've attacked a large sculpture project like this I feel more enabled to work with sculpture moving forward.  I'm looking ahead to do some simpler vinyl toy pieces using a preformed base (like a 'Munny') to save time and provide some parameters to the project.  But I'm also looking forward to doing some original sculpts, but keeping them at a more manageable size so I can start to play with detailing the clay itself.  

Here's another shot of the final piece...