Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Busy few months...



Things have bee busy around the Condon household as of late. With a daughter in grade one french immersion, a wife with a job that demands lots of after hours work, Christmas right around the corner, and myself currently juggling two animation contracts and a band... Free time to sketch is at an all time premium. It seems everything I've drawn for the past few months has been for something specific. Not for myself. Which is great , but you don't usually get to do any free form drawing with commissioned work. :) This piece is from an un-used poster design for my band. I had the idea of doing it up like an Art Nouveau print. It never got finished. For various reasons... This was as far as it got.  I might re-visit the concept again for another poster.


Speaking of Band posters... My wife and I were just nominated for Visual Artists of the Year for the 2012 Music PEI awards. It's a great honour that belongs mostly to my wife. She does the heavy lifting. I'm just here to bounce ideas off of and to contribute the odd illustration. It's great to see her get some recognition for the time and effort she puts into making us look so good. My band , Bad Habits, also got nominated for two awards. Weekend Warrior, and Entertainer of the Year. Needless to say we were pretty excited. We were told that it's unheard of for a band to get nominated for Entertainer of the Year without an album. We didn't expect it for sure. But we're thrilled none the less. The Weekend Warrior award is for the hard working bands that try hard to get their music out to people at the bars and clubs week in and week out. We've definitely done that.:). And.. It's a public vote open to everyone. So feel free to drop by the link below and throw a vote our way. You can also stop by http://www.afewbadhabits.com/ to check out the band in more detail.


Happy Holidays everyone!


http://www.musicpei.com/music-pei-week/ballot-public.php

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Poster post??

Wow. I don't post here anymore do I? Life's been busy as of late. With the band and the family, things get pretty busy pretty fast. But every now and then I do get the chance to draw. This is an illustration I did for a band poster. My wife April has been doing all the poster designs for us since we've started gigging and she's been doing an amazing job. You can check out some of the earlier ones she's done for us here..


http://www.afewbadhabits.com/p/posters.html


This time we worked together. She did up a comp for me to follow using some photos of the band, and I set out to do a bad Drew Struzan impression. :) I did this Grey tone illustration and she took it into photoshop and colored it. Then a little type setting in Illustrator and voila. One poster. The illustration got a little rushed at the end, and you can see it come apart at the seams in areas, but it was a good learning experience. I'm not sure I'd jump right into doing another poster illustration at this very moment, but I think someday I'd like to take another stab at it. 




Thursday, February 24, 2011

So.. Where the hell have I been?

Well. Lets just say I got a few "Bad Habits" this past year. My last post was  April 1st 2010. Right about that time I joined a band. We're called "Bad Habits". Our first practice together as a group was April 12th 2010. And things have been crazy since then. 

My initial thoughts were that maybe by November or December we'd be playing a gig here or there. By late July we were in a studio practicing hard for our first gig coming on Aug 5th. We got to set up in the studio and record our full show through the same mixing board that Radiohead recorded Creep on. How surreal is that. All before we had even played out first live show. 

Well, we hit that first gig running and haven't really looked back. By the time the end of December rolled around we had played more gigs than we ever thought we would and played an original song live on CBC radio. On top of that, we were set to go into record a demo on Jan 2nd. Now the recordings we made live off the floor that day are fully mixed and off to the local radio stations. Original songs on the radio before we hit our first birthday is beyond anything I could have hoped for with this band. It's all a bit surreal. We're gearing up to record a full album sometime this year. So far that's going really well. Fingers are crossed on that.

On top of that I've still been animating. I've done some freelance jobs here and there, but the band has eaten up all of my free time. So no blog for me :). 

I've embedded our demo recordings in a player on the sidebar below. Check them out. 

 Go like us on facebook
  • www.facebook.com/BadHabitsBluesBand


  • Go check us out on reverbnation.com
  • www.reverbnation.com/badhabitsblues


  •  And check out our homepage too while you're at it :)

  • www.afewbadhabits.com



  • Spread the word... If the word is good. :) And if any of you happen to live in Charlottetown, PE... Call you local radio station and request us. ;) Well... That's about all the pimping I can stomach. :).

    Cheers!

    Thursday, April 01, 2010

    Digi-doodles...



    Just some random warm-up doodling done with Sketchbook.
    I've been drawing the Kellogg's Characters alot these last few days. This is a by-product of that. This isn't how they actually look, just my bad interpretation of them..

    Tuesday, March 23, 2010

    Bruiser.


    So I did this little sketch in the corner of a page I was doodling on the other day. And I kinda like it. Not so much the drawing per say.. But the character. A real bruiser. A guy with one eye slight closed over and an obviously previously broken nose due to his love of fisticuffs. So I though I'd explore the character further. Not really this exact design. But the character. Here's what I came up with.

    Just playing with the features and proportions.
    At this point I thought he'd just be a giant of a man. Tall, tree trunk forearms, and a barrel of a torso.I figured he could be one of those guys that enjoys the intimidation process that leads up to the scuffling. I've meet guys like this when I used to go to the bars. I always tried to make sure they thought of me as a friend.:).
    Here I tried to make him a bit more compact. Both in overall torso structure and facial proportions. I thought he'd have thick sturdy hands with really prominent knuckles. The kind of knuckles that are good at breaking things. Like noses... Or walls. Hands that looked like they could really rip a person apart.
    He'd have to get angry eventually.
    I guess this drawing is based of the one I did above. Only in reverse.:) I should have photoshopped them onto one page so they were beckoning to each other. That might have tarnished their tough guy persona's though. I mean, his tight shirt here does make him look more like a player than a tough guy.
    And Hey! Here's a bonus weirdo drawing! You're reward for schlocking through my ramblings and bad drawings.

    Sunday, March 21, 2010

    More random junk..

    Sometimes I draw really messed up animal type creatures as well. For no real reason either.
    Rooster I guess???


    Some sort of duck?



    Hmmmm. Platypus maybe?

    And of course my cat.. Wearing some sort or vest? A natural combination right?
    What's better than a human with an animal nose?? A human with animal ears...

    This guy is so happy to have broken fingers.



    I really didn't set out to draw a bad knock off of Silver from Treasure Planet when I started this doodle. Seriously. I didn't...


    I have no idea what this is supposed to be. But this is a pretty good example of what I do when I'm just drawing without purpose. I just make a few lines and just see where they take me. Sometimes the results are unexpected, or unsettling, or just plain unwanted. :)

    More Faces...

    More of the same mindless doodles..








    Friday, March 19, 2010

    Faces galore...

    When I sit down and draw mindlessly in the evenings, I always end up drawing faces. I'm not 100% sure why. I think it's because there's always a lot of character that can be displayed in the face. And I'm not very good at doing that. At pushing the expressions and making them readable and appealing. I also tend to repeat myself a lot. Use the same nose or shapes for every drawing. I'm hoping that by just drawing alot of different faces I can break away from my normal tendencies and maybe explore some areas I normally wouldn't. Or who knows... I could just draw a lot of the same things over and over...






    Proudly carrying on the Canadian tradition of Humans with animal noses. ;)





    More to come...