Jelly Art

I had been thinking recently of trying to work on some different pieces instead of relying on the same themes--movie posters, paperback book covers, etc.--that I have been.

So when one of my old Kubert School buddies, artist Matt Luxich, emailed to invite me to participate on a new artists blog called Jelly of the Month, I accepted.

JOTM is a collective of about a dozen artists, all with varying styles, and each month a new theme is posted and the artists contribute a piece related to that theme, and it all goes up on the blog.

July's theme was "zombies" and I had first started working on a piece featuring a sort of sexy babe/zombie combo, and in a short while I had almost all of it completed--a b/w shot of a good-looking woman with part of her head missing, clearly blown away in some sort of zombie vs. human battle. I had her eyes tilting up towards the missing bit o' cranium, in a vain attempt to understand it all.

But as it neared completion, I was unhappy with it--it was a gruesome zombie piece, sure, but it wasn't anything more than that. And even though I've seen about a zillion horror movies, just looking at a gory image with no context bores me to tears, so I ditched the whole thing and started over.

I had had this other zombie illustration for a poster I did for Exhumed Films, but he was just a tiny, tiny element of it, so I decided I wanted to build something funny and absurd around that. It took some pushing and pulling, but eventually this piece turned into a 50s-style(again with the retro stuff!) PSA-type poster warning kids to keep an eye out for zombies. Once I had all those elements I knew this was what I had wanted for my debut on JOTM.

I submitted the piece to the site-runner, artist Mike Atiyeh, and luckily he really liked it and posted it up on the blog, hopefully the first of many fun pieces I'll get to do for them. I also hope I'll get inspired by the other fine artists on the blog, and incorporate some of those elements into my work and make it better and more varied.

Note: Upon further inspection of the piece, I realized I had made a completely unintentional joke on this zombie PSA poster. I had put the phrase "keep an eye out" on there since it seemed like the kind of bland warning you'd get from the government(ironic, since I'm pretty sure current Head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff is, in fact, a zombie himself). I added the arrow as a cheery, too-obvious hint as to what a zombie might look like.

Of course, what I didn't realize--I swear--was that "keep an eye out" is pointing right to the missing eye of the zombie! I had completely missed it, but it looks like it was nothing but intentional.

Weird.