Vacuum Table!

JAMES - So I finally built my own Vacuum Table for screenprinting. I've recently acquired an awesome extra studio space, which I'm sharing with my buddy Brent Fleury (great photographer), and I'm turning my half of it into a print shop for my own personal use. Psyched.
Anyway, using the great plans of AndyMac (which you can download here, if you wish), I built the table from scratch. Got me a bunch of large plywood, some formica, drill bits, screws, glue and all that stuff. With the help of Brent's table saw, I cut it all out how I needed, and began to set the formica to the top piece of the table.
After that, I drew a grid of 1" squares and began drilling holes - 1,827 if I remember correctly.



Some pics of the drilling process. It took forever. My drill is shit - waiting for the batteries to re-charge was the worst part.


Here's a shot from outside at night - inside, you can just barely see that I have a ton of weight on the table, waiting for the second layer to set.



This is what the second layer looks like - staggered strips to allow the vacuum suction to travel through the whole table and suck in through the holes on top.


Finally, I set the third layer, which is just a flat bottom. Added my hinges and went to Ikea for some table legs - one's that can go at an angle to assist my back during printing. I hooked up the Vacuum, and it totally works great. The finished size is 4' x 4' - so I can do some nice sized prints with it. Can't wait to get started....

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Winter

TOM- It got prety darn cold this last week here in New York. Those who know me know that I'm not a real winter person, I much prefer the warm weather. I'm going to try and make the best of it this year though. Perhaps drawing pretty pictures with a winter theme could be my way of making nice with the season. Anyway, here's my first attempt...

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Buzz Buzz

TOM- Just messing around with a sketch I did. Trying to play around with some textures and coloring techniques while listening to the Buzzcocks...

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Fuzzy Dress Part 2

TOM - And here's another...

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Fuzzy Dress

TOM - Playing with some China marker and ink on nicer paper. More to come. Thanks for checking in!

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"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash"

TOM - Here is a new drawing I did recently. It will be featured in A.G.A.S.T, the Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour. The tour will be going on the weekend of October 17th and 18th from 1-6pm. A ton of places in Brooklyn will be participating. This particular piece will be at
Mobile Mutts 257 Third Ave. Check out the link above for more info on the tour and a map of all the places participating. Sounds like it's gonna be a fun weekend!

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Strips!

TOM - Here are some strips I did way back in the winter time. Either one, or both of these will be published in the next Dapper Chaps Quarterly. The theme for the issue was 'strips', we were free to interprete that word any way we liked. I decided to go with a couple strips about strips.

Check out the new Dapper Chaps website for info about the upcoming issue or if your interested in purchasing past issues. Happy weekend, everyone!

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All things red

TOM- My last post was strawberries and roses, this one is hearts, what's next, unicorns and bunnies? Man, I'm gettin' soft. Anyway, here's a new one that I worked on little by little over some time. As I was coloring this one, I realized it shares a very similar composition to my last 'strawberry' post. Maybe it's an unconscious attempt at creating a series, or maybe it's just me being a lazy artists...

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Happy Labor Day!

TOM - Here's a new one I've recently finished. Those strawberries keep finding their way into my drawings, don't know what that's all about...
Hope everyone's having a great Labor Day Weekend, I sure am. It feels great to still have a tan in September!

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M.I.A.

TOM - I dissapeared from this blog for a little while, but hopefully I will get back to some more regular posting soon! Keep checkin' in!

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Belikos

TOM - Here's a quick post. Did this poster for Belikos. Check them out in Brooklyn on Wednesday.

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Let the battle begin!

TOM- I recently did this illustration for Silver Sound's Music Video Film Festival and Band Battle.
I provided the illustration and Liz Nebiolo provided the design and layout. If yr into music and wanna have a good time, check it out, it should be fun!

Here is the illustration on it's own.

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Covered!

TOM - I finally contributed a piece to Covered! I picked one of my favorite Archie covers, come o think of it, one of my favorite comic book covers. I tried to get the essence of the cover while adding my own twist. Check out my Covered post here. Hope I was able to do it some justice.

Here's he original drawn by none other than Dan DeCarlo, one of my all time favorites. God, he's incredible!

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Nerve!

TOM - Here are some recent illustrations from a weekly gig I've been doing for Nerve.com. The feature is called "My First Time" and every week someone submits a piece about how they lost their virginity. They're all really short and to the point, so they're worth checking out. AND, if you have a funny, or somewhat interesting story about how you lost your virginity, send it over to Nerve.com and I'll illustrate it. Yippy! The above image is my favorite so far, it's from week two. I had alot of fun with the guys tattoos. Below are the rest of them.

Week one.

Week three.

This week.

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Philadelphia City Paper!

TOM - A couple Sundays ago I was in Philly with James and Steph enjoying a day of art, tattoos, and the sun. The next day, in the midst of moving into new apartment and finishing up pieces for a show (which I will post about soon), I got a call coincidentally from Philadelphia City Paper to do an upcoming cover for them. They had a pretty wacky idea for their Book Quarterly issue which seemed like it would be an interesting challenge for me since I don't normally incorporate animals into my illustrations. They wanted the animals to look like animals but be dressed and acting like humans at a cocktail party. I wound up having a lot of fun and got into drawing each animal's different human-like qualities.


This is my third time doing a cover for Philadelphia City Paper and they are super laid back and easy to work with. Above is what the final print version looks like. Some slight changes, but I'm still very happy with the way it turned out.

And here are some process shots. Above is the black and white version. I wanted to keep it as clean as possible at this stage with very little shading and spotted blacks, because I knew I was going to take care of that when I stared to color. Also, the grass in the background was done separately in acrylic, then added in Photoshop.

And here is the original sketch. It was based off of a rough sketch that the designer sent me. There was more of a pyramid composition going on at this point. As you can see, there were alot of changes made between this point and the final, but this definitely helped me visualize it early on.

Well, that's all for now. If anyone out there lives in the Philly area, don't forget to pick one up!

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Bump in the night

TOM - Here is this weeks New York Press illustration. It's about loud sex downstairs neighboors. It's a good story, check it out here.

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Emulating

Detail

Detail

Detail

TOM - Here is one I've been working on and off for a while. I came up with the concept a few months ago while I was looking at a lot of classic pin up illustration. It was a challenging exercise to try and create my own classic looking pin ups for the posters on the wall and in the books on the floor. I drew them separately so I could treat each one as it's own illustration. I am always amazed by the incredible talent of guys like Gil Elvgren, Al Buell, Fritz Willis and many others. The idea of "emulation" in this piece not only goes for the woman in the illustration trying to emulate her pin up idols, but also me in some way paying homage to an incredible era in illustration history.

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Morning Joe

TOM - Anybody know this guy, Joe Scarborough? He's got a show on MSNBC called Morning Joe, I watch it online 'cause I don't have cable. It's weird because I really don't like him as a person and I disagree with most of his views, but for some reason I really like the show, it's entertaining and a real conversational way to get your news. He's got one of those jerk faces though that I can't stand, so I was compelled to draw it. If anybody knows who he is, let me know if you think it looks like him.

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Women

TOM - Here's some sketchbook stuff. The top one is from a life drawing session about a month ago. The bottom one is some chick from my head.

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Charlie

TOM- Wow, long time no post!
I've been doing these little portraits of random celebs lately in my sketchbook, try to do one about everyday. I'm not going for the pop stars or movie stars (at least not yet) but rather people that for whatever reason interest me in some way. So far it's been mainly TV broadcast people. Here's the man, mister Charlie Rose. I love this guy. His show is probably one of the best on TV and anybody that is involved in time consuming activities (such as making art) should really check out his website and pull up one of the hundreds of interviews he's done over the many years and just listen while you work. I guarantee you will be thoroughly entertained as well as inspired. I personally recommend his interviews with writers and chefs, but there's a shit load of topics that he covers. He's truly a curious dude, he asks the questions you want answered!

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Model Drawing

TOM - Here are some high(or low)lights from the past couple months of model drawing.

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Read all about it!

TOM - Here's a new promo piece I did recently. The idea behind it is about how newspapers are sadly becoming obsolete with the Internet being the fastest, most accessible way for people to get their news. Due to news blogs, podcast, and video feeds, newspapers are quickly becoming a thing of the past. I see much less newspaper reading on the train and much more ipod listening than ever before and I must say it's actually very sad. As an illustrator, the rush that I get from seeing my work printed on paper alongside an article is something I hope I never goes away. Websites and blogs are cool, but being able to look at an illustration up close in a newspaper or magazine and admire an artists brushwork or how the illustration works within the composition of the page is something that you don't get from seeing someones work on a web page. I'm sure writers feel the same way about having their work printed in a newspaper, since everybody has a blog nowadays, it's just gotta feel more "official" for a writer to see their work in a newspaper. And beyond all of that, on a purely aesthetic tip, newspapers just look cool! The shape and size of them, the smell of ink on newsprint, aside from comic books they're really the next best thing. I'm all for keeping up with the changing times, I think being able to get up to date news at any moment is an awesome idea, I just hope there continues to be a place for newspapers in that future, maybe "green" newspapers, articles printed on recycled paper would be kinda neat.

Here's a quick look at my process for this piece. Above are the final inks, I inked this with a #2 Isabey brush, Windsor Newton India Ink and some pens for the finer detail.

I had a real hard time settling on a color scheme for this piece, so a big shout out goes out to everybody that helped me, including James Flames. As you can see above are some of the alternate versions I went through. In the end, I'm very happy with the final piece.

So everybody go out there tomorrow and buy a newspaper, they look alot cooler than iphones!

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Flying!

TOM- Steph and I went to the park the other day and tried to fly. We hovered above the grass for a while, it was awesome. We got some weird looks from people, but they were just jealous that they couldn't fly. Haterz.

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