Can you spare a like?
Hey. It's been a busy few months. I've been working steadily and balancing animation, music, and family. It's great fun. I recently finished a contract animating some Mort Drucker comic strip for MAD. That was a blast. My band recently performed for an international media conference in Whitehorse too. That was a crazy experience. What a beautiful place.
Anyway. Enough about me. This post is for my wife. :) She was recently told that the program she teaches at the college was being suspended and thus, she was being laid off. The college she worked at is making drastic cuts to it's arts programs which is very unfortunate. At the end of this month she will officially be a low paid freelancer like myself. :) But there's a slight silver lining. April recently submitted an image for a contest put on by the Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival. This is a great festival that we were wanting to go to, but due to everything that happened recently we realized it wasn't going to happen. Well here submission is among the finalists chosen for public voting. The prize is two full VIP passes to everything happening during the festival. This would be such a great spirit booster. If you can spare a few moments you can vote for her by following the link below and liking her image. You'll have my eternal thanks for doing so. ;) Fingers crossed. This is her image below.
Thanks!
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151007321866344&set=a.10151007320591344.417148.9406661343&type=1&theater
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
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.
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!
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..
