Old Dirty Bastard and SXSW

Super excited to be doing regular illustrations for Philadelphia Weekly again, this time for Brian Macmanus's Stereotypewriter column.

First two are about all the awesome new corporate sponsors at SXSW and the Legacy of Tastykakes, Old Dirty Bastard and the rise of Gucci Mane, whose new album "The Return Of Mister Zone 6" I've been listening to non stop for a week.

On The Radar 2005-2009

Before my hot dog days I illustrated a weekly column for PW called On The Radar written by the legendary and hilarious Steven Wells. Starting with an article about gay republican cowboys in 2005 I cranked these out every week. Topics ranged from politics (George Bush as a Trekkie with Boobs??) to music (Lots of articles about how Belle & Sebastian and Henry Rollins are terrible) sports, pop culture, and how Americans were all secretly gay 400 pound gun toting rednecks.


A lot of the old drawings make me cringe.. I still worked in a kitchen back then and some of these were done in 3 hours on a tuesday morning, half an hour before press time and 45 minutes before I had to be in chef whites pounding out 75 tuna carpaccios. One day I'll archive all the illustrations and link back to the original articles, until then here's some of my favorites.






Steven passed away in 2009 and I don't think I really understood how lucky I was to be illustrating his stuff until reading the stories about his life and work that poured in from all over the world.

Along with being a blast to read and draw Steven's rants each week, illustrating On The Radar was really the project that pushed me into becoming an actual professional full time illustrator, so a huge thanks to Steven and art directors Sara Green and Tim Gough for actually letting this stuff go to print.


Check out the PW archives for more-

Philadelphia Weekly - Steven Wells 1960-2009

LA TACO PRINTS

BIG 16" X 16" Taco prints available for a limited time at LATACO.COM!!!

Willamette Week Cheap Eats Guide

So for Willamette Week's annual Cheap Eats Guide they asked me to do a hot dog T-shirt design, that they actually printed and put on a dude that sort of looks like me and squirted some mustard on him. Awesome.

The photos were all shot by photographer Chris Ryan.


Along with the photo on the pull-out Cheap Eats Guide they also used a full color version of the design for the cover of the issue.



Read the article at Willamette Week!

La Taco Madness 2011

Recently finished this illustration for LA TACO's 2011 "Taco Madness" which is a March Madness bracket style competition pitting 32 of Los Angeles best tacos against each other.

Checking out photo after photo of LA tacos made me pretty hungry and jealous of the taco scene out there. Anyway it was awesome to go outside the hot dog zone, some prints of the art will be available soon!

Check out the bracket at LATACO.com.

Rachael Ray Hot Dog Bracket

Last year, Every Day With Rachael Ray magazine asked Serious Eats (website I do the Hot Dog Of The Week illustrations for) to do a basketball-bracket style "best hot dog in the country" article and I was lucky enough to be a part of it.


While Serious Eats head honchos Ed Levine and Adam Kuban were in Arizona, Chicago, New York and the West Coast I was driving across the South hitting 5, 6, 7 hot dog joints a day. Along with eating and writing I also did a bunch of illustrations for the article, just published in this month's magazine.





You can check out the bracket here or grab the magazine but I wanted to post the full size paintings and bunch of stuff that they didn't use.






These quick napkin sketches (I did about 30 of them) were going to be photographed with some actual hot dogs but they ended up not being used.


Also not used was a bunch of lettering for the different sections of the article, a lot of which was fashioned after the awesome hand-painted signs at Angelo's Coney Island in Flint, Michigan. Check out my recent post on Angelo's for more photos.




Also some spot illustrations of "hot dog drink pairings" like Cheerwine with Pulliam's Slaw Dog and Moxie with a Flo's dog.

Much thanks to Serious Eats and everyone at Rachael Ray magazine. It was incredible to illustrate a story I had actually experienced and something I'd love to do again, whether it be hot dogs or something else entirely.

One of them is right

Another short "Said What?" comic, see the whole thing here.

Edited by Benn Ray of Atomic Books, these comics are based on overheard
conversations and appear once a week in Baltimore's free daily "B paper".

Check out the archives including lots of great ones by Noah Van Sciver and Jordan Jeffries.