the yin and the yang.

i had an interesting day.

i worked from 9am until 10pm, and that really wasn't any fun. missed spending time with the family, relaxing after a normal sized stressful day, etc.

but in an effort to balance out the boo-hoos, the cosmos delivered unto me 3 things:

montana flash!

this is one of those overly-expensive rock band figurines that are carved from ceramic by a 3d sculpting/painting machine. and that alone is pretty keen. but even cooler is that this character is a doppleganger for my father circa 1970. my dad was nicknamed "montana flash" (hence the custom shirt graphics i created for him) and it was a shirt design i made for my dad's birthday a decade ago that piqued my interest into the legacy that is, montana flash.

so that was pretty cool.

and on top of that, i finally received my monster league baseball playing cards!

the pre-orders are shipping out, click here to order yours today!

and lastly, my wife surprised me with new tank tops. this is fantastic solely because of the unexplainable lack of them in our area outside of the summer months. i know i live in wisconsin, but there weren't even any wife-beaters in the walmarts... that's absurd. so the 3 month wait is over.

you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life. the facts of life.

early adventures in design.

i began design by simply playing around in mspaint. creating random internet pictures trying too hard to make internet friends.

one of my favorite early mspaint designs was for my dad's birthday. i had taken an image of his head, slapped on his (early) nickname with some "typography skills" and made some shirts for the family.

i no longer have the still image (and the business that originally printed the shirts lost the screen) so this annoying animated gif will have to suffice.



a year later, my mspaint skills had increased slightly, and my dad had another birthday, so the branding continued:



after seeing some of the random designs i had put together and made into shirts, a blockbuster coworker (i worked there for 7 years out of a 9 year video store career) who was in school for design started a fire under my ass suggesting i get into school for graphic design.

a year later, i decided to go for it and started some schooling. here is the second design i made for school, mind you, we had yet to touch the macs or any adobe programming, so this is still very much an mspaint project:



not the best looking work ever, but i'm still proud of my roots.