Lucha 2 and a West Side Story...

Here's an alternate version of "Lucha' with a more cinematic feel.
Initially I was thinking of a background image (maybe a knife fight or urban fire-escape etc ) and pulled up some gang movie clips on YouTube for ideas, including a few from the film adaptation of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. Instead I ended up keeping it simple and just floated everything on a black background. Maybe there will be an updated 'Sharks and Jets' Bad Vamp image in the future. : )

Speaking of the West Side- No, I wasn't part of a gang , but I did meet Leonard Bernstein once. When I first moved to NYC I shared an apartment on the West Side at 105th and Bway- (not exactly Shark and Jet territory anymore) and my roommate Leslie was friends with him through her boyfriend who was one of his protégés. Coming home late one night I walked down the hall into the living room and there was L.B. hanging out with them. True to his extroverted nature he got up and greeted me like he'd known me for years. A few years later my wife and I went to an engagement party that he hosted for Leslie and Michael at his apartment in the The Dakota, which was very cool.

Pixels on the Track...

This is a fun project I did last month for an IBM publication. It was a cover and inside illustration with a transportation/travel theme - which I always like. The story had to do with servers, 'storage engines' and open source applications, with names like SugarCRM and Joomla. I tried to style the train to be a cross between a freight train and a more streamlined passenger train. The inside piece featured the train pulling boxcars featuring made-up product logos that symbolizing the different open source applications.

Some of the other train images I've done include a poster for Air France and a logo for Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, which if you watch the movie to the very end you can briefly see after the credits roll. : )