I got interviewed over at Chirply.com – it’s a big ol’ mess, but at least you can buy the cool card & notebook of mine that they printed!
Link to buy Greeting Card.
Link to buy notebook.
“I used to, but macaroni kept proving archivally inferior to digital mediums, and peeling Elmer’s off your fingers gets old eventually. I mean, it’s no good having a bunch of glue flakes stuck to your hands when you’re trying to seduce a woman, I’ll tell you that much.”
Well, I mean I guess my name is IN it. I don’t know if that counts… I don’t think I can say that I’m in a book if the mere presence of my name is my only contribution between the covers. Y’all would probably call righteous shenanigans on the “IN-ness” of “me” regarding said “book.”
If I had a buddy who had, by virtue of his first and last names appearing in the correct sequence somewhere, even once professed to be in a book, well, I would wait till he was talking to a pretty girl at the bar and then butt in and say, “Hey, did he tell you that he’s in a book? You should have him tell you about that book that he’s in,” and then watch him crash and burn.
Because I am eeeeevil. Or something.
Anyway, regardless of the highly dubious nature of my bookish inclusion, I am most certainly irrefutably incontrovertibly unmistakably ON a galldang book. Front cover, front and center. Of course, by “me” I mean “something I drew,” which is probably better looking than me anyway. So that settles that.
The book in question, I must admit, probably stretches the accepted standard definition a bit, at least in terms of any literary expectations you might have, but I’m happy about it anyway. It is, of course, the Threadless Book. Yes, that Threadless. Yes, the website. Yes, the website that sells t-shirts. Sometimes my t-shirts. Yes, they wrote a book about it. Why? Because they are turning ten years old and they figured it would be a neat thing to do. Yes, this is the book I’ve been excitedly rambling on about for the past several stolen moments of your life.
So! Would you like to see it? I thought so!
(my drawing is the three-eyed sea-tiger dude above the big yellow dot)
Below is Threadless founder Jake Nickell posing with a giant Threadless Book cover.
And, finally, here is the full illustration of my Sea Tiger monster dude.
The end!
I’ve been getting a lot of nice feedback on Sanguine Parliament, my Tee-of-the-Day at Design by Humans, and I just noticed that it’s made it onto the “Top Tees” list.
They like me! They really like me! </melodrama>
First thing’s first. Remember that movie I was in a while back?
No?
Really? You don’t remember all the pictures of me drenched head-to-toe in buckets of glistening fake blood and all the overloud proclamations of “Brian Walline: ACTOR!” and “Brian Walline: MOVIE MONSTER!” and Look at Me! Look at Me! Look at Me!?
Well then. In that case, you may want to refer to the posts of October 30th and December 21st, in which, well, see above…
I know, right? December? Seems like old news. And it is (I mean hells bells, filming happened last summer), but the special new-ness is that KIN creator, Matt Gelzer, packed up his little shop of horrors to Detroit, where he pitched the film at the MotorCity ComicCon, along with a bunch of cool swag designed by (ah yes, the point, now we get to it) Yours Truly.
If you’d like to get your hands on some of the merch, or if you want to get all widescreen home entertainment with a DVD, then by all means, hit up Mr. Gelzer over at Bachelor Productions. Spread the word, y’all!
SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!!! MONDAY! MONDAY! MONDAY!!!
Exciting things are afoot. Get your e-payment tool of choice ready, y’all 😛
So, as you may have noticed, yesterday the wonderful folks at shirt.woot.com began selling my “Alien Invader” design on their lovely site. But now, where’d it go? Seemingly, those halcyon days of alien invasion are behind us, because if you know anything about woot it’s probably that they feature/sell an item for a mere blink of an eye and then it’s gone… lost in the shifting desert sands of the internet for all time.
Or IS IT?
Fear not, gentle reader. If you’d still like to get your hands on the Alien Invader shirt it lives on until such time as it is either sold out or becomes wildly unpopular with the wooters, in which case it gets booted from the site.
Hello and good day! Thanks for visiting my blog. My name is Brian, you may remember me from such woots as:
Navy Seals:
Scrap Hunt (aka The Gearassic Period):
Wind-up Wildlife Encounters:
I hope you didn’t hate any of them too much 🙂
Thanks again for stopping by and have a great day!
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For all you non-wooters of the world, my exciting news of the day is that one of my glorious benefactors, shirt.woot.com, has printed one of my designs and it is now up for sale!
Alien Invader:
To kick things back off, and in the spirit of Halloween, I thought I might post a photo. It was actually taken during the summer, but that should not detract from its very ghoulish theme, which, as it so happens, is… well, ghouls…
You see, one day, Matthew Gelzer woke up and thought, “Gee, I think I’d like to make a gory horror movie… Wouldn’t that be neat?” Other, equally jovial voices in Matt’s head agreed, as did starlet and producer, U-M film school grad Anna K. Jonsson. What happened next is called Blood Kin: Terror is Thicker than Water, which was written and directed by Gelzer, who also starred and is currently laboring away in post production. At some point I got a call asking if I could come out to the set for an evening and play one of the ghostly ghoul type things that serve –shockingly enough– as the undead antagonists. Despite a whopping hangover, I said I would be delighted. Little did I know that playing the part of a gurgling, grunting, violent zombo-ghoul would involve wearing a burlap sack over my head, being doused in a gallon of fake blood (principle constituents include corn syrup and non-dairy creamer…) and having dirt ground into my slimy red skin while I stumble around shambled and barefoot in the woods outside Hillsdale…
To be sure, clean up was hell, but filming was actually a blast. Mine was a fight scene. I got to hit people, make supernaturally yucky noises, and projectile-vomit ectoplasm all while choking the shit out of the director. Below is the photo, post-burlap headgear and well after my glistening dermis had begun to set and congeal into a dull and outrageously sticky mess.
Another still from the set:
It’s no secret that I have a thing for dinosaurs. I regard them and other ancient monsters with an enthusiasm that is curious to my friends, if not entertaining. But what my friends should keep in mind is that there are people out there that harbor still deeper dino-obsessions and, more importantly, the ambition to tell people about it.
Enter: The Smithsonian “Dinosaur Tracking” blog, a delightful repository of dinosaur news, musings, minutia, and even sightings — which is where I come in to the picture. The section of the blog devoted to sightings is a survey of all things dinosaur that one might encounter in everyday life — particularly in pop-culture– such as roadside sculptures, billboards, motion pictures, and — in my case– t-shirts. To such ends, the blog discovered my Sweet Tooth design on Threadless and decided it was worthy of entry as a cataloged Dinosaur Sighting. Naturally, I am pleased 🙂
Brian Wolly (yes, it was acknowledged in an email that our names are eerily similar, even moreso in pronunciation than in spelling), who helps run the blog, said they may even feature my Dinosaurs Ate My Shirt! store sometime in the future, which makes him one of my favorite people on the internet at the moment.
Other incredible finds on Dinosaur Tracking are as follows:
I’m pretty pumped about this post. I thought it could stand an aural accessory. Enjoy the Smooshiness.
Anyway, back to the action, which –in this case– is a living room wall… An action packed living room wall, complete with a painting –honest-to-goodness painting— of my very own Quack Attack. The wall belongs to Denmark’s* Jesper C L, of Ivy League Design, who says he “…pulled out the majority of my hair from not being able to find some decent decorations for my livingroom wall.”
First off, in a similar vein to the tattoos people have been getting lately, I’m naturally flattered that someone likes my illustrations enough to want to look at them every day. Secondly, I’m super impressed with the execution here. I very much doubt I could paint that thing on a wall as well as Jesper has, and I drew the damn thing. So hats off you you, sir! You made my day.
* Or at least that’s what the Danish “.dk” domain tag in his URL would lead me to conclude, although “Ivy League Design” does suggests a potential American connection. I dunno.
I was on vacation when this happened so I forgot to blog it, but the lovely folks at TeeFury did a run of my Terror Bear design last month. So there it is. One more design escapes from my computer and into the real world, which is always fun. I hope to do more work with TeeFury in the future, it’s a great way to get stray designs made and once the 24 hour sale is over all the rights revert back to me and I can go sell the design to someone else, who hopefully won’t mind that a few hundred shirts are already floating around out there.
So yeah, any takers? 🙂
You may remember a post from a while back about my acceptance to the 7th installment of the Shadow Art Fair, in which I probably promised updates regarding product lineups and other such improbable silliness. Well, tSAF came and went. As might be assumed from a tagline like “1 day. 40 artists. 9,000 gallons of beer” it was loads of fun, as always. I displayed a few new shirts and a few new posters and made a few new dollars, not to mention a few new friends.
Folks proved excitable when confronted with the Ypsi-Ynvaders poster of our infamous water tower (above) and the Scyptsy shirt (below)
But one of the best things to come out of this summer’s Shadow Art fair was this wicked sweet video by Mike Ambs. Make sure to keep an eye out for me and Heather (0:49), the Hide-a-Turtle (1:23) and the Ynvaders poster (3:08):
1 day. 40 artists. 9,000 gallons of beer. from mike ambs ☂ on Vimeo.
(I apologize if this thing isn’t embedding properly. WordPress seems to hate Vimeo, which is a shame. But seriously, you really should follow the link to the vimeo page because this is a truly charming little recap of a great event!)
I received an email the other day from a fellow named Andy Pitts. He was writing to inform me that he had made a cake based on my Sweet Tooth design for the bizarrely delightful Threadcakes competition.
He then provided me a link to the gallery. Having no idea what awaited me on the other side of that innocent looking hypertext, I gave it a click.
Hyperbole be damned, as soon as the page finished loading there was faint Pfftt! sound somewhere between my eyeballs, followed by a few wisps of acrid smoke from my ears. My mind had been blown.
Now look here, and behold the most diabolical pastry known to mankind:
Here’s what Andy has to say for himself:
“I’ve always been a fan of thunderpeel aka Brian Walline’s tee designs – so I picked one of my favorites and tried to do it justice in cake form! I wanted to make this guy as sugary as possible using a variety of sweets, Chocolate cake, confetti cake, peanut butter rice crispys treats, tic tacks, skittles, caramels, gummi bears, tons of fondant, butter cream frosting and a wisp of blue cotton candy smoke on the volcano.”
Thank you Andy! I am flattered by your cake design, awed by your cake skillz, and now, inexplicably… hungry? 🙂
I just got an email from someone informing me that they loved my Are You My Lobster? design so much that they decided to have it permenantly emblazoned on their leg! Which, y’know, is super flattering and stuff. I guess she calls her husband her “lobster” and when she found out the shirt wasn’t available he offered to get her the tat. She claims that it’s her favorite 🙂
This is actually the second t-shirt design of mine (that I know of) to be appropriated for ink-immortalization. Last summer a friend of mine converted Terrible Lizards into a sweet tattoo on her side. She’s out of town right now, but when she gets back I’ll see if I can get a photo of it on here. Till then, here is the design:
This was filmed during the Winter ’07 installment, from which I was rejected 😛 Though I feel kind of lucky to be included as many times as I have.
Found out last night that I’ve been accepted to this summer’s Shadow Art Fair, which makes me happy. I’ve participated in the summer installment of this fine event for the past two years and I know that they (The Michigan Design Militia, and yes, you read that correctly) like to shake things up when they can and that they’d received over 150 applications for roughly 40 spots, and so I had a feeling I was going miss the cut on this one. But hey, GIGGITTY. I’m in.
The Shadow Art Fair has many charms, but perhaps none so alluring as its venue, The Corner Brewery, which aside from being roomy enough to accommodate throngs of art vendors and enthusiasts alike, still has room for live music in its ample beer garden and, perhaps most importantly, the constant availability of quality brews. Nothing to loosen up folks pocket books and broaden their appreciation of the arts like a few (or a few too many) fine tasting fermentations.
And here, my friends, are some of the slides I sent as part of my application, outlining some of the shtuffs that shall be made and sold at The Booth of Wonders — Yes, Wonders:
I wondered, I really did. I honestly wondered if I was somehow “Woot Proof,” incapable of creating anything that resonated at the appropriate Woot frequencies, something that could be embraced by the mysterious and fickle wooters of the world.
Every week Woot holds “The Day of Reckoning,” in which they eliminate the 10 lowest-selling shirts on the site. Forever and for good. My designs have all launched themselves into that void at break-neck speed, heedless of the oblivion into which they descended. The Casualties List is their familiar home. Failure is their nourishment. Anonymity their joy.
— Dramatic Pause —
No More! In a bold and unprecedented endeavor, it seems that I have actually produced a successful t-shirt design for shirt.woot.com, one of my biggest and most beloved clients. Its success is documented in the records of The Reckonings… Five times it has been tested, and five times it has endured and emerged from the rubble of Reckoned shirts unscathed! At the peak of its glory it even managed to crack The Top Ten, a lofty territory that I was sure would forever close itself from my designs, those loathsome and pitiful denizens of The Bottom Ten… It’s name is Navy Seals, and I am very pleased to say that it is still for sale.
The proof is in the pudding screen-shot:
So last week I blogged about my mysterious Google Analytics splyglass findings. Further investigation led me to North Broadway in Chicago where the Threadless retail shop was peddling shiny new copies of Faesthetic #11: Ghost Stories. A brief scanning confirmed it, Sea Ghost is in Faesthetic. Case closed. Epic win.
In my excitement I managed to inform the store employees that I was included in their mag, but hadn’t known it ’till I held the little beast in my own two hands. They took pity on me and gave me a copy. Of course, they were giving anybody who wanted one a free copy with any purchase, but that is neither here nor there. The point is that I was important enough to be included a wicked sweet magazine… Just maybe not important enough to be notified of it. Bah, who cares. Mission Accomplished!
Here are the obligatory visual aids:
My promo photography skillz have been measured, and have apparently been found wanting…
So I was consulting my internet spy-glass (aka Google Analytics) the other day and noticed a bunch of hits to my portfolio from faesthetic.com. This confused me. As far as I know Faesthetic has no reason to link to my site. My only contact with Faesthetic was a while back when I sent them a drawing of a ghost because of a call for ghosts I heard about, but I never heard anything back from them. I figured they didn’t like my ghost. No biggie.
But now, here we are, in the future —waves hands mystically— and I’m getting hits from Faesthetic #11: Ghost Stories under the section of “contributing artists.” My powers of deduction have led me to the conclusion that perhaps they didn’t hate my ghost drawing so much after all 🙂 Anywho, I’m really hoping that it’s not a mistake, because it would be fantastic to be included in such a crazy cool publication. I’ve basically been wanting to be in it since I first saw it back in ’06 or something like that. I’m actually heading to Chicago this weekend so I’ll be able to further investigate the matter at the Threadless retail store, since Faesthetic and Threadless are in cahoots and there’s always some Faesthetics in stock there.
Here’s hopin’
The more devoted and astute among my modest readership may recall that some of us threadless types published a little coloring book a while back called ADVENTURE. Oh, what’s that? That was just 2 posts ago? I see…
I really should write more frequently I guess.
Anyway, it both pleases and amuses me to report that our beloved little ADVENTURE was named an honorable mention for Lulu Top Sales in the month of March. Accordingly, we have earned this gif:
A threadless buddy of mine remarked –pretty accurately, I’d say– that this may not bode particularly well for Lulu –self publishing colossus though it seems– when one pauses to consider that our dear little ADVENTURE probably sold about a hundred copies. Though, I should add –and you would know this and nod in earnest agreement if you had purchased one– that every one of those hundred prints is a shiny and glorious specimen of coloring excellence.
*smiley face*
W i l l y W a l l y --- Art & Design blog of Brian William Walline 