As anybody who likes to spend their time creating things all day can attest, if I spent all my hours in one single sphere of art or design then I would both drive myself crazy and begin to resent it. My professors in design school told us that we should strive to be "T-shaped designers" where we aim to be mainly focused in one area (for me, that is UX/UI) and then dip our toes into other creative spheres that interest us to keep us well-rounded and fresh in perspective. If we're sticking to the metaphor, my creative interests are less shaped like a "T" and more shaped like some unholy, irregular sea-anemone, because I find as much joy in the learning of new pursuits as I do in actually executing on them. It is part of the reason why I stretched out a four-year college journey into a decade long venture. In addition to what you'll see below, I can say with confidence that at one point or another I've taken personal interests in many hobbies: illustration, painting, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, DIY renovating, gardening, book binding, creative storytelling, 3D printing, 3D modeling, miniature painting, cosplay, card collecting, ukulele, computer assembly, game design, laser etching, wood burning, comic-making, card-making, and now that you're reading these words, website development!
All of these creative pursuits have different levels of competency attached to them. My fervor in some have waned and in others have rooted to deep passions. The important thing is, when a friend approaches me and asks "Hey do you know how to do this thing?" I can proudly say "yes" and offer to help them achieve their vision. It is one of my favorite feelings in this world.
Every year since 2019, my wife has volunteered at a haunted house with many of our friends at the Culbertson Mansion in New Albany. The mansion is a historical site dedicated to the preservation of this beautiful Victorian building, and aims to educate visitors and restore each room of the building to its peak glory. Every Halloween season, the folks at the mansion host a haunted house that gets constructed in the carriage house behind the mansion as a fund-raising effort for the historical site. Everyone involved is not only in it for the festive spirit of the season, but for the preservation of the Culbertson Mansion.
My good friends in charge of this haunted house have lately been in the process of a rebrand. For ages, the haunt was known as "Literally a Haunted House" and is moving to "House of Anguish". It centers around a recurring character "Anguish" that has been present in the narratives built by this haunted house for the last few years. As part of this rebranding effort, I volunteered my time to update the visual identity for House of Anguish for the 2024 opening.
Due to the refocus of the brand to center around this character Anguish, and the setting of this haunted house being on the back yard of this old Victorian mansion, I felt it was necessary to reference marketing materials and design styles of the late 1800s. Here are a few samples I ended up referencing for this project:
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And while I'm providing references, I should go ahead and give you a reference for the delightfully creepy Anguish.
This is one of the rare cases where I have an entire time-lapse video of the actual creation of the logo. It can be viewed below:
The logo itself is highly complex, and was designed to be broken into its component pieces depending on where it is needed. A black version and a white version was created so that it could be clearly viewed on either dark or light backgrounds.
A text-only version was made (with accompanying subtitle) for simpler applications:
In addition to this, a version with the head only was delivered so that a simple mark could function as an identifier for the haunt in place of the full, dense logo.
This project was an exercise into diving in to a more self-indulgent place. (which is where most of my hobby work ends up, more or less). One of my greatest sources of inspiration comes from the many Dungeons and Dragons games I play with my friends, and remains to be where I focus a large portion of my creative proclivity. The collective storytelling process that D&D facilitates is an endless wellspring of escapism and creative capacity that acts as a muse for characters and stories that tumble around my mind endlessly and occasionally spill out onto my tablet screen as little comics or paintings.
That is all to say that this comic was born as a backstory concept for one of the characters I played in a D&D game. Cosima is a character with a divine gift that is awakened within her during this pivotal moment in her story, and I wanted to tell that story in the form of a fully-colored comic. Part of the process of making comics is learning how to make your story understandable for those that have little to no context for what is going on, so I count this as a lesson in that regard. As a piece of art I put out into the world, I'm happy for its existence, even if it may be a little out-there for an audience that does not encapsulate myself and a close group of friends.
When I made this in and around 2021, I hadn't really made a comic that approached the scale of work that a project like this required. A fully illustrated and rendered image, multiplied several times down the page, with full backgrounds and text treatments is a lot of work for one person. I used my knowledge of Blender at the time to aid me by creating little maquettes of the arena so I could get the shading and perspective correct on some of the panels, but most of the process boiled down to blocking positioning for the characters, pacing out the story into 2-page releases, sketches, lineart, colors, and single-tone shading. After this came text treatment and final touches. Below you can find a process video for a single page:
The full comic is presented below. As with any image on my website, you can click to view the full-sized version of the page in a new tab if you're having trouble seeing or reading.
When I'm not working or engaging in a number of other hobbies I'm usually drawing on my iPad. The section below represents a number of selections from my instagram that I count among my favorites. I'll come back from time to time and update this selection as I see fit. They're ordered in reverse chronological order, so as you scroll down you'll be scrolling into older and older work from me.
