I love stippling, and would use it all the time in drawings after I learned about it as a kid. But man, is it tedious!

Hero from Miguel Endara on Vimeo.

(Via LikeCool.com)

This is pretty cool. Makes me wish I was better at/more willing to learn about animation:

keep drawing from studio shelter on Vimeo.

(Via LikeCool.com)

For your consideration: two piping-hot, fresh off the sketch-pad designs to kick-start your holiday wish lists!

First up is my transit map homage to the world of Lewis Carroll, helping you get around Wonderland & Looking-Glass Land with ease!

Next we have this pretty rad romantic interlude between Red Riding Hood and The Big, Bad Wolf called “Star Crossed”:

As usual, both designs are available in men’s and ladies’ sizes on a variety of styles. If you like ‘em, share ‘em! Visit the Facebook page and let me know what you think:)

Related Art:

So Australia was surprisingly like the U.S. in a lot of ways. But every one of those similarities was just a little off for some reason. Here’s a list of ten things that were just weird:

1. _________ (insert iconic snack food here) “Classic”:

So I thought to myself in the airport newsstand at LAX “I bet Meredith misses American junk food. I’ll bring some Oreos® along!” Good thing, too, because in Australia, they don’t have Oreos®. The have Oreos® Classic.

The ingredients are different, the packaging is muted and faded compared to the bright, bold blue of our Oreos©, and the taste…well, let’s just say the closest comparison I can think of is along the lines of “stale Hydrox”. And this wasn’t just limited to the cookies—5 Chewing Gum® (the one with the Matrix-y commercials) just tastes WRONG over there.

2. The Royal w/ Cheese (AKA, the f#$king metric system):

They use the same road sign set-up that we do on their highways—kelly green field with white border and text, in the same font. But my ability to determine how soon we would arrive at a destination was thrown by the fact that all of the distances were in kilometers, as was the speedometer in our rental. This confusion extended to filling up at gas stations—sold by the liter, not the gallon, and rather than stating that regular unleaded was $1.45 per liter, it just said “145.8″ on the signs. So the cost of gas (and only gas) was expressed in hundreds of cents.

3. Alcohol Serving and Cost:

If you’re a cocktail and/or beer drinker and you’re in Australia, I hope you’re either loaded or OK with subsisting on wine. It’s easily the cheapest of their adult beverages. The average cost of cocktails in Melbourne is $18. Decent craft beers aren’t much less expensive, selling for between $8 and $12 a pint. Also, beers are served in one of three sizes: pots, pints, and jugs. Pints are like they are throughout the rest of the world (roughly 20 fluid oz.), but pots are half that size, and jugs are roughly equal to two pints (40 fluid oz.) Depending on the strength of the brew, you’ll want to adjust the size of your glass accordingly.

4. “Am I driving drunk, or just in Australia?”

They drive on the left side of the road, and the driver sits on the right side of the car. The toughest aspect of this? Remembering to use the lever on the right side of the steering column to signal turns and lane changes; the left side lever will (naturally) turn on your wipers. It’s very disorienting the first couple of days.

5. There are only white people in Australia.

Not really, but you’d certainly be forgiven for assuming that based on the television programming, especially the commercials. I think there may have been an islander in one of them, but that particular commercial was in black & white—almost as if they were trying to obscure the fact that there was a non-white actor involved. Now, our apartment had VERY basic channel offerings, but it was still noticeable enough that Meredith and I both commented on it.

6. Soccer is football. Football is GRIDIRON!

This was admittedly hilarious and awesome. They were actually airing commercials advertising open tryouts for refs, coaches AND players, and the clips of Australian “gridiron” they were showing throughout were so poorly-attended and sad-looking; you’d probably find more fans at a pee-wee football game for under-10′s here than the number that were watching the games in Australia.

7. They really love art:

Melbourne in particular was just COVERED in cool street art and graffiti, and that’s b/c it’s considered a valid form of artistic expression (as it should be). We walked by a couple of guys working on a mural in an alley off a main street at TWO IN THE AFTERNOON. The U.S. really needs to get on board with this.

8. Pumpkin, pumpkin everywhere, but not a pie to eat:

Basically, every restaurant had a pumpkin-centric item on the menu, but barring one establishment that offered a pumpkin pie ice cream sundae, they don’t seem to use pumpkin for sweet applications. They’re missing out!

9. They have a really vibrant music scene that is surprisingly (and wonderfully) not U.S.-centric.

We heard a lot of great indie-rock and pop music on the radio that just hasn’t broken through stateside, and it was pretty revelatory to find an entire continent with a rich pop musical history that I’ve only as yet scratched the surface of.

10. Wi-Fi = Dial-Up:

Seriously, the most frustrating aspect of being in Australia is the painfully slow internet speed. Even wired “high-speed” connections weren’t much better, with most browser windows freezing if more than two tabs were opened at one time. Maybe Al Gore was telling the truth when he claimed he invented the thing.

Add your captions in the comments section below!

(Via Pop Hangover)

This is pretty awesome, and looks like it probably was very tedious and exhausting to make:

(Via LikeCool.com)

Trading under the name DWITT, David Witt is a Minneapolis-based illustrator who is in the midst of a pretty awesome series, both in terms of concept and execution: Last Words.

Basically, he does quasi-caricatured portraits of famous dead celebs paired with the last words they uttered before shuffling off to the Great Cocktail Party In The Sky. I really hope he continues the series; his most recent addition is Bob Marley, though besides Bogey (pictured above), my favorite would have to be Groucho (of the human variety—not the canine). You can check out his full portfolio, including posters and other design/illustration work, here.

(Via Thrillist)

This weekend my wife and I made a quick jaunt up to New York City to visit family. It was only about a 24-hour long visit, but it was packed with a lot of great experiences; here are a few of them:

First, we stopped off at my cousin David’s in Hoboken, NJ to decompress from the drive before heading out for a bite to eat in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood. While we were walking toward our chosen eatery, we randomly bumped into our friend Jamie, who diverted us to the magical Indian restaurant Milon, pictured above. It was extremely hot, cramped, and sweaty, and the food was only so-so…but look at the light show! And there’s nothing like two competing doormen screaming at/begging you to come into their respective establishments to stroke your ego.

The next morning we met my wife’s uncle for brunch in Park Slope, Brooklyn before he took us wandering around the neighborhood to look at some of the shops & boutiques, one of which was the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.

There are a lot of cool things about the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. While most of the “inventory” is merely for show and used as a vehicle for creative package design (canisters of “matter” and “anti-matter” are pretty obviously full of sand), they do sell some actual items, like fake glasses and masks and capes. Plus, the overall concept is a lot of fun, it’s just a neat place to wander around in and admire the design aesthetic of the labeling and packages. The coolest part though is that it doubles as a front for 826NYC, a creative and expository writing workshop and classroom space founded by writer Dave Eggers for young writers to hone their craft in.

We then headed over to Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood so my wife could attend & speak at a small business forum while I strolled over to Brooklyn Bridge Park to work on some new design sketches:

Finally, to wrap up our adventure, on our way back down to Baltimore we discovered how Yoda & Obi-Wan were able to afford all those technologically-advanced lightsabers:

(Apparently with a little help from the Wendy’s guy.)

So there’s a lot of new stuff coming your way from Ex-Boyfriend. We finally got around to posting my two newest designs, Eight vs. Ate and Transylvania Is 4 Lovers. I’m hoping to get at least one or two more up by the end of the week; I know it’s been a bit quiet in that regard lately. Don’t worry, though. I’m on it!

I also put the finishing touches on a new site design this weekend. Still a few minor things to do before that goes up, but I’m hoping to have it up later this week as well. The pitfalls of running a business with just two people!

Anyway, here are the new designs:

And just so you don’t think this post is all about MY shizz, here’s a pretty cool art blog I discovered via Thrillist.com a couple weeks ago: It’s called Ten Paces and Draw, and the concept behind it is that the blog contributors come up with a conceptual theme and then invite artists to work collaboratively on a piece that reflects the given theme. One artist starts off and creates a sketch inspired by the theme, and then passes it off to another artist who completes it. It’s a very cool idea. One of my favorite recent pieces is this collaboration between Kyle Fewell and fellow Baltimore-based illustrator Ariyana Suvarnasuddhi. Check out their other stuff; it’s very good!

So after a quick diversion into the robotic realm last week, I thought I’d wrap up this two-part series about my recent European escapades!

Previously I posted some pics of the cool art to be seen in Oslo, Norway and the choicest selections from Berlin’s East Side Gallery. This week’s focus is a bit more on Berlin’s excellent street art scene.

This awesome Japanese woodcut-style portrait decorated the side of a hotel across the street from the East Side Gallery facing the Spree River. We really loved the economical use of color and elegant contours and just thought in general it was great art AND marketing for the hotel; it’s hard to miss AND hard to forget.

After a couple of mis-steps seeking out the cream of the art scene crop that we’d heard so much about before arriving in Berlin, we asked the proprietor of Big Brobot, a very cool book/toy/comic/t-shirt shop in the Friedrichshain section of the city, if he could recommend any good galleries that exhibited more street art and pop art (as opposed to the truly awful installations we’d seen up to that point.) He kindly pointed us in the direction of the NeuroTitan gallery and shop.

After a couple of missed turns, we finally were pointed in the direction of the correct alley leading to the gallery. Once we stepped into the alley, we were greeted with some really wonderful pieces of street art, from spray can art to traditional media to paste-ups.

The alley then led into a courtyard that featured this very cool steam-powered sculpture of a steampunk bat-creature with flapping wings, roving eyes, and flailing proboscis. I really wish I’d switched on my video camera to catch it in action!

Finally, to get to the NeuroTitan gallery, we had to climb a few flights of stairs to enter the shop area before checking out the exhibit. While the exhibit was pretty “meh”, the trip up the stairs was awesome, with the walls just COVERED in really cool graffiti and street art. One of our favorites was the “Fashion Chimp” ad paste-up, done in the style of a 1930s-40s women’s magazine. Who wouldn’t want a giant, life-sized “fashion chimp” for their home?

That pretty much wraps up our 2011 European adventure. Sad as we were not to be able to make it to Tokyo, it was an excellent diversion none the less, and hopefully the planet is done kicking Japan’s ass for a few years and we can make it over there soon.

In OTHER Ex-Boyfriend news—AT LEAST two new designs are going to be up by the end of this week. If you or someone you know is into vampires, kitties, and/or kawaii-style art, be sure to check back!

ALSO: Be sure to tune into The Daily Show on Comedy Central tonight at 11pm. Our good friend Jackson Galaxy from Animal Planet will be sporting our very own Fuzz Aldrin this evening during Aasif Mandvi’s segment! Woot! Be sure to spread the word!

UPDATE: The Daily Show segment featuring Jackson Galaxy wearing Fuzz Aldrin tonight has been postponed thanks to some big political news today, but I’ll keep you guys updated about when it really airs!