It got cooold here in Baltimore all of a sudden. I’ve been hibernating in my office with hot drinks and my sketch pad because it’s finally design time! Before I started selling Ex-Boyfriend products to stores I put out new designs willy nilly. I admit, it was more fun that way, but nowadays I mostly work on seasonal catalogs, releasing new art in December and July. So if you were wondering why I haven’t done anything new lately, don’t worry, there’s a ton of new stuff coming before the end of the year!

Don’t believe it? Here are some actual shots of me working on new art today!

As you can see, Oliver is hanging out to give me his critiques. Don’t let the reaper scare you, we aren’t going all death metal over here. He’s part of a larger piece but you’ll have to wait a couple more weeks for the final reveal. In the meantime, stay warm and drink up!

I’m currently loving this Mexican Hot Chocolate. It’s so spicy and boozy and chocolatey, plus it’s a hot drink! What’s not to love? Bonus points for creative tequila use, a spirit I don’t drink often that tends to sit on the shelf for too long around here. Mr. Cuervo will be so pleased to be out when it’s not even margarita weather!

Sorry for the radio silence, guys! Been busily gearing up for our big annual fundraiser benefiting the Maryland SPCA!

You can get the details here. The exciting news is that this year, in addition to some new magnet & keychain designs, I’ve included my new art prints in the promotion! So now till April 15th, not only will the purchase of these items make your house look good, but it’ll make you AND some cute critters feel good as well! Plus, y’know, FREE SHIPPING! You guys like free stuff, right? Right?!

So c’mon and help us spread the word — tweet, share, link, and post about this all over the webz and help us help them!

I actually had a really cramazing Thirsty Thursday post lined up for today, but it’ll have to wait until next week — I have an exciting announcement to make (well, two actually):

First up: my Diver Riding Shark shirt was worn by Jimmy on FOX’s Raising Hope this week!

The full video won’t be up on Hulu until next week, but rest assured, it will be embedded ASAP (provided Congress doesn’t destroy the internet between now and then). There’s something vaguely satisfying about Jimmy passing his GED test while wearing one of my tees…

But even MORE exciting than this teeny-tiny step up the ladder of fame is the addition of ART PRINTS to the Ex-Boyfriend product line! While a limited selection to start, I hope to be able to add to the collection of available art prints in the future. Each 11″ x 17″ print is digitally reproduced on 100 lb. glossy cover stock, ships for FREE in sturdy cardboard shipping tubes, and is guaranteed to get you mad high-fives & fist-bumps at your next dinner party (if your dinner parties are typically held at the Jersey Shore. And if they are, the high-fives might be for your delicious rum-ham.)

I realized that while I mentioned this on Twitter and Facebook, I never actually got around to introducing it here on the blog: my new Pterodactyl Springs Summer Camp t-shirt!

What better way to relive the halcyon days of your youth than by throwing on this distressed vintage-looking tee from the Pterodactyl Springs Summer Camp? Guaranteed to evoke fond memories of warm summer nights spent listening to the lake lap against the shore as the flap of dinosaur wings passed by overhead!

Wow, sorry for the radio internet-silence; the holidays can do that to a guy. And by “that” I mean “crawl into a cave for weeks at a time with nothing to keep him company but his wife, cats, and copious amounts of fattening food and booze”.

Speaking of cats, remember this cutie from our last chat? Well, she just had her surgery on Monday morning and is recuperating nicely in the pillow & blanket nest I made for her in the bathroom. I felt bad sending her under the knife without a name, so she’s officially Penelope, at least as far as the state of Maryland is concerned. More pix will be forthcoming.

Anyway, let me show you what I’ve been working on. First up is a new design documenting the on-going exploits of Fuzz Aldrin, first kitty in space!

Being the enterprising sort, Fuzz decided to make a little scratch doing what he does best, not unlike his bud Victorious Yeti did with his alpine resort. I present to you Fuzz Aldrin’s Astro Camp:

Cyber-high-five to Yuki Shichi, a fan who helped critique an early version of this design months ago and really got me pointed in the right direction. She rocks!

Another cyber-high-five to Victoria Vu, who loved the skull & cross-carrots on the Pirate Bunny jolly roger so much that she asked that it be made into its own shirt. Done and done!

Finally, as I’ve already done with my I’d Rather Be Making Out & Peanut Butter & Jelly Lovers tees, I recently re-designed my Now Accepting Boyfriend Applications and Now Accepting Girlfriend Applications tees. I think they’re way better now:

Well, that’s it for now. I should have some new stuff up in the next couple weeks. Tomorrow we resume our normal diet of booze, weirdness, Japanese robots, and hilarity!

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:

Saturday was the first annual Baltimore Run For Your Lives zombie 5K obstacle race, and this guy had a front-row seat!

The race was very much a full-day affair, with the first group of runners heading out into the course at 8am and the last one crossing the finish line around 6pm, followed by live music until midnight! This of course meant that Meredith and I had to get to the event around 5am to finish setting up our booth before the attendees showed up for registration at 6am—which meant a 3am wake-up to load the car up for a 4am departure time!

Totally worth it, though—a very fun experience, and a great place to meet new fans and make new friends.

I even snapped some pictures throughout the day, though I had to wait until around 7:30 or 8 for the sun to come up and get over the treeline. Here’s the booth in the early morning—we were soooo excited to see the sun, and big-ups to the folks in the Funtastic Foods tent for keeping us warm with a steady stream of hot chocolate!

The event area itself was the perfect setting for a mock-zombie apocalypse: remote, lots of forest, and very cold and overcast for much of the day. Our stuff went over really well, and it was especially gratifying to see my newest designs get lots of love from the crowd, though pretty much every design I’d brought with us carried its weight—it’s always nice to see that Fuzz has still got it! Even nicer to see older fans already in-the-know:

I love this sort of thing—I imagine it’s a lot like being a musician and never getting sick of hearing your song on the radio.

All in all, it was a great day, but really long—the booth pretty much looked like this from 8:20am (around the time the first survivors made it to the finish line) until we started packing up around 8pm:

And sad as I was initially that I had to work the booth instead of run the course, I eventually realized it was definitely for the best; way too many reports of broken legs, serious cuts and gashes, and sprained ankles, not to mention that fact that there were two water obstacles that necessitated running around in soaked shorts & tees in sub-55˚ weather, followed by a thorough hosing down to remove caked-on mud. The weather was miserable enough being dry and fully-clothed, thank you very much!

But ultimately everyone seemed to have a blast—especially this guy:

Many thanks to all the new fans I met this weekend! And those of you who couldn’t make it, fear not and remember, you can take 10% off your purchase now through the end of October by entering the coupon code HALLOWEEN10 at checkout! And Philly fans—we’re coming back up in December for R5 Productions’ Punk Rock Flea Market! $3 gets you inside to shop for awesome holiday gifts from a variety of vendors, and I’ll be there with new stuff on shirts, bags & belts! Even better: it’s indoors! Hope to see you all there:)

In case you hadn’t noticed, shizz just got a whole lot more orange up in this biatch: I’ve been furiously adding a ton of Halloween-themed designs to the collection of late, and not to get all sales-y on ya, but now is the perfect time to order your “I’m too old/un-creative to wear a costume on Halloween” costume!

Let’s see what we see, shall we?

Wow, that’s a lot! Sure, there are some classics in there, like Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, Ghost Whisperers, Zombie Boyfriends Bite, Classic Movie Monsters, and All My Friends Are Undead. But check out all that new stuff! Death Takes A Holiday, Zombie Dance Party, Sugar Skull Pin-Up, Ghost World, Transylvania Is For Lovers…even our pal the victorious yeti is getting in on the action with his alpine resort shirt, and, along with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, on his very own belt!

And if you feel like picking one of these up in person, stop by my booth at the zombie-themed Run For Your Lives 5k in Darlington, Maryland on October 22nd! It’s bound to be awesome—I mean, c’mon; WE’LL be there—and we LOVE meeting fans!

And hey, those of you too busy or too far away—we get it. Life is busy. October is cold. Zombies (even fake ones) are scary. So to show we have no hard feelings, stay safe and warm at home and take 10% off your purchases now through the end of October by entering HALLOWEEN10 at checkout. Because 3-D or purely digital, we love you guys!

Have you guys heard of Klout? It’s a new social media influence-compiler that takes all of the data produced by you on your various social networking accounts and grades you out based on link-clickage and page views and follows and likes. Like Google Analytics, BUT FOR YOUR VERY DIGITAL ESSENCE. I can’t decide if this is awesome or horrible. Probably both; the social media equivalent of watching some other dude get hit in the balls with some sort of object.

Here’s why it’s awesome:

Klout is new, so it has that “new app smell”, and it satisfies a navel-gazing urge and desire to have my ego stroked.

Here’s why it isn’t:

Klout is also pretty much a robot. And if a robot just rolled into your job or class wearing the coolest new clothes (mine, for instance), you’d probably want to hang out with it. But then it opens its mouth/switches on its speech facilitatrix, and just spews weird, random analysis of you based on what it sees with zero context. All of a sudden the cool new robot with the fly kicks seems a lot more like someone you’d like to shake down for lunch money.

For example:

That’s me. 29. My whole online existence, boiled down to a single (relatively low) number. High compared to my friends, but I rank lower than a lot of back-up outfielders on small-market National League baseball teams (how does Nyjer-f@#king-Morgan score a 57?!)

But check out the five topics I’m supposedly “influential” about:

1. Homelessness
2. Animals
3. Money
4. Billy Joel
5. Mystery

Let’s break it down: “homelessness” and “animals” should be paired together; my love of shelter pets and work with the SPCA is pretty well-known. Money…well, let’s just say that I always thought in order to be influential regarding that, you had to actually HAVE some. Klout thinks I’m Warren Buffet over here.

Billy Joel; OK, fair enough. I love The Piano Man. Apparently so much that he is the thing I care fourth-most about IN ALL THE WORLD. My wife, my cats, art, baseball, comics…don’t even make the list. And “mystery”?! I get that Klout is probably just picking up on the frequency of my Mystery Monday posts, but believing I’m influential about something as abstract as “mystery” is like saying you can actually “win” against terror.

Robots: awesome, but stupid.

FURTHERMORE, Klout believes that I am a.) not really all that influential, and b.) am only really influenced by ALCOHOL:

True though it may be, I don’t really need to be reminded of it by some douchey robot (whose shoes really aren’t all that great anyway). That’s right—my only influencer is Bad Decisions. My favorite bar.

Whatever. At least I’m not alone; Bad Decisions has a Klout score of 51, so clearly there are many other drunken Billy Joel fans with an air of mystery about them. I just need to find them.

In completely unrelated news, I’ve posted two new designs: Pirate Bunnies, and Ghost World. Snap ‘em up!

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!