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This month's creative challenge over at Laika was Coraline themed.  Pretty good excuse to watch the movie.  I had my sketchbook handy while watching.

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I have a new daily sketch blog over on Tumblr called The Marky Way.  Here I'll be posting daily drawings of things that have to do with outer space.
Follow me over at The Marky Way!

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Playing around with some animation.  This one's just a test.  How about an animated recipe?

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Brushing up on my Illustrator skills.

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I really liked the results and wasn't tired of the image, so I decided to paint it with watercolors.  When expanding the sketch, I decided that I wanted to make this my next postcard.  I expanded the top to make room for my name, and used some of the initial sketches from the project on the back of the postcard.


Maybe you'll see this in your mailbox at the end of the month!

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Last week I participated in Rock the Ville in Westerville, Ohio.  I got a 10x10 foot square and a couple boxes of pastels and the opportunity to make whatever I wanted.

The image I chose was one that I made for a small pastel piece a few months ago.  After a long, drawn out argument with the pastels, the original drawing is sitting, unfinished, next to my desk.

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Ever since my first trip to the Illustration Academy, sketchbooks have been vital to my artmaking practice.  I kept sketchbooks before then, but it wasn't the same.  After seeing beautiful sketchbooks by illustrators like Sterling Hundley, and my classmates like William Godwin, I knew that they could be a place for experimentation and observation as well as a place to get your ideas out.  I decided to document some of my sketchbooks here today, some of which I have never documented at all.

A good number of my sketchbooks are handmade by Nicki Crock.  Her generosity in making them for me allows me to control the type (or usually types) of paper that go into them, size, thickness, and what they generally look like.  This allows for lots of fun.  I have sketchbooks covered in fur, hand-dyed fabric, and old clothes with the pockets still attached.

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I haven't done a sketchbook post in a while, so here's a pile from the last one I finished.  Most of my sketchbooks are custom made by Nicki Crock, and this was no exception - it had all sorts of different papers in it and the cover was made from an old pair of pants, pockets and all.

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This spring, I got the amazing opportunity to work with a local independent printing press, Igloo Letterpress.  They commissioned me to do a series of greeting cards for their wholesale line.
We started off with a long list of holidays and occasions that we could create cards for: Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, graduations, Christmas... the list goes on.  So I began sketching out ideas.

"Good Talk" began as a couple talking on a park bench.  Sort of a "thinking of you" type of card.  I thought a guy talking to a bird was a lot funnier and so did Allison at Igloo.

The person sitting with the cat evolved as the weeks went on into a series of cat and dog images.

"Your age does not compute" didn't make the cut.  At one point, we saw a lot of animals emerging in my idea pile and decided to cluster the cars around an animal theme, making them a little more unified.

"You'll go far" made it all the way to the end, only getting cut because of time constraints.

The nice thing about working with a local company is that we could meet and discuss in person, make decisions together and figure out where things were going.  We ended up with seven ideas that would be taken to finished cards.  Igloo usually works with more graphic illustrations than what I do but wanted mine to be washy so they'd stand out.  My cards would be 2 color prints, so I worked in layers, traditionally, with ink.


Igloo ended up using halftones to simulate the washes, and I love the result.

 And here are what the finished cards look like:






So you can find these cards (along with a bunch of other really great ones) on Igloo Letterpress' website and in their store in Worthington Ohio.
Follow Igloo on Facebook and Twitter.

And speaking of Twitter, I am going to give away a full set of these seven cards when I get to 200 followers.  So follow me here: @MarkCEberhardt

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This year, I am lucky enough to have had a print design chosen to be featured in a local show called Pinchflat.  The premise of the show is bike-themed posters created using any printmaking technique.  So I combined my love of bikes with my love of space and created a constellation - The Great Northern Bicycle.

Luckily, I know a lovely lady who works at a local print shop, Igloo Letterpress, and they agreed to allow us in to print after-hours.

Test Print

Making adjustments

The block on the press

The finished pile

 We hand-brayered each print to give them a more spacey look.  This means that every print is just a little bit different.  All of the text on the print is also hand-carved, which I think looks really cool.  The prints will be for sale at Wild Goose Creative in Columbus on May 4, and at Paradise Garage for the rest of the month.

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Some people commented, 6 re-posted.  Izzy, an avid Adventure Time fan, was one of those people.
As a fellow fan of the show, I began thinking of my favorite characters, Marceline and the Ice King/Simon Petrikov.



And dancing baby Finn made an appearance.

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If you follow my blog, you know that when business is slow, I seek out contests and competitions to create imagery for, and you know that I love just about anything to do with space.  Last year, I submitted a painting to The Mars Society Conference's poster competition.  It looked something like this:

Seeing the one that they chose last year, I decided to make this year's a little more graphic.  The theme of this years conference is "Finding Life on Mars & Bringing Life to Mars."  Inspired by Curiosity photos of Martian sunsets, and the sense of vast open spaces that those photos create, I began my thinking in very large shapes.  I considered how small the human form would look in such a huge space, and came up with a few sketches.

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This month's LAIKA/House creative challenge centered around Failed Fairytales.  I had a little trouble coming up with a solution since the subject has been done again and again (especially with red riding hood).  I kept getting stuck at my favorite Stinky Cheese Man stories, like the Really Ugly Ducking.

(Nikki helped me come up with the brilliant "Twelve Breakdancing Princesses)

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This month I've answered LAIKA's creative challenge again.  The brief this time was to mix unicorns and the seven deadly sins.  What started as a silly sketch of a prideful unicorn in the margins of some serious ideas turned into my final project.

Like in December, please visit LAIKA's Facebook page and 'like' my illustration!

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I stumbled across a poster contest for a catfish festival early last month and the only requirements were that the image depict and American Farm-raised Catfish.  After many catfish sketches and throwing ideas around, I came up with the most American Farm-raised Catfish I could possibly think of.

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Here's the final piece for LAIKA's November Creative Challenge.

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I was sketching at the cafe the other day and drew this guy who I thought looked like a viking.  While waiting the next day, I decided to give hime a torch and turn him into a simple animation.

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Here are a couple videos from Urban Scrawl.  I make appearances in both.

In similar news, I am going to have a chalk square at this year's Chalk the Block in Easton, OH.  If you're in Columbus, make sure to stop by and vote for my square for the people's choice award!

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At the newsstand this week is September's Cricket Magazine, featuring three illustrations by yours truly.  I was commissioned in April/May to do two half pages and a spot for a short piece of historical literature about overcoming adversity.

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I'll be sending out a new mailer this week.

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I began this series of illustration based on the concept of amulets for a contest.  I didn't finish on time due to a great assignment from Cricket Magazine, but decided to compete the images.
The brief for the contest was to create illustrations based on the idea of amulets.  Amulets can be anything that a person thinks holds power.  It can be anything from a rabbit's foot, to a favorite pencil, to a talisman imbued with the power of ancient spirits by a shaman.

The first amulet I decided to illustrate was a Norse Mjölnir pendant.  Mjölnir was the Norse god Thor's hammer, and pendants were widely used for protection and strength in battle.



I decided on Jötunn as the antagonists in the illustration, and after a cat-water accident, came to this final piece:

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