Newly added to the Etsy Shop,“Chimp My Ride.” Two variations of a styling grease monkey in his souped up chimp-mobiles. Also available on T-Shirts & Stuff.
Tag: monkey
Monkey Monday-Gesundheit
I don’t know about where you live, but the spring pollen has everything covered in an ominous layer of itchy-looking green around here.
Monkey Monday-Run Like the Wind
New ChetArt Merchandise Shop
A new shop is now open for business, offering t-shirts, tote bags, mouse pads and more featuring characters from my “Steampunk Monkey Nation,” “World War Monkey” and “Literary Pets” series. Choose from a list of fun shirt colors or liven up your home decor with a General Persnickeybritches coaster for your drink. To see more, visit:
Tote bag to carry all your bananas.
Cork bottom coaster for your favorite Steampunk beverage.
Monkey Monday—The Decider
All you need to express your feelings for any critical situation.
Not sure how to respond? Let the Monkey Decider do it for you!
Buttons!
An avalanche of 1.25 inch pinback buttons have hit the ChetArt Etsy shop.
Automagical Mural Art
Back in late December I was greeted by a super sized order from my Etsy shop for a large variety of prints. All monkeys. I noticed that the buyer was Ben Chestnut, one of the co-founders of the Atlanta based company Mailchimp. Additionally I was proud to learn that he planned to pass them out as Christmas presents to his company’s employees. Monkey like!
A few weeks passed and then I was contacted by Mailchimp’s video impresario extraordinaire Joshua Rosenbaum with details of a project they thought would be just right for me. And how! The job was for a 12 foot by 40 foot long mural banner. This artwork was to be used for Mailchimp’s presence along the front of a building across from the convention center in downtown Austin for the annual South by Southwest conference. It would serve as a very large announcement to the world of some of their “Automagic” services. Their art direction was simple and straightforward: Invent a whimsical environment with a Rube Goldberg sprinkling of silly devices, add in some monkeys, Steampunk flavor to taste and… a unicorn. The resulting sketch composition was greeted with happy chimp screams. Working with Joshua and receiving input from their meetings to work out the details for the finished image was a true pleasure. The 500MB+ digital file was delivered to a large format vinyl wrap printing company and the site installation went up yesterday.
The art is also the centerpiece of the new “Automagical” landing page, replete with clanky, bubbling soundtrack. (shiny!) In addition, Mailchimp worked out a sponsorship with Austin’s Intercontinental Hotel so that for the duration of the event the hotel key cards will be a special edition ChetArt card.
And the mural was designated as an official Gowalla point of interest:
Discover more Steampunk Monkey Business by visiting:
Steampunk Monkey Nation and The Society of Sinister Simians.
Felt & Wire & Monkeys
A big thanks goes out to Tom Biederbeck over at Felt & Wire for his kind post about the Steampunk Monkey Nation card sets.
A bit of info about the great Felt & Wire site, from their “About” section:
“Felt & Wire is about the universe of design, paper and print — from posters to packaging, from memorable mail to beautiful books, from invitations to artistic innovations. Felt & Wire reveals the fascinations, avocations and professions of the people who inhabit this continually expanding and evolving universe. It is a community, by and about those of us who are paper-obsessed.”
Also, be sure and visit the Felt & Wire shop for loads of beautifully created items by artists and designers.
The Evolution of a Monkey
Here’s an simplified example of the steps I take to create one of my Steampunk Monkey Nation characters. I scan my pencil sketch and open in Painter. It’s used as a guide for creating the black and white line work with Painter’s Scratchboard tool. Color is applied to a lower layer which shows through the line work since it’s converted to a “Gel” composite layer (something similar to Photoshop’s Darken or Multiply layer attribute.)
Here’s a bit of background on Professor Horatio Sprocketnotch:
Scientist
Brilliant but quite mad mastermind behind of scores of scientific breakthroughs. These include: the creation of the Eye of Radical Hyperbaric Transcendence and Licorice Legs. Pictured holding his greatest creation, the inter-dimensional tsunami egg of destruction, which worked perfectly the first and only time it was activated.