This is my submission for the MIA’s Foot in the Door 4 show.

It was a doodle at first. Then it turned into a scavenger hunt. I think a whole series of people discovering things would be interesting.

…in kitties

I made this today. I think I’ve decided that I’m going to make iPhone backgrounds for a living.

Let’s ignore the obvious here and pretend that this isn’t 4 months since the last post.

DOODLES. I bought a cheap scanner for scanning at home. It really sucks. Surprise! I was crabby on 1/2/10 apparently. Luckily, all three of my needs were fulfilled. Later I drew all of Ben’s parents’ pets. Sitka, Loki, Rose, Angus, Nell and Tess. Dog, Dog, cat, cat, kitten, kitten. ANIMALS!

What could this be a song for?

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Never Want to

PS- Joel, how do you upload an mp3 so it shows up with a little media player instead of it being a link to the file?

Ben and I recently purchased a new TV. A rather large new TV, I might add. 42″ I also might add. We hooked up Ben’s computer to it. I’m sitting in a living room chair, with my feet kicked up on a footrest, and a plank of wood as my keyboard/mouse pad.

It’s a new experience working in Illustrator while being as comfortable as I am now. I’m used to hunching over my 13″ macbook screen and zooming in and out. Squinting my eyes and shifting around in my chair to get the kinks out of my back. I do have to worry about falling asleep though. This chair is pretty comfy.

This is what I’m working on in Illustrator: Eggmoes!

My previous post contained some of the pieces. I took some out, and added a couple new pieces (mostly the multi-colored images). I’m pretty happy with the way these are turning out.

Soon I will make a quick post on the drawings I’m working on. Three large drawings! One about space. One about human animal. One about my trip to Florida. None of them are close to completion, but I wanted to show some progress.

I’m making some birdie drawings and shapes for a pattern.

This is really awful, but I decided to invert my laptop screen today (ctrl+option+apple+8) to see how my digital world would look. It’s… pretty bizarre. It’s kind of an exciting change, although I’m not sure if it’s going to affect my eyes in some sort of awful way.

I then decided, that I would see how my website artwork looks. Mostly, it’s really hokey and stupid. BUT IT LOOKS SO…. what’s the best word to use in high school terminology….

…SWEET.

That’s the only word I can think of to describe it. I selected my favorite inverted pieces, all you have to do is hit those amazing set of keys to live the magic.

CTRL+OPTION+APPLE+8
One special bonus, I found a picture of myself on a website (which will not be named). MY HAIR USED TO BE SO LONG. It was actually inverted on said website, so you’ll have to see it normally to appreciate how long my hair was. I think this was either Junior or Senior year of high school.

IMAGE OVERLOAD:

A bonus fact: I painted this exact inverted self portrait to put in my portfolio, to bring to National Portfolio Day, to show to MCAD. I’m 100% sure this piece is why I got accepted. It obviously proved that my level of creativity was through the rough.

The title of this post comes off a little sarcastic, but it is NOT meant to be! I spent some time this afternoon and this evening working on a card for my relatives back in Michigan. I actually got birthday cards this year from two aunts and uncles, so I figured I should make them a card in return (my birthday is in May, I’m ridiculously late making these).

I’m going to print one out for each of my aunts and uncles though. Just to let them know I’m thinking about them and let them know how I’m doing, without mentioning my unemployed status. I think I’ll steer clear of that subject.

I basically copied took quite a bit of inspiration (QUITE a bit) from this book cover. I just couldn’t resist! The color palette, the typography, the imagery- all beautiful. The cover was illustrated by Will Staehle, who is an amazing-amazing-amazing artist/designer/illustrator. My piece comes NOWHERE near the incredible-ness of his book cover. But I do like it; very chilly and winter-y. Maybe it will keep my relatives in a cool state of mind so they don’t overheat this summer.

I really like those balloons- how cute! I also am pretty fond of the font: Museo. It’s a really fun style to work in, silhouettes and outlines with flat colors, I’m curious to see if I can somehow work it in with my drawing/painting style. Perhaps an experiment!

Hey, Shambot. Er…

Hello everyone! I was going to keep this a secret, but I figured it would be better to involve everyone so it’s not a selfish way for me to get you guys to like me (even more! )

I’m putting together a book of the best Shambot posts to date. At first I just wanted this project to be a way for me to practice my typography. I thought our blog is a good source of text and image so I was going to lay out a few spreads and play around with things. But I actually think it would be a super fun project for us all to come together and work on. I’ll be doing the layout of the book, but if you guys want to contribute photos, descriptions of older photos, drawings, maybe footnotes? (like what happened after this post was initially written) that would be really awesome.

Right now the images above are just some dummy spreads I put together. Although, I do like the cover since it is our logo/fav icon. The five names that I have in the ‘table of contents’ at this point were the authors of posts that were my initial pick. They weren’t necessarily my favorite but they all had a good amount of text and some cool images. For example, here is the spread I made for Ben (using the original title of the blog post):

It still needs a bit of work. I’m not sure how I feel about the images lining up directly with the grey box. But it feels like… kind of cool and hip to me. Not sure if that’s a universal feeling. You will also notice the comments section over on the right side!

If you guys are interested, I guess we need to go through and pick everyone’s favorite posts. Seeing as we all have quite a few pages of history, don’t go crazy with it. Just kind of browse around and let me know if you find anything that absolutely needs to be in the book. And when I say book, I do want to get this printed somehow. We can all have a copy and reflect on how cool we are. Maybe there could also be a bio section. Who we were when we first started the blog and what we’re up to now. INTERESTING.

Also, if we did a yearly collection HOW FRICKIN’ COOL WOULD THAT BE? I think everyone needs to start posting on Shambot MUCH more often. Me included. Then we’ll have more to choose from in the future for our anthology.

EDIT:// Help me write the intro thing on the table of contents! I’m bad with words. I forgot to change Cedar Rapids to Iowa City. Listing the cities might not even be important.

Ben and I wrote a short song, and recorded it on a Hitachi LevelMatic:

Mom’s Tape Recorder from billbill on Vimeo.

Sorry for the crappy video. My digital camera isn’t the best.

I was home a while ago, and found an old tape recorder in the basement. Apparently my mom used it when she was younger. I’m not sure what for, because most of the tape somehow got sped up and the audio is distorted. I had chance copy the entire tape onto a hard drive, so all the memories are preserved. There is however, a really beautiful song still intact. I think it was my uncle singing to one of my aunts. It’s him playing the acoustic guitar and the quality of the recording is unbelievable. It’s very haunting and romantic. There is also a cute, but also a little creepy recording of my brother singing the ABC’s. I can post that later if I get the audio from Chance’s hard drive.