Lauren Monardo

Music, Music, Music!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 21:26:00 +0000

Welp, it's been a while since my last update, so here's another big'n!

Bob Marley 6/10/2013

David Bowie 6/06/2013

Sir Paul McCartney 6/07/2013

Joe Stummer (The Clash) 6/05/2013

Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) 4/5/2013

Spider Stacey (The Pogues) 3/15/2013

Tony Duggins (The Tossers) 3/13/2013

Shane MacGowan (The Pogues) 3/14/2013

Liner Notes Art Collection

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 15:47:00 +0000

Here's a massive group of recent drawings I've done, adding to what I have
now entitled the "Liner Notes Art Collection"!
I have a few of these for sale as prints at
Liner Notes Art Shop

Billy Joel

Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam)

Erroll Garner

Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull)

Janis Joplin

Mike Patton (Faith No More)

Prince

Sade

Make Mine Music!

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:37:00 +0000

Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols

Joey Ramone


Neil Young - not thrilled with how his face came out, actually, I may try to revise this some time in the future

Robert Smith of The Cure

Satchmo

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:41:00 +0000

Hendrix

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 20:06:00 +0000

Today's warm-up drawing of Jimi Hendrix

Más Músicos

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:33:00 +0000

John Lennon, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Thom Yorke

More Musicians

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 19:38:00 +0000

Stewart Copeland of The Police and Johnny Cash

Musicians Past & Present

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:39:00 +0000

A while ago I had done an illustration of Jack White and Ruby Amanfu in an Al Hirschfeld-inspired style and had a blast doing it! The last couple of days I've been doing "warm-up" drawings in the same style and I think I'd really like to do a bunch of these because they're loads of fun! Here are yesterday and today's, Billie Holiday and Al Barr of Dropkick Murphys! Hope you enjoy them as much as I do :)

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 01:35:00 +0000

Happy New Year, ladies and gents! My first two drawings of 2013 are of characters from my good buddy Eben Burgoon's comic "B-Squad"! As I type there are less than 40 hours for the B-Squad Kickstarter to be funded. If anyone's reading this, please visit B-Squad's Kickstarter to become a backer and make this awesome project a reality, while getting cool rewards in the process!

Balloooooooon

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 01:21:00 +0000

Oh, hello there, children!

It's been a while since my last post, but don't worry! I'm still right hewe!
I've had a lingering head cold for the past week and it's been making my head exceptionally foggy and balloon like. Being an artist I of course feel the need to illustrate my point thusly:

Love Interruption

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 04:36:00 +0000

I was listening to Jack White's "Blunderbuss" album, as I've been doing a lot lately, and it inspired me to do this drawing. I don't know why I was compelled to use a Hirschfeld-esque style for the line work, but I was! Anyway, I'm kind of happy with how it came out - my humble homage to two amazing musicians :)

Stamp Collecting Trollusk

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:37:00 +0000

A wonderful little monster from one of my other favorite books as a child, "One Monster After Another" by Mercer Mayer! I used to stare at this book for hours!

Rest in Peace Maurice Sendak

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:12:00 +0000

I remember gawking at two books quite a bit as a child. One was Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are", and the second was Mercer Mayer's "One Monster After Another". Looking back on my art thus far, what I love to draw and how I draw it, I realize what a huge impact those two artists must have had on me. It's sad that we've lost such an amazing and inspirational artist, but there's no doubt to me that his work will continue to cause awe and inspiration for generations and generations to come!

Game of Thrones

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:19:00 +0000

Okay, so I will admit that I am completely hooked on Game of Thrones. Luckily I'm in good company, as my husband and many of my fellow artists are also in love with the show! With the airing of the latest episode last Sunday, "Ghost of Harrenhal", I was inspired to try to capture the likenesses of a few of my favorite characters! First up are Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) and his sell-sword bodyguard, Bronn (Jerome Flynn).

Next up, Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) and Lady Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley). These two are giving me a bit more trouble. Mainly because I made a massive rookie mistake, that I shouldn't have after my 20+ years of drawing - I ran out of room on the page. Had I roughed out the entire thing before digging in I could have avoided it, but alas, I did not. So now I have a semi-decent Lady Catelyn and a squash-legged Brienne. Even though I already inked it and attempted to fix it in Photoshop, I may have to go and redraw Brienne's lower body on a separate sheet and fix it that way. It still looks wonky to me despite my efforts to salvage it. Ah well, here they are so far!

Last, but not least, so far is a sketch I did for a friend of mine of Ser Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen) yesterday at Free Comic Book Day! There will be more GOT goodness in the near future, I am certain!

AT-AT-ATTACK!

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 05:23:00 +0000

A piece I did for a local Star Wars themed Art Show (wonderfully named, "It's Getting H0th in Here")at Bound For Glory Tattoo, curated by the amazingly talented Magie Serpica and Nick Caruso! It's currently for sale if anyone is interested :)

pencils

inks!

Justified Sketches

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:53:00 +0000

in celebration of the 3rd season of Justified premiering next week, some pen sketches of Boyd Crowder and Raylan Givens!

Happy Howl-idays

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:45:00 +0000

Hope everyone has a great Holiday Season and a Happy New Year!

Featuring a few of my family dogs
(from Top Left: Bosco - Chocolate Lab, Ruby - Pointer Mix, Gordon - Pomeranian, my lil' guy, Jethro! -Straight up Mutt!, Cecco & Pasqual - twin Yorkie-Poos!)

Adobe Support

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 21:41:00 +0000

Working in Flash used to be slightly annoying for me because of how the line smoothing works. I'd draw a line that fit what I wanted perfectly and as soon as I released the stylus it would warp into something completely different. Whenever I work on an animation project, as I am now, this problem is exasperated by a frequent crashing. Well, I recently spent a decent penny and upgraded to Flash CS5.5 for my most recent job and I must say I am impressed! I didn't think Flash could have crashed more than it already did but bless Adobe, they really pulled out all the stops on this new version. I'd say overall I've lost over 24 hours of work due to crashes, which is 24 hours of pay I'm losing by having to do everything more than once.

Obviously this has lead me to calling Adobe Support on more than one occasion since purchasing the program. The results have been...disappointing to say the least. First of all I'd be very surprised if any of these support technicians really knew the program well. Secondly, even if they did it would appear they are limiting their responses (and usefulness) to a very contrite script. This conclusion is arrived at after a few conversations ending in awkward silence, an assurance that a "higher tier technician" would call me back in a day or so, and repeated suggestions of things we've already established didn't work.

So rather than pitching my computer out the window, I decided to have a little fun!
Since I'm working on another Mo Willems project I thought using some of my favorite characters would be apropos...

More Boardwalk

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:19:00 +0000

Okay, last ones for today. Some more of my favorites from Boardwalk Empire; Chalky White, Jimmy Darmody, and Manny Horvitz. Lookit Manny's head, it's like he was carved out of an apple!

Harrow

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 17:34:00 +0000

Doing some warm-up sketches today before I begin my work. One of my favorite shows right now is Boardwalk Empire, it really is a great show to watch! Perhaps the biggest draw to tuning in every weekend is my favorite character, Richard Harrow (played by the insanely talented Jack Huston). So I figured to get rolling today I'd do some character studies/sketches!

Have I mentioned how much I love sketching in pen? Because I really do!

Angry Penguin Jr. 3, The Penguining -- this time it's personal!

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:03:00 +0000

Okay, last Angry Penguin post for now, I promise.
It's just that my neighbors are screaming at each other right now, and I can hear them quite plainly through my window! And that makes me think of "angry"! Ahhh child-like logic at its best.

Here's the most recent one I did for the fine folks over at www.theangrypenguin.com!

First-a we pencil d'penguin....

Next-a, we ink-a him up...

Last, we put 'im in d'oven and make him all nice and nice-a! Bon Appetito evr'body!

Angry Penguin Jr. 2, This Time He's ANGRY...ER!

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:51:00 +0000

Time for more Angry Penguin!

Gosh I love this little guy... This design is far more recent, and it's the first double-sided
tee design I've done for them.

Original concepts done on scrap paper with ball point pen. BIC fine point blue are my favorite to sketch with...maybe it's because they're relatively cheap? I don't know...

Little Angry Penguin Jr. in his bloody glory!

Poor eagle... caught in the sharp blades of cheese-ball humor *tsk*

Angry Penguin Jr., the First

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:43:00 +0000

On the subject of Angry Penguin (see previous post), I realized I haven't posted any
of the work I've done for them! Here's a little behind the scenes of the first shirt design
I ever did for them. They were going with a Global Warming theme, for which I did
a few concepts, and though this was apparently submitted among that bunch I can't
for the life of me figure out why. I think I had just kept the header there as part of a
template used on the other (more appropriate to the theme) concepts. Well whatever
the case was, this was the design they liked the most, and so it went on to print!

Original Concept done in Photoshop

When I went to do the final artwork (which was done in Flash), I realized
that AP Jr was very stiff, so I tried to liven him up a bit! Everyone seemed
happy with the results :)

The finished product! Check it out on their website at www.theangrypenguin.com!

Been A While...

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:38:00 +0000

Wow, so I haven't posted to this blog in a while and I figured it's about time I get back to it!
Unfortunately a lot of what I've been working on are things I still can't post. In the meantime though here's a little catching up!

This little number is a piece I did a little while ago for kicks, featuring my favorite irrate little bird, Angry Penguin Jr.! I've been hired to do a few designs for Angry Penguin and they're always a blast, but this one was done on my dime :)

Brock Commission

noreply@blogger.com (Lauren) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:51:00 +0000

One of many Venture commissions I did at BAC a couple of weekends ago
he's singing "Immigrant Song" by Led Zepplin :)