With August behind us, it’s time to start looking ahead to the coming of the fall. Ahhh… fall, my favorite of the seasons. Beautiful colors, nice semi-chilly weather which is perfect for running, and home of such great holidays as Halloween & Thanksgiving. Looking forward, September is starting to seem like a great start to my fall. Filled with art, events and sessions… I’m surely looking forward to it!

Sparking it all off this Friday, I’ll be painting at 111 Minna in San Francisco for Oh Dang! Magazine’s 4 Year Anniversary. My homie Kris Mestizo will be featured, and I’ll be tagging along to add my own bit of flavor to it all. So come through and we’ll have a beer (or whatever your poison), and let me know whatever I’m painting looks somewhat OK. Deal? Cheers!

-Pride comes before the fall

<3 Nick

Putting together a new concept and style takes a lot of thought and work. I put some new sketches in the sketches area… Or just click on the image above to teleport you there!

(edit: sorry about the size of the images… it’s 3AM… I’ll fix it tomorrow -__-;)

<3 Nick

Wowee… the summer sure has been flying by at what seems like light speed. Luckily though, I’ve been able to take advantage of what little time I have to begin to develop a new style. It’s based in my love for the mechanical, mixed with a seemingly natural growth tied together with a concept that lies deeper than I care to dig into here. After a series of explorative sketches, I finally decided to put something down on wood.

This is my first (and hopefully not the last) venture into this new world… I feel strangely free while sketching and developing… building and growing… more than I ever had before. It’s really starting to feel like the sky’s the limit and I can’t wait to see where this new thread unravels to.

Anywho… Smash on the image above to get to the rest of the progress shots, or use the happy “progress” link up above to peruse my latest… Enjoy!

<3 Mynt

In Sacramento on the coming Saturday of August 14, 2010 (During 2nd Saturday) there will be a show carrying the whimsical title of  The Time Machine hosted by White Sky Factory. The creation of The Time Machine title came from our love of adventure and curiousity. This show will be the product of what we “transport” along our travels. Showcasing it (our artwork) to living species (viewers, humans) like a moving gallery.

The Time Machine will feature LIVE ART by renowned artists

• JP Neang
• Nick “Mynt” Trujillo
• R. sseJ
• Anthony Tunac
• ShwinStar
• Raw*UL
• JToddO
• Ichii Ohryin
• Radknee
• Adam Cunningham
• E. Dubois

Musical performances by

• Stevie Nader
• Nina Nanca
• Mye Fojas

Documentation will be provided by Tim Nusog Photography and 1derbread Productions

So on 2nd Saturday, make sure you make your way out to 1801 L St. in Sacramento. Within the courtyard we’ll be amassing a healthy serving of art and music to fuel our travels into the future! Liftoff is scheduled for 6PM to 9PM.

——

The Time Machine is Hosted by White Sky Factory. For those  wondering who that is… The factory is a collaborative group consisting of myself and Sacramento artist, JP Neang.

The White Sky Factory exists to deliever imagination to the unadventured minds,  blank slates and white canvases across time and space. The company car is our Time Machine fully equipped with cheese, bacon, and a tank topped off with insanity & imagination. Enough to run this bad-boy to the beginning of Life and BACK 87429834782382346123512430 times!! (eating the cheese & bacon refuels the ship which equals infinite super fuel lol)

If you’re an artist and you haven’t taken life drawing, you’re seriously shortchanging yourself.

Tonight I was invited by my arch-nemesis Lewis “Lenny” Jacobs to participate in a life drawing session in Vallejo and I’m ever so glad I did. I firmly believe that every artist young, old, skilled or just starting out can learn sooo much from drawing the human figure. It’s been so long since I’ve gotten the chance to do life drawing and I’m damn happy to say they got a great thing going on in Vallejo. They did a smattering of poses lasting from 2 all the way to 15 minutes so you can practice your mad skills! So from now on, every other Monday from 7-10PM, if you got $10 to spare, I hope to see you at 51 Daniels Ave. I’ll be the one with the charcoal covered hands.

PS… go here to see my life drawerings from the night!

PSS: Sorry that the site is still funky! I’ll fix it soon I promise!

<3 Mynt

My good buddy Lewis must be rubbing off on me cause, like him, I’m changing the look of my site again. So pardon the dust for the next few days. Colors will be weird, images won’t fit the frame and links won’t work… sorrrry!

<3 Mynt

The first was 2nd Saturday in Sacramento. Any Sacramentoan (is that right??) should know about this. An abundance of art, music and local shops all open into the night as the people take to the streets enjoying the festivities and food. The first time I checked out 2nd Saturday was with Dyno. He had scored a showing at Havoc Boutique during the event and it was well received. You can probably find the video on his blog, but either way, I was greatly impressed by the amount of energy that was shared that night. Everyone out there for the arts, the music and the local establishments made it feel like a true, grass roots event. I made some friends there and tried to set up a chance for me to display some work there myself.

One of the employees at Havoc Boutique, Jimmy, acted as my contact at Havoc. We tried to set up something for February, but ended up settling for March due to my hectic schedule. It was probably for the best, mostly because the weather was probably better, but that’s neither here nor there. Annnyways, Jimmy was a great host, doing everything from communication between me and the owners of Havoc, to helping me set up shop, all the way to just letting me kick it and introducing me to all the people he knew. I had a great time, and if you’re reading this, Jimmy, big thanks m’man! Despite your age, you were a real professional. Next set of donuts are on me!

Everyone else at Havoc was awesome as well and made me feel right at home. Big thanks to Micky (don’t know if I spelled that right) and Mary, the owners for giving me the chance, and the other guy I met there, who’s name I can’t remember (sorry!) had some crazy ass stories of shit that’s gone on since he’s worked there. You guys definitely made my stay a blast.

I decided that 2nd Saturday was a great place to release my latest print, titled “The Noms” here it is below! (as always, click to biggie size)

Sharks like bacon, right??

For this month only, you can get yours at Havoc Boutique in Sacramento for the on sale price of $20. If I have any left after the month is up, I’ll release them to anyone who wants to buy them, and yes, I’ll ship! I only made 10 so this is a super limited quantity of bacon eating goodness, so gettem while they’re hot!

Below is a (not so) awesome shot of the piece I did live that night

hmm… that looks familiar… Apparently they like donuts too… who woulda thought I have so much in common with sharks?? Annnnyways… if you wanna see some more (really) awesome shots of the night, you can check out a couple of photographers interpretations of 2nd Saturday. The talented Dan Rowan and Ivan Jerick (Jordan, let me know when you get your set up and you, too shall have a linky [edit: Jordan's Set]). I ALWAYS forget to bring my camera, and when I do, I’m usually too busy painting or talking or a combination of the two, to take any shots. So click on the links and make sure you say some GREAT things in the comments box.

This post is getting waaaay to long… So to spare you the trouble, I’ll update next time about the Napa event on Sunday…. Ciao!

<3 Mynt

]]> http://myntcondition.com/2010/03/turbo-weekend/feed/ 2 http://myntcondition.com/2010/03/turbo-weekend/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/myntcondition/~3/5zGz6diIgKc/ http://myntcondition.com/2010/03/outta-the-blue/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:24:11 +0000 Mynt http://myntcondition.com/?p=283 My show hiatus has ended with a bang. I can’t even remember the last non IC show I painted but all of a sudden, I got a full weekend lined up. First up I’ll have a bunch of pieces hung up at Havoc boutique for Sacramento’s 2nd Saturday this Saturday. I was there when Dyno had

Oh yeah...there's more

My show hiatus has ended with a bang. I can’t even remember the last non IC show I painted but all of a sudden, I got a full weekend lined up. First up I’ll have a bunch of pieces hung up at Havoc boutique for Sacramento’s 2nd Saturday this Saturday. I was there when Dyno had his paintings there a few months ago to check the place out and hopefully broaden my reach to places other than the bay area. I found that the crew is awesome and gets big, big ups for supporting local, underground art. They had artwork inside, a DJ out front, and a sick ass freestyle session. Make sure you make it down to check out my collection and theirs. I also had the chance to meet the cats from Dragatomi, a local collectible toy shop around the corner from Havoc who had an awesome set up of retail toys and customs. Either way, Second Saturdays is an awesome event that happens (wait for it) every 2nd Saturday of the month. If you haven’t been, gather up some friends and check it out!

The next event I have is in Napa and unfortunately I don’t have as many details about it right now. All I know is that we’ll be live painting. Shit! I don’t even have an address!! I’ll see what I can dig up.

I know it seems like I’ve been dormant, but I’ve actually been working on a big project soon, and I don’t wanna spill the beans on it quite yet, but it’ll be something you guys haven’t seen from me yet.

Here’s your shark sketch…. he’s hungry for bacon….

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Right now, it’s in the sketch phase, laid out in black and white. I’m gonna share some of my tips for creating this as I go along. Not so much a tutorial, but some helpful hints you can use when you create artwork in Photoshop.

Tools: All my work for this project will be created in Photoshop CS3… even the sketch phase. Photoshop is probably the most useful tools to sketch with, and I’ll share some settings I used to make it feel more like drawing on a sketch pad as opposed to drawing on a computer. I don’t advocate ONLY drawing with one or the other. PS has it’s advantages, such as the ability to undo, layer, and change hundreds of other little options. But I don’t view it as a replacement for actual, physical drawing. Maybe one day, when I get a Cintiq, I’ll change my view on this a bit, but for now, knowing when and how to use both digital or physical drawing is key to getting your project started right.

Right now, I’m using a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. It’s the 6×8 variety, big enough to allow large movements, but small enough to fit in a backpack or shoulder bag. Know and get familiar with utilizing the pressure sensitivity… It will expand EVERYTHING you can do when doing digital work.

Getting Started: First things first, I need to create my document in PS. This picture is only going to be viewed on a computer screen, so, I’m going to make sure the color mode is RGB and the resolution is 72 pixels/inch. Since I’m only doing a black and white sketch, I won’t go into detail about the resolution and color modes, I’ll explain more about those in a later post as it demands an entire article on it’s own. Here’s a peek at my settings.

Beginning your sketch: Even though the end product will be transparent around the edges, I like to create a new layer and fill it with 50% grey. You can do this easily by pressing shift + F5 or going to edit > fill. You could also do this by selecting a fill color for your Background Contents when you  create your document, but I always forget…. annnnyways…

Shift + F5 or go to edit > fill

The reason I fill the BG layer  is that with this method of sketching, I’ll be using a lot of transparent colors. Over a transparent background, they will be VERY hard to see… So I fill it in with either 50% Grey or White. Most of the time I use grey because when I eventually lay color in, it provides a neutral comparison as opposed to seeing the colors against an all white or an all black background. Now, it’s time to sketch.

Here’s where you can start to see the power of using a Wacom tablet combined with Photoshop. I used to just get my Brush tool, pick a color and go right at it, but once I learned how to utilize my different brush settings I developed a method to make it more like natural drawing. Now if you’re drawing with a pencil and press down hard, You’ll get a dark line right? On the contrary, when you press lightly, you get a light line right? If you keep drawing on that light line with the same pressure over and over again, it gets darker and darker with every stroke. We’re gonna re-create that feeling with the wacom and some brush settings.

Select your brush tool or press B to use your brush tool. Then go to Window > Brushes or press F5 to open up your Brushes window. In here you can alter everything that happens when you use your brush tool. When you get a chance, come to this window and fool around with all the settings and experiment to discover all kinds of uses for this window when you’re painting. For now, we’re just going to duplicate my sketching setup. Click on Brush tip shape and reduce the spacing slider all the way down to 1%. When you’re using the brush tool in PS, the program is really just drawing a series of circles. Setting this number as low as possible ensures that all of your brush strokes will be smooth as possible. Set it at anything above 50% and try a brushstroke and see how it’s different to get an idea on what this slider does.

Next, make sure all other boxes are unchecked except for “Other Dynamics”. Then click on “Other Dynamics” the word not the checkbox. Under “Opacity Jitter” click on the dropdown box labeled “Control” and set it to Pen Pressure. Also make sure that Jitter is set to 0%.

Setting the opacity for pen pressure

Now, every time you make a brush stroke with your stylus, the opacity will vary depending on how hard you press down, just like a pencil. You can follow the same steps with your eraser tool selected and it will do the same thing whenever you erase.

Setting up your brush and eraser this way helps me SKETCH in a more natural way over a solid background. It won’t work as well when I start laying down my base colors, but for sketching, it works fantastic. While drawing, change your brush/eraser diameter sizes by right clicking on your canvas and moving the slider, or the easy way, by using the “[" and the "]” hotkeys. Zoom JUDICIOUSLY with Command + or Command  - (Ctrl if you’re on PC). Or hold Command + Spacebar and draw a box on what you want to zoom in on to have more control.

Like I said, there’s TONS of settings you can mess with on your brushes alone, so this barely scratches the surface of PS’s potential. Mixed with the different layer abilities the possibilities are endless. There’s plenty still for me to learn as well, so I don’t want to act like a know-it-all, but if you have any questions, lay em down in the comments below and I’ll get back to you the best I can. Until next time, EXPERIMENT, PRACTICE, AND SAVE OFTEN!