inked mag

Commissioned illustrations for Inked Magazine.

The prompt I was given was loosely, “A woman on (or with) a motorcycle”. I wanted to give it a bit more spin than what you’d typically see with images of women on bikes, so I opted for something with a bit of narrative and thought up this woman, escaping some kind of heist with a duffel bag full of cash, maybe she was at some penthouse hot tub before bailing out with the loot, down to her sport bike on the street below, while she’s firing at her pursuers. Exactly the kind of action movie nonsense I get hyped about.

This flash sheet style piece was pure fun. Inked Mag was having a weed themed issue and they asked for a relevant piece. i always liked having the inverted V on the Visine bottle to act as the top point on the triangle. The snake swallowing a bong was equal parts technical and silly. I even got to share the issue with Tommy Chong on the cover!

This was for Inked Mag’s 2021 “Sex Issue”, which lead to a few revisions because i had to keep it suggestive but not gratuitous. A cool challenge, and one where i got to break out this balloon dog condom, which was actually a sketch I had in my personal sketchbook since around 2007. Glad it got to finally see the light of day outside my sketchbook.

I knew this was going to be for an issue themed around plastic surgery and body modification, so i tried to strike a balance between themes of surgery and self-perception. This piece also had a revision or two where i had to taper back some of the more graphic ideas like scalpels and implant incisions and brought in metaphors like the butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

A fairly open “TikTok themed” prompt lead to this woman singing in her kitchen. I tried to keep the color palette limited and reuse colors where I could, so you’d get a nice bit of repetition and continuity through the image. I’ve always had an appreciation for the visual style of silk screen posters and color misalignment in offset printing, so I try to bring it into my digital work when I can.

Went completely the other way with this, my first published 3D render, for the 2021 Christmas issue. The turkey, hat, & switchblade were premade assets, I modeled the ink caps, the dice, and illustrated/added the tattoos to the turkey in Substance Painter. Went for simple staging and soft lighting. the tattoos were really the thing I wanted to be the focal point of the piece.