Tuesday, August 12, 2008

I pity the fool.

I landed another illustration contract this week, making art for the book Mr. T vs. Chuck Norris by Ian Spector, the guy who started the whole Chuck Norris thing. He already has a book titled The Truth About Chuck Norris. Angelo Vildasol, the illustrator of that book, worked with me on The Alphabet of Manliness. He recommended me for this project, so I owe him a thank-you. I have 10 illustrations to complete for an August 27 deadline, so the rest of this month is going to be busy for me, to say the least.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

RAGBRAI is around the corner...

The week after next is RAGBRAI. My friend Denny is coming up from Corpus Christi. The crazy bastard is driving the whole trip, but with airfare the way it is I can't say I blame him. It's going to be a great time. I'll have my camcorder, and I might bring my laptop to post updates throughout the week. Depends on how much room we have and whether I want to deal with it. It seems odd to have a laptop while you're "roughing it", but since just about every overnight town is offering Wi-Fi access I suppose that's not too weird.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

I'm in Adbusters this month!

I've been published again, this time in the July/August issue of Adbusters. It's a nonprofit organization that puts out a magazine of about 120,000 circulation. It's carried nationwide at Border's and I think Barnes & Noble.

I've been working on some more concept art, trying to get my digital painting chops up. I'm also designing a CD cover for my friend Jose's band. And I've started a new woodworking project; I'm building a printer/scanner stand and computer cabinet. I've got all the wood cut to size, glued up the two big panels and I've started milling the pieces to fit together. The jointer/planer combination is indispensable when gluing up a wood panel. I'll post some photos on my web album as soon as I make some more progress. Cheers.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Welcome to petersenart.com ver 4.0

I've been spending some time this week giving my site a facelift. After learning some great techniques from the folks at lynda.com, I'm happy to say that this entire site has been built without using tables. The entire layout is CSS. If you plan on building web pages and you don't know about CSS, I highly recommend using it. You'll never go back.

Another thing I'm trying out is using Lightbox javascript for all of my image viewing. It's a script that overlays images on the current page, without opening a popup window. So far it seems to be working like a charm. I personally don't know JavaScript, so I found a package written by Lokesh Dhakar. Many thanks to him for this great tool. It really solves the layout problem a lot of portfolio pages encounter, that is, where do you place the large image after you click the thumbnail?

I've also brought back the drafting table plans, this time in handy pdf document format. I had a lot of requests after I took them down. I'm planning on building a new table of my own, with collapsible art storage.

I'll be adding more to the site very soon, specifically displaying movie clips. Right now they just link to their own pages on YouTube. I know it's cliché, but the site is under construction at this point. I'm shooting to have it completely functional by the end of the week.