Howdy folks!

Here’s some work I’ve been developing over the past couple of months. It’s been rather liberating diving into these works on canvas. There larger scale, relative to my  illustration work, made a refreshing demand on my body to be more physical. The following pieces were done for my “Madness All the Time” series. These works are the product of nonsense integrating with reason and consequently defecating a sloppy narrative on canvas material. After all narrative is essentially just that, a pathetic exhaust of one’s ideas. The history of man is subjective; resting in the realms of opinion based on fleeting events. Therefore, to assert that I can tell a story about history accurately I must begin by submitting to the possibility that purposefully lying is just as informed and indeed valid as had I been trying to tell it truthfully.

Being aware of my inability to tell a story about historical truths truthfully has led me to the layering of narratives in these pieces. At times it is an erasure of one event in favor of another. Even though both events may have occurred I give myself the authority to stamp out whatever I like. At other points it’s to acknowledge my insecurity with the truth and submit to the insubordination of a subjective history. The result of which is symbolical imagery scattered about with tacit implications but no discernable direction, laden with doubt in some moments and shallow confidence in others.

Bon Appetit!

This was the first piece I did for the series, it’s called “I like Bunnies II”

“War All the Time”

The Fecundity of Criticism I and II

Hey y’all. Just a quick update for you. I partnered again with College of Charleston Magazine AD Alfred Hall for this piece. The article was about the increasing amount of people in the United States that believe in the Devil. Apparently, the number of believers has jumped quite a bit in the past decade. Thanks, Alfred, the  two works I’ve done under your eyes have been some of my favorite pieces.

Below shows the process from thumbnail sketches to final artwork.

There were a couple more concepts but Alfred went with number 1 ultimately, below is the final pencil.

I don’t generally do a color comp unless the client feels like they need one, but for this job I wanted to go with a color triad and wanted to make sure the bold primary colors would work. This is just a photoshop quick sketch of color- broad strokes.

and there you have it…

Well, it’s been far too long since my last post, my apologies. My blogging absence has not been due to lack of work but rather a lack of leisure time. Hopefully I can devote sometime in the next few weeks to properly document all my torrid adventures and the images that said adventures subsequently spawned. In lieu of affording myself the time to blog about them thoroughly now, I shall say this in regards to the work that was produced in the past few months; these past few months have certainly been conceptually formative, challenging and entirely economically irrelevant, I’ve leapt into some personal work and the result has been in some instances terrific, and in other instances embarrassing failures… nevertheless, it’s been fun.

First off, I’ll start with this little collection of drawings depicting the fictional battle between modern England and the Britons. In reality it was the Britons verses the Anglo-Saxons, the result of which is what we know as the United Kingdom. More or less these works are a humorous response to the tacitly placed guilt on American society from the movie Avatar, and indeed running rampant throughout contemporary media. Sure, sure the Native Americans were great and all, I thought, but any semblance of their true history has been replaced by this highly romanticized notion of their purity. Pssh- were they not just as warring and territorial as we? Just as I don’t have any strong emotional concern for my Briton ancestors, I am entirely unconcerned with the plight of the Native Americans. Here I show this fictional narrative of my ancestors being conquered… good for England, I can assure you it’s better off. MMMM, mmm, MMMM…. I can’t wait to build a house on 40 acres of prime Pandora real estate and start living off the vast revenues from the Unobtainium I drill. Hell, the locals aren’t doing anything with it.

Extra! Extra!  I recently helped my dear old friends at the Dandy Dwarves with the production of a commercial for the Doritos ”Crash the Superbowl” annual competition. If you’re unaware of the competition, in short, Doritos has brilliantly found a way to convince thousands of people to submit ads for their company and pay them nothing- make it a fun competition! Doritos Co. sifts through the plethora of monotonous videos that are submitted  and pick five to be voted on by the public for the possibility of being aired during the Superbowl. This year I helped the dwarves board out the commercial (click here to see a small sample of the boards) and decided to lend an extra hand and join them in the production as well- just for kicks. Anyhoo, I made the final cut as an “extra” in the background. If you look closely at the picture you’ll take note that I’m the one on top of the bus, waving a suitcase wildly in the air!

Watch the final video here.

Considering my brief stint as an extra I thought I’d do a post to pay homage to all the extras in my illustrations. The following pictures highlight all those lowly extras that have appeared in my work, true they may not have been featured but they were essential to the piece as a whole! Some are really small, even comprised of just a few strokes of the pen nib others are larger and are in fact quite dynamic and detailed but were not the focal point of the drawing for whatever reason, but all of them are important on some level. Please enjoy!

This first one, incidentally WAS the featured figure in the illustration, but it was his action that was truly the focal point, not the figure himself… so he qualifies in my mind. I kind of liked the cropped image as a desktop image… if you concur you can right click and save the image here. This is a cropped portion of an illustration I did for Caribbean Travel and Life magazine- unfortunately the publisher decided to pull the article due to it’s controversial subject matter (eating whale soup).

This is from an older piece. These little characters probably consume no more than 5% of the entire illustration but I’ve always really enjoyed their presence nonetheless.

Taken from a sketchbook. This character was at the time symbolic of me feeling marooned on an island in paradise.

One of the pages from my most recent book Zarafa. The cropped image here is slightly less than a quarter of the total illustration. This book has so many crowd scenes that I could have easily pulled another ten images for the purposes of this entry… I recall reading the manuscript and asking the publisher if they were seeing it illustrated like a Where’s Waldo with hundreds if not thousands of people  page after page. Fortunately, they seemed like they wanted the scale to be slightly less chaotic.

Perhaps you recognize this little guy from another entry? I’ve always liked his elegant simplicity, just a few strokes and he tells his story.

And finally, I just finished this job yesterday for BNET and thought this hard working stiff fit the criteria for this news update. That’s it folks, y’all come back now, you here!

Check out the new issue of Saturday Evening Post. It has quite a lot of my work running rampant throughout it’s pages. On the interior is a six page spread with 12 spots of my caricatures supporting the cover story “12 Innovations That Changed Our World.” But the true piece de resistance is the cover, not due to any remarkably and skillfully executed illustrating, but namely due to the magazines historical ties to Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker.

It may be difficult to find the magazine on newsstands as it is primarily a subscription based print now. But if you do have the means go check it out! Otherwise, just go to their website and you can flip through the articles.

Sorry for the infrequency of posting. Hopefully, I’ll get back in to a comfortable stride of posting bi-monthly news items.

I did this job for Inside Housing magazine (UK distribution) The final print size was just 300 mm x 300 mm I ended up doing this piece much larger on the watercolor paper just for the sake of having more area to work on the details. I think the plus size scale on this one really allowed me to explore with the watercolor brush strokes and overall I’m very pleased with how this one turned out.

Go check out my new book Zarafa at your local bookstore. It was just released and may not be on the shelves just yet, so make sure they order a copy to be placed facing front in their children’s book section. Or if you’d prefer go here: Barnes and Noble website or here: Amazon. OR…. if you’ll be in the LA area on July 8th I will be doing a book signing at Every Picture Tells A Story in Santa Monica from 6:00 to 7:30 pm, mark your calendars. 

Zarafa is my third book done with Philomel and marks the second time working with the author Judith St. George. It’s a fun book, based on a true story, in which a lovable giraffe circa 1830 traveled from Northeastern Africa all the way up the Nile, crossed the Mediterranean, arrived in Southern France and walked 500 miles to Paris all to meet the king! Naturally, the giraffe makes a number of friends on the way and everyone who sees her falls in love. The following is a review from Kirkus: 

“Zarafa the giraffe first traveled on camelback, then by a small, creaky boat, then a tall ship and, finally, walked 550 miles on her own four hooves. Why would a giraffe ever do all of that? In 1824, Muhammad Ali, the viceroy of Egypt, decided to present King Charles X with a beautiful, exotic gift-a giraffe (in Arabic, zarafa means “charming” or “lovely one”). But Zarafa had to travel all the way from Egypt to France, with her lanky neck and knobby-kneed legs growing the entire time. In her trademark witty yet informational style, St. George relates this epic journey with a jaunty text and quick, parenthetical quips. Spencer easily captures this essence as his long-lashed giant happily lopes through the pages, much to the delight of adoring crowds. His gentle human caricatures and almost-but-not-quite anthropomorphized animals are playful, expressive and fun (an attendant cow’s seasickness is a particularly amusing detail). Thousands of visitors came to see Zarafa in France-no doubt many more will flock to this book.”

Here’s a couple interiors to peak your interest.

Bedbugs: The Perils and Misadventures of an Anxious Traveller was published recently. Author of the book Jonathan Hehir commissioned me and for the most part was my Art Director throughout the project. It was fun working with Jonathan because he was so personally connected with the book and he knew exactly what he wanted with very little ambiguity. Shipping the original to him, wasn’t quite as enjoyable… but that’s another story.

I’ve only read the first chapter, but it seemed like a very humorous book. So if you’re in the market for a dryly humorous novel, and you like books about traveling, and you want to own a Britt Spencer print, buy this book!

Cheers!

I hope you guys like anecdotal tales of torment and shame. 

I was asked by a preschool here in LA to come and read my book Fleas! for a charity benefit earlier this month. I thought to myself, hey what a fun and humanitarian thing for me to do. I’ll show up, read the book- everyone will love me for my selflessness, and lift me up on shoulders shouting Hoorah! Hoorah! 

So, I show up thinking that I’m going to do marvelously. After all, the kids will be so utterly in love with the book that simply reading it will make them frozen in anticipation of every syllable that rolls off my tongue. This was not the case, unfortunately. 

Instead, the moment I opened my mouth I lost control and the little crumb crunchers made sure I was aware that I had NO relevance in their lives what so ever. Between the chaos and through my monotone reading voice I could hardly think I was making an impact. A fact made very apparent by a kid requesting that perhaps I “read with a pie in my face.” In hindsight, that may have given them some fleeting moment of entertainment and truly would have been the best route to salvaging my integrity. (you know you’re in a rough spot when taking a pie to the face would actually raise your value) My feeble attempts at jazzing up the text with different voices wasn’t well received either. So much so, that by the end I was just paraphrasing in extreme short hand, “And then he went here and everyone was happy…” turn page, ” …and then he left and all the characters were sad, but you know things worked out anyway…” turn page.

Finally I closed the book and the parents politely clapped - naturally the children continued their chaos uninterrupted. Before I could high-tail it out of there I grabbed a couple of the complimentary cheese and crackers and was approached by a sadist that informed me of how well my performance went.

Never again!

Recently completed this job for the College of Charleston’s alumni magazine. The article titled, “The Darkside of Leadership” explores the tendency for some leaders to abuse their power and lead their flock in a wayward direction. I was fighting hard not to go a Star Wars route on this one. Fortunately, for the College of Charleston’s Alumni, none of my Star Wars sketches turned out and I decide against sending such foolishness. Out of the several sketches I sent, this one was picked:

I cleaned up the sketch and submitted this for their approval:

After doing the tighter sketch I really started getting a duoshade itch. If you recall from an earlier posting, here. I thought the drawing would lend itself  perfectly towards an older pulp comic look so I asked the AD, Alfred Hall if he wouldn’t mind me trying something slightly different than my usual watercolor and ink. Seemingly open to the idea, Alfred gave me the go ahead and I got the final ink done on the duoshade. 

Keeping pulp comics in mind, (and keeping in mind, I’ve never actually read a comic book in my life- so it wasn’t likely that my idea of a pulp comic is at all historically accurate) I wanted to use a limited number of colors and attempt to mimic a rudimentary printing process. I ended up only using three colors and a scanned texture of an old sheet of paper for the final.

Thanks Alfred.