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$5 Off Society6 iPhone Cases

Nathan Olsen — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 21:39:29 +0000

Online e-retailer Society6 is offering $5 off all iPhone cases between now and Sunday. If you were interested in having some of my artwork on your iPhone, now is your chance. You can see my cases here, here and here.

My Lovebot illustrations are also available on Society6 as prints, canvases and laptop skins. You can see my full store here.

In addition to Society6, I also have a few skateboard decks, a t-shirt and other merch available through Artzprojekt.

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Post tags: artzprojekt, for sale, Lovebot, prints, robots, skateboard, society6

Building Blocks

Nathan Olsen — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 16:47:34 +0000

This was one of the last pieces I finished for my MFA thesis exhibition. Like the rest of the work developed for the show, this piece is my attempt to talk about and reflect on my childhood experiences. I was made to believe as a child that all this — life — was happening for some reason. That my life meant something. That there was a plan. The robot in this piece is meant as a sort of stand-in for God or, more specifically, Fate. The comic book page is here being taken apart, it’s carefully constructed two dimensional surface slowly pealed away and reshaped by this three dimensional interloper. The rigid structure and clear-cut morality of the comic book is defeated by an outside force — an unseen hand (or claw) that shapes the world according to some predefined ruleset that is inscrutable to the inhabitants of the page.

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Post tags: art, comic book, Illustration, robot

The Exhibition

Nathan Olsen — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:05:16 +0000

For those of you who have been kind enough to follow my work but were unable to attend my MFA exhibition, I thought I might post some photographs from the show. Unfortunately, I don’t have any shots of the opening reception — after all the hard work that went into getting the show up, I was just happy to be conscious and in attendance that night. The reception was great though — there was a huge turn-out and I had a lot of fun talking to folks about my work.

There was a brief write-up of the show in the campus newspaper.

The work in the show is all from large scale digital files — many of which are over 3GB in size. The largest prints, the candy wrapper series, were printed at 3′x3′ and from files that each contain 234,090,00 pixels (15,300px by 15,300px). I’ve never worked this large before and seeing these pieces at this scale was really gratifying. Months of drawing, painting, layering, masking, and color correction went into each piece but I never really got a good sense about how it was all working until I finally saw the final prints on the gallery walls.

Now that the show is over, I’m looking forward to figuring out what to do next. I’d love to continue working on some of the ideas that developed out of this body of work, but I’m not quite sure how to proceed. Working at such a large scale is very demanding and outputting high quality, archival prints at these sizes is not easy on the pocket book. I would love to do a short run of limited edition prints of some of these pieces.

By the way, this entire album of photos can also be found on my Facebook page. Liking my Facebook page is a great way to keep up-to-date with what I’m doing and to help me spread the word about my work.

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Post tags: art, csulb, gallery, Illustration, MFA, thesis

MFA Thesis Exhibition

Nathan Olsen — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 22:41:42 +0000

On Sunday, November 14, 2010, my MFA thesis exhibition, Make Believe, will be opening in the Dutzi art gallery on the campus of California State University, Long Beach.

A map and directions can be found on the university art department website. Park in lot 7 if you plan to attend the reception.

The reception will be from 5:00pm-7:00pm and coincides with the opening receptions for the MFA exhibitions of three very talented friends of mine, Nancy Chiu, Jennie Cotterill and Harry Diaz.

The exhibit will be on display the week of November 15th-18th. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 12:00pm-5:00pm, and Wednesday from 12:00pm-7:00pm.

I’ll personally be on hand at the gallery to answer questions and talk art both at the reception on Sunday as well as during gallery hours on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, so stop by if you can!

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Post tags: art, csulb, exhibition, gallery, thesis

Creature Comforts

Nathan Olsen — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 07:21:29 +0000

The body of work I’ve been developing over the past six months has been about my childhood. This piece is probably the most personal — I used handwriting from my grandmother, mother and father in the background and the bear pattern was the creation of my mom, who was a teddy bear maker in the 1980s. She was never a big name in the business, but her bears have been published in teddy bear calendars and occasionally find their way onto Ebay. My parents’ creative efforts had a profound affect on my childhood, so this was partially an attempt to address my feelings about their work.

Growing up, I never had a sense that I came from a creative family. Even though my father was a woodworker and my mother designed bears, I never connected that to my compulsion to draw. It wasn’t until years later when I discovered a box of old manuscripts that my grandmother had written in the 1950s and started going through the photographic negatives from my grandfather’s darkroom that I started to understand the role my family played in how I developed into the person I am today.

My grandparents were quite old by the time I was born. So were my parents, for that matter. My grandfather died when I was eight and my grandmother was in a nursing home with dementia by the time I was a teenager. I lost my parents to cancer in 2002 and 2006. At thirty-four, I feel like I’m just now starting to understand who I am and my place in the world and I envy people who have the opportunity at my age to know their parents and grandparents as peers rather than as authority figures.

Me? I am left to converse with the dead. They don’t talk much, but they’re good listeners.

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Post tags: art, Illustration, robots, teddy bear

Brushes

Nathan Olsen — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 03:05:44 +0000

Today was a work session for my Tuesday Photoshop class at LCAD, which left me with some downtime. I like to draw while I await requests for help from my students so, in that spirit, I decided today to check-out the Brushes app for the iPad. It’s a neat program. The interface is really simple to use, but I still found it a little awkward at first. As I got the hang of it? I really started to enjoy myself. It’s no replacement for actual paint, but it’s definitely a much more practical option for sketching on the go.

I know that there is at least one or two competitors out there to Brushes and discussions often revolve around which of them has the most/best features. Honestly? I love the simplicity of Brushes. I don’t think I need anything more than this. I just learned that there are shortcuts for changing the brush size and picking colors, which is great. If there was a shortcut for changing opacity? The program would be perfect.

Update: You can watch a time lapse video of the painting process at YouTube.

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Post tags: art, Brushes, iPad, life-painting, sketch

Batgirl

Nathan Olsen — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 08:10:01 +0000

Other superheroes in the notebook:

The White Queen

Nathan Olsen — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:22:29 +0000

My favorite comic book series as a kid was The Uncanny X-Men. I was too young for the Byrne era, but I was there for Rick Leonardi, Marc Silvestri and Jim Lee. Chris Claremont’s writing was so convoluted that half the fun was just trying to figure out what the hell was going on from issue to issue. The first time The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants showed up? I had no idea who they were, but Claremont wrote the story as if everyone knew who they were — I think that was kind of what made the book so interesting. Reading it was like joining a club and the longer you stuck with it, the higher you rose in the ranks. Long time readers knew the Brotherhood, and that’s all that mattered. Me? I just had to catch up.

And it wasn’t too difficult to find the motivation — the Brotherhood’s leader was a character called The White Queen. A cold, evil woman named Emma Frost who had the body of a supermodel and a costume that looked like it had been picked off the rack at Fredericks of Hollywood. To a pre-teen boy? The most terrifying supervillain imaginable — either she’d kill you or kiss you and at that age both prospects seemed pretty frightening.

Other superheroes in the notebook:

Playing With Panels

Nathan Olsen — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:03:44 +0000

This guy may look a little bit familiar — he first showed up as one of the skateboard designs I posted a few weeks back. It was an interesting challenge to figure out how to translate those markings into a three dimensional figure.

“Meanwhile, Below” Print For Sale

Nathan Olsen — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:55:47 +0000

Hey folks! It’s been a long time coming, but I finally have a new print for sale. For those of you who have been following my work, you probably recognize the Lollypop Squid from a previous print of mine.

This new print, Meanwhile, Below, is offered in my store as a 12″x12.5″ giclée on 13″x15″ acid-free fine art paper and ships signed by me, the artist.

While I’m really happy with how this piece came out, it’s been a long journey to get it to this point. I actually started the piece last winter, initially rendering it as a pencil drawing.

At the time, I was mimicking the workflow of many digital illustrators by starting with a pencil drawing and then moving to digital coloring. However, my method of digital coloring was a bit… complicated. Slow, tedious — those would also be apt descriptions. I mean, the results were always great, but I really didn’t enjoy the process and I was really getting bogged down while working on this one.

After a good month (yes, month — perhaps longer, but that’s too embarrassing to admit to) or so of working on this print, I gave up. I needed to find a new way of working. So, I set this print aside and started experimenting, looking for better, faster, more enjoyable ways to make pictures.

Comparing the final image to what I made a year ago, I think it’s clear that all that work hasn’t gone to waste. There were certainly some nice elements to the early piece, but I’m much happier with the results I’m getting now. More importantly, I’m much happier while I’m working, which is also really important.

Once again, if you’d like to have a copy of this print for yourself, you can find them in my online store.