Here's some caricature photos.... Check them out.

Check out this girls blog! She's posted a caricature I drew of her and her boyfriend.

The above title says it all... but just to restate, this girl has posted a caricature of mine on her blog. :) Check it out at www.xanga.com/hulaprincess

I'm a model... kind of. It's me on a billboard.

Check this out. This was a billboard campaign that I art directed, and another art director designed it. It was originally designed for Espresso Royale, but they thought it was a little to strange and spooky, and they ended up going with the "love your coffee" campaign, which... heck, I art directed and designed that one, and loved it, but I thought that one was even stranger and spookier. :)

But another Adams market ended up using it, for Dunkin Donuts. (Whoa)

That's a photo of me though, messed with in Photoshop... but me nonetheless.

Check out my caricaturing sign... and check out me painting it. :)

Hey, here's a photo my girlfriend took of me painting my caricature sign. I painted this sign on the back of my old portable drawing board, it's the same boardl that I've been using to draw caricatures at events for years. It's 26" by 24" and I have a sentimental attachment to the thing... but it was banged up and covered in doodles, drawings, and peoples names, so I decided it was time to retire the thing, paint over it, and turn it into my sign. It's my little "master of the quick draw" guy.

Love your coffee & love espresso royale as well...

Hey, here's a two great billboards that I did while I was the art director at Adams Outdoor Advertising. It was for Espresso Royale, a coffee shop chain in Champaign IL, and the tag line was... "Love your coffee." Hey, I love my coffee! I loved this client too, for letting me do something this cool. They ending up doing a few variations on these designs and the tagline and they got t-shirts made also.

Oh! And it got like an hour of radio time also. Some people thought it was too much, other people liked it. But most import of all, people were talking about it.

Amazing mural based on my billboard design, painted by area artist Mike Harper.

Here's an amazing mural in downtown Champaign. It was based on a billboard design of mine that I created for Homeworks, and painted by Mike Harper a local artist and mural painter in Champaign Illinois.

Homeworks is a home improvement resale store in downtown Champaign. The billboard design was a finalist in the area CHAAMPS awards two years ago as well, and Homeworks has used the design in print pieces, signs, and even on the side of their truck!

The talented artist who painted the mural was Mike Harper.
Mike is also the mural artist responsible for the mural in Champaign's Art theatre. Check that one out as well! Mike is available for further mural work. He's a great guy and I recommend his services highly.

Do you know who we are?

Here’s something cool. It’s a 10 feet by 10 feet mural that I designed and illustrated back in 2001 that I finally got a photo of. Currently it's on display at the Davenport Public Library.

I drew the mural and assisted in the painting of it with a Quad City mural painter named Gloria… (Gloria what? I don’t know for sure.) Who was the mystery woman? If anyone knows, or if she’s reading this… feel free to drop me a line and I’ll give you a shout out on this blog.
Anyway, this mural’s in the children’s library in downtown Davenport Iowa and it features a ton of characters from children’s books. The copy across the top of the mural asks, “Do you know who we are?”
Do you?

CHAAMP winner in Champaign Urbana

Each year, the the Champaign - Urbana Ad Club holds its biggest and best known event — CHAAMPs. CHAAMPs (Champaign-Urbana Advertising Awards of Merit Program) is an annual contest for members of the Ad Club. Check out their site at www.cu-adclub.org.

This billboard of mine won an award at the last event. Oh yeah. But man, I wish the client had went with my favorite campaign idea. FREE GAS (with every meal.)

Up a notch records and hip hop rots the brain...

This was one of the last projects that I did as the art director for Adams Outdoor Advertising. It was strange. I had left Champaign for about a month, right before these went up... there was a death in my family and suddenly Adams, advertising, and billboards were the least important thing in the world to me...

But the billboard campaign got tons of attention, and when I came back into town I found out that there had been articles written about it, tv coverage, radio coverage, and tons of controversy. Oh yeah. But, being that I was out of town when the boards went up... I wasn't able to take photos of all of them! Though friends did hold on to copies of the newspaper articles for me.

Anyway the campaign was created to promote an independent hip hop label called Upanotchrecords, and went down like this:

Week one: Adams posted a 11 billboards, for a fake company / client / organization called "Coalition of Responsible Attentive Parents." Spell it out...C.R.A.P. See... it's a hint right there.

Week two: We planned on posting up 11 vandalized versions of the board that me and some local artists had vandalized in house, The artists that helped out were Marque Strickland, (www.artistrick.com), Deborah Su, (djsu@uiuc.edu) and one more guy that wants to stay nameless. But, before Adams Outdoor Advertising could post the vandalized boards, someone beat us to the punch! Which was cool, I mean, I would have done it myself if I hadn't allready been involved and vandalizing billboards on the clock. Anyway regardless of the unexpected and appreciated assistance from the community, Adams Outdoor Advertising posted the vandalized boards, and left up the one that some area artist, rebel, and visionary had done for us.

(By the way, that took some guts to actually do that. I'm not condoning it. But I'm not condemning it either. Nah, I'm condoning it. That was awesome. I would totally buy that guy or girl a drink.)

Week three: Adams sniped in the message, the payoff, the explanation - a big red square that told everyone that "indie hip hop label Upanotchrecords was putting on a show featuring the Brainhousing Group, at an area club."

That was the campaign. It got lots of publicity and you got to admit that it was clever, edgy, and attention getting. And it was fun to mess up the billboards! So I want to say thanks to Upanotchrecords, the artists that helped, the one artist that help of the clock, and Adams Outdoor advertising for letting me do something like that.

I'm going start posting some of the replies and attention that it generated on my blog... starting with these these links:

http://goretro.typepad.com/edna_million/2005/01/

http://www.livejournal.com/community/chambana/819244.html

http://www.adrants.com/2005/01/record-label-vandalizes-own-billboard.php?show_id=110512539360210740#bk_110512539360210740

http://www.uchiphop.com/node/106

Here are three web discussions about the "hip hop rots your brain" campaign. If your interested copy the web addresses and paste them in your browser's address window and check them out.

And here's an article that was on www.adrants.com.

http://www.adrants.com/2005/01/record-label-vandalizes-own-billboard.php

"Record Label Vandalizes Own Billboard Campaign
A recent billboard campaign placed by Champaign, Illinois hip hop record label Up A Notch Records apparently encouraged local student organization UC Hip Hop to "vandalize" this billboards to achieve more publicity. The boards, with the headline, "Hip Hop Rots Your Brain," were accompanied by a logo for the fictitious Coalition of Responsible and Attentive Parents whose acronym, not surprisingly is CRAP.

One of the boards was vandalized to read, "Stereotypes, Racism, Ignorance Rots Your Brain." The campaign and the vandalizing are hot topics of discussion on a UC Hip Hop and LiveJournal forum. The cynic in us, along with the all too convenient images and forum commentary, makes us think the whole thing is manufactured but, then again, we are very cynical."

Here's another aritcle that ran in the UofI's buzzmagazine:

http://buzzmagazine.collegepublisher.com/news/2005/01/06/Intro/The-Joke.Is.On.Us-830897.shtml

The joke is on us - New hip-hop label to join the likes of Polyvinyl, Parasol
By Michael Coulter - 1/6/2005
Article Tools: Page 1 of 2

So, as it is a New Year - 2005 - The Year of our Lord (I've always wanted to write that), I feel the overwhelming need to reiterate something that I have expressed in my columns before.

I, Seth Bryant Fein, am not, under any circumstances, in any way, shape or form, a "hip-hop head". Nosireebob! I am not!

I will, however, state for the record that my girlfriend most certainly is. In addition to simply loving the genre, she has taken classes on it, been active in UC Hip-Hop (founded by Harsh), and has turned me on to much more of it than I expected to like when we first got involved. And as a result, I feel as though I must eventually succumb and buy a pair of matching Cross Colors pants and hoodie, with the African colors all over it - one that states - "Ya Dig?"

Wait, that was in Middle School.

But moving on, something in town has cropped up and for me, it is worth noting. Let me tell you how it went down, yo.

There we were, driving home from a movie some days after Christmas. My lady friend and I had not spent any "quality time" together in a while as we had been precoccupied by Jesus and presents over the last couple days. It really hadn't put us in the mood, what with all the heavy cheese and guilt, at least on my end. We took I-74 to the Lincoln exit and drove towards my house close to campus. We were laughing and having a good time when all of a sudden, out of nowhere pops up this huge billboard on the

corner of Lincoln and University. It states:

HIP HOP ROTS YOUR BRAIN

Under it, a sponsorship company called:

COALITION OF RESPONSIBLE ATTENTIVE PARENTS, was easily seen by both of us.

Needless to say, we held up traffic for a second taking it all in. A car horn honked and we proceeded to my home without saying a word.

It reminded me of a time when I was a senior in high school. My best teacher, Mr. Stoia, had assigned us a number of terrific novels to read over the course of the semester. Turned out that one of our friend's mom had taken offense to more than a couple of the books we were reading like, The Grapes of Wrath, Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, amongst others. She started an organization and sent out letters to all the parents and took it up with the school board where she was promptly laughed out of the place after she chose to use The Bible as justification for her tirade. We all got a chuckle and even her daughter, who was not...ahem... a liberal, was embarrassed beyond belief.
These billboards left the same nasty taste in my mouth.

Sure, hip-hop isn't always fun and games or arts and crafts time. Plenty of ghetto boys have rapped about killing and pimpin' and gangbangin' and bling bling bling to the shizzle mcdizzle around the corner from the fizzle. Right?

But that, my friends, does NOT encompass hip-hop.

From what I understand, hip-hop has no color or stake in any one community; it's a non-violent way to use words and music to express love and hate, life and death, thoughts about society and anything else that poetry can extend to. And that is what it really is. It's poetry, plain and simple. Hip Hop doen't rot your brain. Ignorance does. And most of the people who are "anti-hip hop" and find it offensive (and believe me there are MANY) are guilty of being just that: IGNORANT!

We drove home and went to sleep. We were not in the mood to spend any "quality time" together. Whereas I once hated conservatives for screwing over impoverished people and racially profiling the world, I now hated them for another one. They were messing with my private life.

But alas, the joke was on us.

Go back to who sponsored the billboard and look at what the acronym spells out.

The next day, the forums on Openingbands.com blew up with talk about the billboards. Turns out, they were paid for by a new hip-hop label in town to get our attention. Nice job my friends, I wrote a column about you.

Up a Notch Records, whom I don't know that much, about will be breaking into the CU scene very soon on January 28th at Nargile. You can be sure that I will be there, if only to meet the people that had the courage to pull off a stunt like this and then, show people that the are for real.

Maybe there is hope for me yet as a bonafide head.

Fo' shizzle.

Wait, that was 2003, yes?

A thank you note from an award winning author...

Here's a thank you note I recieved from Stoker Award Winning Author Mark Mclaughlin.

Below is the artical about Mark that I illustrated:

Quad-Cities author Mark McLaughlin has won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry for the 2002 collection, THE GOSSAMER EYE. THE GOSSAMER EYE features the poetry of Mark McLaughlin, Rain Graves and David Niall Wilson, and was released by Meisha Merlin, a Georgia publisher of science-fiction and fantasy books. The Bram Stoker Awards, named after the author of the classic novel DRACULA, honors authors worldwide who have created imaginative works of superior literary caliber. This year's ceremony was held June 8 at the Park Central Hotel in New York City, and Mark was there to receive the award, along with his co-author Rain Graves, of San Francisco. Other winners that evening included Ray Bradbury for his story collection, ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD; Neil Gaiman for his book for young readers, CORALINE; and Stephen King, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Below is the letter I recieved from Mark:

Hey, Dan, great redesign on the website! It always looks great, but it looks even better now!

Dan once did a really funny caricature of me for the RIVER CITIES READER after I won the Stoker Award -- I look like a cartoon devil-man, and it really captured the nature of what I write, since I write humorous/satirical books of horror fiction and poetry.

Keep up the good work!
Mark McLaughlin
www.geocities.com/mcmonstrous

This is only a test...

Hello,

My name is Dan Wild and this is my test post... using this blog. Soooo... I'm going to check out a few things.

My website is www.danwild.com

I'm a designer, caricature artist, and illustrator living in the Champaign Urbana area.

And here's a photo of me drawing a caricature or some girl at an event. This photo was taken by Joe Storch at www.storchphoto.com.

An e-mail from the police...

Here's an e-mail that I got from the Fort Myers Police Department. :) I had created this illustration fro the Quad Cities River Cities Reader... and somehow word of it got all the way to the Fort Myers.

Below is the artical I illustrated:

Ft. Myers earned the Privacy Villain of the Week award from The National Consumer Coalition's Privacy Group for an incident in which a police officer "worked" the drive through window at the McDonald's on U.S. 41 in Fort Meyers, Florida.

Press reports paint a murky picture of how exactly it was that Officer Glen Eppler came to man the drive-through window, taking orders as he radioed alleged seat belt and drug violations to his colleagues lying in wait in a police cruiser down the street. Certainly nothing in McDonald's history indicated that a drive-through worker would be looking for drugs or issuing seat-belt tickets. (Over two nights of manning the window, Eppler and company issued 29 citations and made six arrests.)

Here's the e-mail:

Dan, Love the cartoon on McSting! I called your voice mail and left you a message. I would like to purchase the original still from that cartoon to put in my office. Thanks for taking an interest in what we did! You are a very talented artist. Thanks Again! Officer Glenn Eppler #244 Fort Myers Police Department geppler@swfla.rr.com