Brandon Pence

I’m actually kind of proud of this update because it’s not exactly late or overdue… just a ton has happened in the past week or so. Really exciting, actually. If I have seemed quiet or distant from you on a personal level it’s because I have just been crazy busy lately.

Anyways, onto the stuff.

My latest digital art piece, “Mote”

As always, it is available in high-resolution in my digital art portfolio.

“Mote” was my first big local collaboration; myself, Melissa Thurber,Skye Sabrina Zimmerman, Lauren Nicole Brownlow, Dawn Newton and Rachel Healy collaborated together on this piece. They all shot the original model (Skye) and Melissa sent me 4 pictures to choose from to run with. It was an interesting idea; she gave me complete freedom on the project and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I hope we can all work together more in the future!

You can see a “Making Of” video of “Mote” here:

“Tragyk” Mask Series on display at the Northwest Florida Arts Association’s Art Lair

Here’s something I kept almost entirely off of the internet: the fact that I was making masks for an art exhibit. It’s very rare that I experiment outside of my normal digital art medium and I wanted it to be special.

A little bit of backstory… I actually came up with the idea for the exhibit the masks would display in: “Reveal Yourself.” When I say “I came up with it” I mean it in the most American form of the word; I saw it somewhere and wanted to do my own version. I was watching the George Romero movie Bruiser (one of my fav’s, the Misfits are in it, I mean come on) and I thought the “party” scene would be a fantastic idea for an art exhibit. I pitched it to Brandi Lee and she loved it and I think I pitched it to Angel Agagas as well, and then finally went to Holly with it and it was a go.

We had a lot of internal debates regarding the show: how to judge it, how to keep uniformity, ceramic or plastic masks, etc. A lot of people were afraid no one would enter because we were now asking people to pay for masks but this never concerned me and I never feared it. Artists are people that embrace challenge and $5 is easily worth an exciting artistic challenge; I’m glad to see I was proven right. The turn out was fantastic! Thank you to everyone who came out, it was a fantastic reception and I had a great time!

I wasn’t sure how my masks would turn out or what I would use to make them. The whole concept is foreign to me. Angel and I went to AC Moore and cleaned them out. I bought 4 and she bought 2; I also bought one little half mask because I wanted to test. Test what? Shit if I know… I’ll sort that out later!

Angel gave me a bag of random supplies she felt I could use; a few paint brushes, a few paint kits, a big tube of black paint, big tube of red paint, a pencil, and eraser, and glitter. Yep, glitter.

That night I went home and started doodling on the small mask, testing to see if a sharpie would write on the masks. The sharpie proved to be a success.

I was sitting there looking at it and I lit a stick of incense with a butane lighter I had and then I realized the masks were made of plastic… as a kid I used to love melting plastic toys (to the surprise of no one…) so I was quite practiced in the art of melting shit.

I decided to give it a shot so I went out on my balcony and tried burning it…

I LOVED this result. I texted it to a bunch of friends, in particular Charles. Then this conversation transpired…

Charles: Fire reveals character. Amazing work.
Brandon: I need a fucking blow torch.
Charles: I have a mini one
Brandon: may need to skip that and just invest in an Aliens style flame thrower, man.
Charles: You’re scaring me. If you want the small one, let me know.
Brandon: Dude for realsies? Sure. Im down lol
Charles: Ok…ill try to remember to give it to angel in the morning
Brandon: Oh shit yeah son.
Charles: I will fuel your fire
Brandon: Im the firestarter! Twisted firestarter!
Charles: Fear addicted danger illustrated
Brandon: That was a damn good album, man.
Brandon: I had a poster of that album cover on my wall. Real talk.
Charles: Agreed…we are a jilted generation.

Yeah okay maybe I could have cut that convo off but that shit made me laugh so I’m putting it here. Charles, you rock man. You rock.

Anyways.

So then I had a blowtorch. Awesome. Fucking awesome. A BLOWTORCH, MAN. YEAH.

I couldn’t wait to try it. I drew out a quick sketch of how I wanted it to be…

Then I broke out the blowtorch!

Let it cool down and painted it…

Then more blowtorch!

So one mask was definitely finished and I was very proud of it! I loved it! It gave me the confidence I needed to make 3 more.

The next mask was just sort of jumped into. I wanted to test what happened to the mask if I painted it before burning it…

I thought that was a really cool effect. On the next mask I wanted to try melting various things over the mask…

I melted caution tape, sharpies and jelly wrist bracelets over it. Then I poured glitter all over it because damnit, Angel gave it to me so I’m going to use it!

On a side note, black sharpies burn like CRAZY when you cut them open. The black metallic ones burn neon green and blue. Really beautiful, actually. I mean it sucks when you’re not expecting it and it’s fucking EVERYWHERE but in a controlled situation it’d be amazing to photograph.

The final mask I wanted to try and combine everything I had learned with the previous masks. I drew the design first…

Then I burned it with the blowtorch…

Then I painted it… this was the most elaborate painting I did on any of the masks…

Then I burned it again!

Finally at the show, I actually won 2nd Place!

So that is my Tragyk series. The masks are on display right now at the Northwest Florida Arts Association’s Art Lair in Downtown Fort Walton Beach, Florida. It is a part of the “Reveal Yourself” show that is on display until February 11, 2012. Stop by and check them out!

I may do more masks in the future. I really had a blast making these. Plus… Charles got me a blowtorch for Christmas!

Northwest Florida Arts Association Art Week Photoshop Class

My class at the NWFLAA’s Art Week went very well.Thank you to everyone that came out! The class was a lot of fun and I look forward to teaching more in the future.

“Warthog Shot Dead By Canon”

This part weekend I joined the NWFLAA Photography Group on their journey to the Gulf Breeze Zoo. I haven’t been to a zoo since I was a kid so I was excited to join my friends on this adventure. It was early as hell (had to get up at 6) but it was fun. On 2 hours of sleep, Charles and Angel picked me up from my apartment and we were off!

We got to the zoo right as it opened and met up with Holly, the Photography Group leader, and the other photographers. We purchased our tickets for the zoo and the train ride and went to check out the animals.

Honestly… zoos are WAY crazier than I remember as I kid. We saw a Warthog fall over, spasm and die in front of us. We were then asked to leave the area. It was interesting watching the reaction of the cougar in the next cage… the predatory nature never fully leaves us, no matter how calm we may seem on the outside. It was really fascinating to watch. No children were around for the Warthog incident and the staff responded immediately and took care of everything professionally. By no means was it a negative experience; the Gulf Breeze Zoo and their staff are great. It’s just… you know… the Circle of Life? Yep. Went Lion King on it. It happened.

The animals were so friendly and into people, though. The llamas, goats, monkeys, all of them really seem excited to be around people. Maybe it was because they just opened so they all thought we might have food but it was really cool.

Here are some random pictures I took with my cell phone. Yes, my cell phone. I took my Canon 50D and my camera bag and I think I took 10 pictures with it and never touched it again. I haven’t even looked at the pictures. I really don’t consider myself a photographer. However I had a great time with the group and the zoo kicked ass.

Thanks for reading. My goal for next month is to get a much nicer comment system working on this website so hopefully some discussion can start here.

This was one of the hardest challenges I have ever faced as an artist. “Stray Bullet” has so many unique things about it that I’m not sure where to start. Let’s go back a few years… I’m not entirely sure on the exact time frame (2 years maybe?) but it was at night in Fountain Square in Downtown Fort Walton Beach. Steve Burrows, Brad Greek and myself were sitting out in front of the old Artesano Jewels (now the NWFLAA Art Lair) discussing art and artists.

Somehow we got onto the subject of what defines an artist; one of my favorite subjects to discuss, especially with those 2. As we discussed it, I threw myself to the dogs as to whether I was a “real” artist or not. Brad asked me if I had ever done a self portrait; I told him I had not, and he told me every artist has to challenge themselves with a self portrait. That just stuck in the back of my head for awhile… that I wanted to do one now that I had been challenged to do so. It’s just my rebellious nature.

I toyed with different ideas for awhile… as far back as March 11, 2010. That is when Jennifer and I did the photoshoot for my Alice in Wonderland pictures. I was toying with the idea of having one of my models slitting my throat as a clever little joke. We shot a few test pics but I just never liked the idea enough. Here’s one of the test shots:

Never ran with it. Just didn’t feel right to me so I sacked it.

The need to do a self portrait never solidified fully in my mind until I finished my piece, “Horizons:”

Allow me to explain…

Years ago when I first got fired from Cuppy’s Coffee and began doing art for fun, I posted my work on Deviant Art. For shits and giggles I decided to number my first print to separate my new work from my old work. I posted it on Deviant Art as “1 – Freedom” and continued the naming tradition with all of my prints. Sort of inspired by (or absolutely ripping off) the Nine Inch Nails Halo concept; that some works of a collective can be recognized as specific “canon” of sort. How does Horizons fit in? It was #49.

Yep. 49 pieces of art since January 14, 2008 (the date Freedom was posted on deviant art). Pretty cool. But now… fuck. I have to do a self portrait. Just cause.

I’m like that.

Anyways.

Now I had to come up with an idea… my next idea was a more space based theme. This was around September. It didn’t get far for me to realize the idea was shit. However I can embrace that some good ideas will encounter failure so here is the sample I did for that theme:

Sacked it. Hated it.

The next idea, since I was having a hard time defining a style for myself, was going to be a portrait of me made of words. I made a post on my Facebook asking people to describe me with one word. I fed all of the words into a PHP script and had the sizes and words randomly chosen. I did not use all of the words. There is a significance to the number of words I feel is personal and I don’t want to share it right now. If you submitted a word and yours didn’t get used, I appreciate your help, but I never indicated what this was for. I simply asked and you delivered and I appreciate you helping me; let’s leave it at that. =)

I will use all of the words for projects in the future, no worries.

When I noticed Tai Jun hadn’t responded to my FB post I asked him to describe me personally. His immediate response was “fuck.” This was also the response of my boss Kevin Almodovar, by the way…

Anyways TJ asked me why. I told him “no reason” and he said something to the effect of “if you’re thinking of doing one of those stupid portraits where the person is made out of words… don’t.”

Damnit.

Sacked it. Back to the drawing board.

A few weeks went by and I started toying with the idea of basing my self portrait on my personal favorite piece of mine: “Birth.”

“Birth” has always been my favorite piece. It’s not a popular one at all; it’s just my favorite. It’s with the model Sarah Ebear and I think I like it because it was one of the first times I trusted my heart completely with my art. Before that I would take criticism and sometimes alter too much. With “Birth” I did some samples of it to test the idea I had; to combine vector elements with a raster portrait. I did a test that in all honesty was absolutely dreadful…

I was originally going to use Azrael Nightmare for it. She is the model above. I did that test and I was so excited; I knew my idea would work. I remember emailing that to Tai Jun, one of my closest friends. I normally bounce ideas off of TJ when I’m excited so that he can crush my spirit and make me apathetic to the entire idea. I showed him that and I was like “Dude check it out. It will totally work.” He took one look at it and was like “…what the fuck is this?” I was like “IT’S FUCKING AWESOME AND IT’S EVIDENCE MY IDEA WILL WORK SHUT UP”

I just knew it would. I knew in my heart this idea would be cool. Even when I started “Birth” it was crap. It sucked for a long time.

Hard to look at that and stay motivated. I stuck with it though and it paid off. I have always been very proud of that piece and it remains my favorite.

Before I settled on the idea I actually called up Sarah Ebear. Sarah put herself in her artwork a lot so I wanted to get her perspective on the whole thing. Whether it’s vain or megalomaniacal or what have you.

We had a long conversation about it and she really opened my eyes to it. Sarah has always been someone I can turn to when I am creatively stuck and she will set me on the right track. I used to call her my muse for a reason.

During the conversation I told her why I was asking; that I wanted to do a self portrait and I couldn’t settle on a style. She said without hesitation, “you should do it like the one you did of me, Birth.”

I was like “…son of a bitch…”

Sarah has always been on my wavelength but it just felt like the final bit of closure I needed to run with the idea finally. That this was the one that would work.

I had a hard time accepting myself as the model. I have never put a man in my artwork at all, let alone myself! I also couldn’t just fuck off and come back to the idea later. I wanted it to be the 50th so I was stuck.

I must have retaken the pictures in my apartment 4 times. I did them all myself with my Canon 50D on a tripod. I felt asking one of my photographer friends to help would have been putting another artists touch on the overall thing. I respect my photographer friends so I don’t look at them as just “people pushing a button.” I didn’t want to have any of their artistic style in this so I did it myself.

It took awhile to really click but once it did, it just fit together effortlessly.

I did not save a lot of WIP’s (work in progress) while I was working on “Stray Bullet.” Not sure why. I don’t think I ever fully committed to the idea that it would work. In fact I accidentally saved over my “blank.psd” file, a file I use for each art piece, and never bothered renaming it. It still is named blank. Well, blank4a.psd.

Because of that I cannot show you it’s entire creation process.

I can tell you it involved 113 Adobe Illustrator files and 9 PSD’s totaling over 9.31 GB. This style has no tricks; it’s an absolute ton of layers. The video below, while it may seem like one layer, is actually a bunch of layers in an Adobe Illustrator file embedded inside Adobe Photoshop. Meaning each “step” could be one layer in Adobe Photoshop but contain 500 layers in Adobe Illustrator.

So while this is hardly a step by step video showing the creation of “Stray Bullet,” it is a layer by layer breakdown of my final PSD. It is still the most detailed video I have made showing my process from beginning to end.

Here are some pictures I took to send friends during it’s creation:

It’s been a project in the work for over 9 months and I am proud to have it finally finished. I hope you all enjoy it. My 50th piece, my first self portrait, the first time a man has been in my artwork… it has a lot of challenge to it but I am very proud of what I accomplished with it.

Thanks for reading.

I will explain the story behind this as well as show the making of this work later today. For now, I hope you enjoy my latest work and have a safe and happy new year!

My latest work, “Horizons” is now available for viewing in my portfolio.

It’s based very much on what I have been feeling lately.

I hope you all like it. It was great fun to work on. I would say the 2 albums that fueled me during it’s creation are the new Puscifer album “Conditions of my Parole” and of course the new Justice album “Audio Video Disco.” I cannot recommend the Justice album enough; I like it more than their Cross album, in fact. Great job.

Until next time…

Some of you may not know, but I design most of the posters for the Northwest Florida Arts Association. But I do. Yeah.

Anyways.

I particularly like the new one so I thought I would share. Enjoy!

A few months ago, Angel asked me if I was interested in designing a logo for the 2011 Zombie Walk. I said sure and put together a few proofs. I haven’t had any contact with the Jaycee’s people at all to be honest, so I have no idea where the logo is being used or in what manner.

SO you can imagine my delight when driving to work yesterday, I saw a giant neon green billboard featuring my logo! I’m very excited to say the least!

Anyways check it out. I took this picture of it this morning. This billboard is located on Highway 98 as you enter Fort Walton Beach from Hurlburt Field and Navarre. It’s right near the “Welcome to Fort Walton Beach” sign in the center of 98. It’s out there! Be sure to come support the Zombie Walk as well!

On a side note, the Zombie Walk posters you see around town? I did not design those. Just the logo.

Here is a video showcasing the creation of my latest piece, Kynotik.

Greetings all. I have been terrible at updating my website. Again. Big surprise. It truly is just my desire to post things that feel significant to me. I need to get over my reluctance to update my website about progress or other things.

Anyways.

Recently I decided to venture out of my normal comfort zone and make a sculpture for the Northwest Florida Arts Association’s Technomania exhibit. The art exhibit was focused entirely on artist interpreting technology. Being a digital artist this obviously seemed like the exhibit for me however I decided to do something a bit different.

I’ve always enjoyed the idea of having physical art; something you can hold and touch seems much more tangible to me and the idea of transferring emotion in such a tangible way is amazing to me. I hate sculpting most of the time though because I’m incredibly OCD about having dry skin; I’m the only guy I know that carries lotion on him most of the time.

Then I had the idea to make some sort of cross out of computer circuit boards; kind of a fun play on the idea of  computers and technology being virtually worshiped these days. I didn’t want to invest a ton of money into the project though because I am not confident in my abilities as a 3d artist. Plus I’m broke. Mainly that, actually…

So I posted a status on Facebook asking for any techno-garbage anyone had sitting around. Instantly I had people responding and I ended up with more than I needed, so thank you to everyone that offered to help and thank you especially to Candace Malone, Larry Beat, Mercedes Rodgers & James Thomin (of the Full Circle Gallery), Michele Williams and Kristina Smith for hooking me up with the stuff I used.

I didn’t use any of the CRT monitors because James Thomin told me I would die and I’m a fan of not-death-right-now.

Anyways so when I finally got off of my ass and decided to work on it, I had quite the fun time tearing everything apart. I must admit after all of the computers I have used over the years and all the computers I have build, it was great fun taking a fuckin’ hammer to the mess. Very satisfying. Breaking shit is always a good time, anyways. It took about 5 hours to disassemble everything and clean a lot of the parts. I laid it out in a cross formation on my floor and was not pleased. It just didn’t feel as…. awesome… as I wanted it to be.

So after that massive failure I got a bit disheartened with the whole thing. I just hated it. So I gave it a few weeks and finally one night I had trouble sleeping so I decided to sit down and play with it. That’s when I turned it into a square with a cross on it. It felt more complete having a backing rather than a standalone object.

That weekend I began constructing it. I borrowed a drill from my good buddies Holly Bain and Charlotte Snyder, took a trip to Lowe’s in Gulf Breeze to get some nuts/bolts and glue and then back to the apartment to start construction!

I had to take apart a few more towers and this is when I contacted Dr. James Thomin again, my resident “will I die from doing this?” expert, who cautioned me against taking apart all of the power supplies because apparently they can fuck your shit up (the caution stickers aren’t a joke, it seems!). I decided that, after being told “Don’t touch the capacitor” I simply had to. I didn’t die, so hopefully the ones I took apart were safe. Well… or I’m just immune to electricity… who knows.

Anyways, back to breaking shit…

And let me tell you.. shit got real. I fucked a lot of shit up that day and I loved every minute of it.

After 2 more trips to Lowe’s and one trip to Ace Hardware in Navarre, I had something put together:

I was happy with it but it didn’t feel complete…

I had decided on the title “The Soul is in the Software” a few weeks prior. It just fit. “The Soul is in the Software” is an album by the band Icon of Coil. Fantastic album.

I thought about putting a hard drive in the center of it; I had been given one old hard drive for the project. It was like a 500GB Western Digital. However… I couldn’t break the fucker open! I tried for a good hour to break it open.

Well played, Western Digital. Well played. Western Digital: 1, Brandon Pence: 0

Then… it came to me. A cd drive! It fits the software term perfectly! Luckily there was one in a tower so I tore it out and dissassembled it.

I was excited when I realized it would be possible to mount the CD to the drive tray so it could actually spin; then came the question… what disc? I had to sacrifice something!

I didn’t want it to be purple so a DVD-R was out. I don’t own any blank CD-Rs so… I went with a movie. A great movie, but a movie that has a fantastic title to continue the puns! If theres one thing I love, it’s being punny!

That’s right; the DVD is the movie BRAIN DEAD. Awesome. To those with an eye for detail; yes, it was purchased from Network Video in Bluewater Bay. I bought it on their closing sale because I was sad that chapter of my life was closing, so I wanted something to remember the store by. Now, it’s art! =)

After that revelation I was pleased with the piece. It finally felt final to me. So… I glued it up and it was ready to go!

Yes, my method for setting the glue was piling a bunch of shit on it. Problem?

It was delivered to the Northwest Florida Arts Association Art Lair and ended up winning 1st Place at the reception!

Thanks again to everyone who helped me make it a reality and thank you everyone for coming out!

Until next time, keep the uranium in the drinking water.

Oh and here’s some cool pictures of the project. =)

My latest piece, “Dystopia” is now available in hi-res in my portfolio.

Dystopia was really fun to work on. It was titled “FYG” (Fuck Your God) after the Deadstar Assembly song. I began working on Dystopia shortly after going to see Combichrist and Deadstar Assembly live at Vinyl Music Hall. I knew I would never actually title it FYG because that title and it’s meaning is honestly a little too Marilyn Manson shocky for my taste, but that was it’s working title.

The mask is meant to separate the mind from the rest of the image. I have a very bad habit of creating false realities in situations and reacting to them; forgetting that my perception doesn’t always coincide with reality. This is why the girls skin is not burning: there is a possibility the pain isn’t real and only in her mind.

Special thanks to Nate Dubois, a firefighter friend of mine. I sent him a copy of this piece early on to make sure the flames were accurate and realistic and he helped me in that regard. Also thanks to my friend Lynn Dominique. He has really helped me over the years become aware of how my perception and my reality are subjective to myself. He’s really helped me become more self-reflective in that regard and look beyond myself in situations. I’m still learning to realize those things before I react emotionally but I think that self control will come in time.

Anyways I hope you all enjoy my latest work, Dystopia!

I attended the NWFLAA Members Only show on June 17th. It was a great show and I’m very impressed by the entries. It’s really cool watching the NWFLAA grow so much in so little time. The Members Only show was testing a new judging mechanism: it was voted on by the public. I believe this is going to be a regular thing for the Members Only shows in the future as well.

I entered “Silver Future” and “Oil in the Blood” in the exhibit. Both are my personal copies from the walls of my apartment and I was happy to see them treated well; Oil in the Blood received 2nd place and Silver Future won 3rd place.

It was a really interesting night for me. At one point I was sitting in the corner away from the crowd and was just watching people. For the longest time, “Silver Future” was considered my best work. It was really interesting and motivational watching “Oil in the Blood” get more attention and, in the end, a higher honor. At times I look at some of my past work and wonder how will I ever top it; it’s nice to see that I top my old work without intentionally trying to.

Remember to check out both Silver Future and Oil in the Blood in my portfolio here.

Below are some pictures from the night.

Photo courtesy of Larry Beat