MechanicalPen

18/09/2024

🚨 CHALLENGER APPROACHING 🚨 Destroyed Nostalgia Art Show Opening Event Oct 12 from 4PM 🔥

Games, we all love them. From the humble pong to the too competitive wii tennis, nerds have been finding ways to not go outside for decades. So to celebrate gaming, its history and our love for simpler times spent glued to our consoles, I’ve put together my new solo art show: Destroyed Nostalgia 🤯

You see, I’m not your normal entry level soft nerd, I’m a hard(ware) nerd, which means I don’t mind if you have a 3½-inch floppy or a solid-state hard drive, I’ll watch a 1hr youtube video of someone explaining how they work at 2am regardless.

Destroyed Nostalgia takes a peek under the hood of some of my favourite retro consoles to expose the electronics that make them tick 🔌 It’s also my chance to share with you my favourite games with that classic MechanicalPen black and white twist. From Atari to Xbox, cartridges to disks, if you’ve picked up a controller anytime in the last 40 years, there’s something here for you 🕹🔥

So come hang out with me at Working Title Brew Co. for the launch party Sat 12th Oct from 4PM and grab some great food and beers while you’re there! It’s free entry and they’ve even got some arcade cabinets if you truly want to indulge in some gaming nostalgia 🍻 If you’re lucky*, there might even be some limited special edition shadowboxes and mini prints available on the day too 👀

*Subject to me actually getting them done and finding time to sleep 💀

27/05/2024

🍜🍺 Ghibli Art Show Event: Meet the Artists 🍺🍜
You’re running out of time to catch all the amazing works at the Studio Ghibli Group Art Show! 😱 We’re into the last couple of weeks of having the art up at Working Title Brew Co. but if you’ve missed seeing the show so far, a whole bunch of the artists (including Sarah May Arts and me) will be out at Working Title this Thursday 30th May from 6 – 8pm! The opening event was such a blast, but I know I was running around like a headless chook, so this is a great chance to swing by for a much more chill evening of drinks, food, and Ghibli chats! ❤️‍🔥

If you’ve been umming and ahhing about picking up some of the incredible art, this is a great chance as some of the prices have been lowered as the artists would love to get these into the hands of other Ghibli fans 🖤 If you want to suss the art ahead of time, you can find the online gallery of all the artists involved here https://mechanicalpen-groupartshow.carrd.co/ ! There will also be mini print versions of some of the wall art available, so if you can’t quite fit a framed piece up on your wall, but want to still support the amazing artists involved, definitely swing by 🎉

It's all free entry, so come for a relax after work (or after waking up for the day if you’re like me and are professionally unemployed – ahh, I mean, a freelancer 👀), and also catch Sarah and I before we start jet setting around the country to a whole bunch of conventions for the next 5 weeks straight 💀

20/03/2024

Super keen to be slinging my art at The Collectors Market again this year 🔥 If you're looking for anything from artists, to cosplay - card games to table top, it's definitely worth getting out to!

Exciting news! Tickets for The Collectors Market Event are now available! 🎟️

Don't miss your chance to join us for a weekend of excitement, exploration, and all things geeky! Secure your spot now and get ready for an unforgettable experience.

📍 Location: Distillery Road Market, Eagleby QLD
🗓️ Date: May 18th-19th, 2024
🌐 www.thecollectorsmarket.com.au

Click the link to purchase your tickets now! 👇
https://bit.ly/3VlbpxN

31/01/2024

So rad that Mackay is getting a new game store 🔥 if you're up that way, you should definitely check out DeckaDice for their grand opening this weekend!

Look at this awesome artwork! 😮

Come in on our Grand Opening and you may be lucky enough to win one of these awesome stickers as a prize for one of our events! 😎

Thank you so much to MechanicalPen and Sarah May Arts for donating these to our store! 🙏🏻

12/10/2023

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Little bit late on this one, but it has been a very hectic week with an impromptu 1000km road trip up north and back thrown in too. I'm back home now and back into convention prep for this weekend at .collectors.market (I'm also doing my first panel there talking about art and business 🔥), a bunch of custom pieces for people in the works, some secret projects coming up soon (and my taxes to complete by the end of the month, anyone else got that looking over them too? 💀)

07/10/2023

So excited to be running a talk next weekend at The Collectors Market 🔥 I'll be going over my not so straight forward path to making art, some tips and tricks I've learnt along the way, as well as how I pivoted from engineering to make art my full time job!
If there's anything in particular you'd like me to touch on, definitely hit me up or leave me a comment down below ⬇️

Here are the show times for our Main Stage!
We have plenty of great sessions that you will want to be a part of!

Bring your friends and enjoy the awesome info and showcase of talent we'll have on stage.

We can't wait to see you there!

📍 Location: Distillery Road Market, Eagleby QLD
🗓️ Date: October 14th-15th 2023

Get your tickets @ https://www.thecollectorsmarket.com.au/tcm-tickets

19/09/2023

So incredibly happy with this Ho-Oh piece I did as part of the Gen 2 Pokemon Project is putting together 🔥 I knew that for this piece I wanted to do something akin to a Japanese woodblock print and incorporate yokai in some way. I also wanted to pay homage to the Bell Tower where you find Ho-Oh, so I thought what better yokai than the giant skeleton, Gashadokuro, facing off against Ho-Oh over a Japanese pagoda with Mt Fuji looming in the background 🦅☠🗻
This was definitely a trust the process piece – I restarted on the pagoda so many times because I just couldn’t get the perspective I was wanting. There have also been so many incredible artists take part in this project too over both Gen 1 and 2, and that was constantly weighing on my mind. And if that wasn’t enough, it was also a piece where I had a really tough time knowing when to call it done. I’m so stoked that I stuck through it though and kept to the initial concept though, it really helped me push my limits 🔥