This is an art style sample sheet for my work. I work mostly by drawing the individual elements of my compositions in pencil on sketchbook paper, photographing the drawing, then converting the photo to a vector image in Adobe Illustrator where the composition is done. The idea behind that process is that the constraint of making small drawings with pencil only helps me to maintain a consistent visual style. I also enjoy producing compositions that appear to be the work of a bored 12-year-old in math class, and yet under the hood are well-built vector images supported by a fairly huge amount of technology. Why do I like that? Well . . .why do I like anything? I don’t know. You’re the one who is here, not me.

Standard Stickers and Drawings

B002 Sticker – This is the original Cheddar Man sticker. It says “Long dogs save lives” on it. There’s also the number 74520 which is not a ZIP Code. See if you can figure out what it means. I drew this in one of the years we had . . . approximately 2017-ish I think. This drawing depicts a long dog, a dachshund, with a tufted tail.
B003 Sticker – This is a variation on the original drawing. In fact . . . it is the original drawing, but I cleaned up the vector image and removed a lot of the background so that it would be better for a T-Shirt. My favorite T-Shirt is made using the drawing on this sticker. I also use this for my favorite coffee mug. I added my website URL border to this version. I knocked out every single letter so that the letters are all transparent, I think on a later version. That was a pain with my low level of Adobe Illustrator skills. I don’t like this one as much for a sticker but it’s great for a shirt or a mug.
B005 Sticker – This depicts a cat with a surprised expression and a snake for a tail. Text on this one includes Cheddar Man, 74520, Bone Daddy, and my URL scottboyan.com. I’m not allowed to encourage people to call me Bone Daddy in certain contexts anymore. That’s okay. There are plenty of contexts out there. Not a bother. What’s with that 74520 though innit?
B007 Sticker – This sticker depicts a weird bear. Text on this one includes the phrases Good Bear, Bad Bear, Foe?, Fiend?, 74520, and scottboyan.com.
Goat-Motorcycle Chimera Drawing for Shirt – This is a drawing of a half-goat half-motorcycle creature. The front half is a goat. The back half is a 2019 Yamaha XT250 air-cooled dual-sport motorcycle. In Japan and elsewhere in the world, the Yamaha XT250 is called a Serow, which is a strange and interesting creature. It’s not a goat but I guess people not familiar with it think the thing it’s closest to is a mountain goat. Kind of like how where I live we have javelinas and people who don’t know much about them kind of associate them with pigs but they’re not, they’re peccaries. Anyway, Since the Yamaha XT250 is called a Serow, and since the Serow is a somewhat goat-like creature, people sometimes (kind of a lot actually) refer to the Yamaha XT250 as a goat. Which is actually a decent comparison, since the XT250 is kind of goat-like in its personality, being able to climb into just about anywhere if you’re not in too much of a hurry to get there. I made a shirt with this on it. It’s not my favorite shirt for other reasons. I like the drawing. And since it’s meticulously vectorized, Bob’s your uncle. I can use it again easily for something someday.
B014 Sticker – Rabbit Child Drawing – I have been drawing the Rabbit Child since I think . . . 1992. I used to draw him on the chalkboard at the East Campus Dining Center, or ECDC (pronounced EK-DEK with equal stresses on each syllable) at Brown University in Providence, RI which is gone now. ECDC is gone. Not Providence. See how he has RC on his sweater? He always did. I used to put him up on the chalkboard and advertise that anyone who could beat me (I was a supervisor) in bubble hockey would get free fries, as long as they paid for the game. I got really good at bubble hockey and it didn’t cost me anything whether I won or lost so it was a good deal all around. I rarely gave out free fries. Not because I went back on the deal, it’s just I was that good. This drawing says things like Cheddar Man, 74520, Bone Daddy, scottboyan.com, Hammer Down, and Rabbit Ears. Why would a drawing of Rabbit Child now say “Hammer Down Rabbit Years” on it so many decades later? It didn’t used to say that. It should have, but it never did. 32 years later in 2024 I rectified that. I enjoyed making the plaid pattern behind Rabbit Child. I drew it on the paper just as a grid that filled a whole small page of my sketchbook and then I puppet warped it later. Of course I have the original though and the plaid will be back. That particular plaid patter is from Cheddar. In my imagination.
B015 Sticker – Phat Dizzle Drawing – This drawing depicts a monkey patting a dog in front of a busy urban street scene. This is a great drawing. I mean, I’m not saying you have to think it’s great but I’m really into Phat Dizzle. He’s a bit of a long story. But I’ve been working on him for quite a while. The oldest photo I have of a sketch of this was from 2019, but I think I took that photo only because the Post-It brand note paper sheet that the sketch was on had been on the fridge for so long I wanted to throw it out. Anyway, he’s been through a lot of sketches. The main text on here says “Phat Dizzle” which is another way of saying “Phat Daddy.” In the earliest photo of a sketch I still have, the shirt actually said “Phat Daddy” on it. The earliest sketch has an earring on Phat Dizzle. But in drawing the elements for this separately I forgot the earring. I was going to just leave it off because . . . who cares? But it bugged me. Then I carefully made an earring and it looked stupid. So I had to remake this one, which is drawn worse but looks better. This one also says 74520 on it. And the long dog has the words “Look inside” carefully written in proper 20th Century cursive writing exactly the way I was taught in New Hampshire.

B019 Sticker – Always Free Cheddar in the Mousetrap sticker. This is the first proper sticker to feature Puppet 1. I made a sticker sheet of individual characters before this, and Puppet 1 made a cameo appearance as one of the characters on that sheet, but this sticker is the first dedicated solo sticker to feature Puppet 1. I shot the image of Puppet 1 here on 35mm film using a PENTAX MX camera body from Japan and I forgot which lens. So this also is the first sticker (other than the sheet which I’m not counting) to include an element shot on film. I believe I developed the film for this image at home also. The way I converted him into a vector makes it look a little more like a drawing but it’s a photo. The chair behind him comes from the original Always Free Cheddar sticker and it took me a long time to draw so I wanted to include it. It’s also an homage to the chair that Cookie Monster sat in for the strange Cookie Monster x Tom Waits mashup video for the song “God’s Away on Business” which contains the lyric that is the inscription for this sticker. The round elements are pulled from the B007 sticker, the one with the weird bear.

B006 Sticker – This sticker shows the outline of a fist and the Japanese characters spelling “Saitama” on the knuckles. I am no good at writing Japanese characters of any sort, and even though this says “Saitama” I learned later that stylistically one would probably have chosen a different character set to use for a proper name. Saitama is the name of the hero in the hit anime series One Punch Man. One Punch Man can defeat any enemy with one punch. But nobody shows him any respect because he’s so good at what he does that people think there’s some kind of trick, or he’s cheating somehow, because he never seems too stressed out or busy. So rather than earning him some standing in the community, his proficiency sort of brings suspicion and mistrust on him. I resonate with that idea. But Saitama isn’t doing anything wrong, he’s just really good and efficient at what he does. In fact he got so good at what he does by training really hard. How hard? He trained so hard that he went bald. That’s why this sticker says: “Trained So Hard He Went Bald” on it. I have a shirt with this on it also. It’s not my technically best produced shirt but I wear it a lot. I feel for Saitama.
B008 Sticker – This is a sticker which depicts a long dog, a dachshund, with a tufted tail. I’m basically pretty into tufted tails. The dog has the words “Long dog” on him, and the numbers 74520. The dog is drawn in the style of a series of characters called Gorks that my friend the well-known graphic designer Jeff Groves and I used to draw when we were in elementary school. Being Jeff Groves (D4PJAG), Jeff moved on from drawing Gorks. Being Scott Boyan (X8MSMB), I did not. This dog was not a Gork from back during those times, but if you know Gorks (and Jeff would) then this is very obviously derived from a Gork drawing. I catch flak sometimes for the fact that the dog is very obviously male. On any given day, if that’s all I catch flak for . . . it was a quiet day. Look around here.

Color Palette for Retail Signage and Fixtures

Representative Eight Color Palette – I like this color palette. There are technical reasons I am sure why I should not, but . . . I just like it. This is just the basic 8 color crayon box.
Full Retail Signage Color Palate – This is the full 28 color palette. It’s odd having a very particular color palette when I have my stickers and most other artifacts printed in black and white. Especially when it wouldn’t cost me any money or effort to have them printed in color. So why do I need a very specific, probably not technically sound personal color palette when I deliberately constrain myself to grayscale? Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make something with colors. If I do, I have a robustly-organized color palette in Adobe Illustrator.
Retail Sign for Long Dog Cool Shop, Tucson, Arizona – This is a sign for Long Dog Cool Shop featuring a Long Dog and the retail signage and fixtures color palette.

Variant Stickers for Glitter and Holographic Media

The stickers in this group are all printed on either glitter media or holographic media. I like the stickers very much, and people seem to enjoy them, but I am not sure that I should include them on a style sheet because they look very colorful here but all that color comes from the medium they’re printed on. I didn’t design them in color.

B004 Sticker – This is the original long dog Cheddar Man sticker on glitter sticker media. These are pretty popular. I hesitate to include this section because the glitter and holographic effect on these might throw off some algorithm somewhere.
B011 Sticker – This is a special sticker. They’re all special. But you know how sometimes there’s a weird misprint of a stamp and people like to find ones from the affected production runs? Well, it’s not exactly like that because nobody cares. But I care. I accidentally left off the words “Long dog” on this one. It’s got the 74520 on it but I forgot to put the words back on when I was making the glitter parts. There was also a lot of back-and-forth with the technician at Sticker Mule about this, and it involved me having to use the phrase “glitter penis” several times in written communication in a professional context. This is the sticker that got me to convert to sending Sticker Mule PNG files instead of JPG files. If you get why, you get it. Once I converted, I never went back. Also Sticker Mule is great. And they send me just about the exact amount of free hot sauce that equals the amount that I actually use on my hardboiled egg each morning. At first I be like, huh? But I have actually come to rely on my Mule Sauce supply from Sticker Mule.
B013 Sticker – This sticker is the standard Long Dog but it has three glitter areas. The tufted tail here is all glittered in. It looks nice. In real life where it’s all sparkly. Not in a photo where it just looks like I gave him a weird colored tail. Which I did not.
B012 Sticker – This was a bit of job to produce. This is printed on holographic sticker media, but the whole outline of the dog is not transparent for the holographic effect to show through. There’s actually a white starburst pattern that interrupts the holographic effect. I was going for a kind of shattered mirror vibe and when you see the actual sticker in life, it does kind of give that effect. Holographic looks cool but does not photograph well at all.
B010 Sticker – This one is alright. I like the glitter out to the cut line but I feel like having the glitter outside of the dog spoils the effect of having the two glitter areas. They simply look transparent since there is so much other glitter. I’m going to make another version of this where I fill in the two glitter areas and just leave the glitter outer glow and probably retire this one.
B009 Sticker – This is the only other holographic one I’m showing. I have a square standard Cheddar Man sticker with a holographic background. They’re great on my motorcycle helmet. Ramon says you can see them from really far away. But anyway, this is the dog but instead of a printed outline, the outline is transparent and the holographic effect shows through. It looks decent in real life. This photo of it is just . . . meh. All of these on this style sheet that are labeled “sticker” are photographs of actual stickers, by the way. It’s a very long story and a somewhat insane process. Instead of using the original vector files, I photographed each actual physical sticker, but these aren’t the photos, they’re the photos converted back into vector images. Why would I do something so weird and stupid? I wanted them to look like actual stickers, not drawings of stickers. It was for a different project (my poly-mailer and bubble mailer bags), not this project. That’s neither here nor there.

Inspiration for Stickers

The inspiration for all my stickers is Shepard Fairey’s Andre the Giant Has a Posse sticker. I first became aware of this sticker in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1990.

Sticker B017 – Shepard Fairey sticker of Andre the Giant. This sticker reads “Andre the Giant Has a Posse.”

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