New Cthulu-style Sketch

Dig it. I was going to use this in a new poster, but the event apparently has 35 lbs. of info. There's some room for artwork, just enough for maybe one row of space invaders.

Oh well. Maybe next time.
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Nosferatu Poster and Illustration Layout Lecture

So here's a bit of the insanity that goes on in my head when working on something like this...





First, here's the quick thumbnails that preceded my color sketch. I liked the quick, gestural black shape of the vampire's body. Because I didn't want to mess with that shape while experimenting with his hand-gestures, each of the hand sketches was a brand new sketch. Erasing over and over to make a single perfect drawing will just make you nuts, while drawing quickly over and over makes you continually rethink the image.

Same method with the female figure. This thumbnail probably took less than two minutes. Roughly piecing together the best elements in Photoshop took maybe 5-10 minutes. Working quickly like this ensures that the final image doesn't become too intricate, and ensures that the viewer can understand the image quickly as well.

No matter how wonderful you are as an illustrator, no matter how much detail you can pour into an image, and no matter how sure you are that the viewer will pull up a lawn chair and wistfully stare at your picture for hours, the reality is that 99% of viewers probably won't give it more than 3-4 seconds. For a poster, billboard or advertisement to be successful, the viewer needs to "get it" in that tiny space of time. Less becomes more.




Moving on to piecing together my color sketch in Photoshop...

For the coloring, it's a bit of the yin-yang design. The color divides up the space horizontally using black and yellow. Black/yellow is often a more striking, higher contrast color combo than even black/white, but on this I opted for a subdued yellow to suggest a sepia tone (though this 1979 film one is obviously full-color).

The poster is generally divided up into three themes, the Female (bright, white, yellow dreamy), the Vampire (black, solid, with that sharp hand invading the Female's space), and the Info. The Vampire's blackness bleeds down to create a clear backdrop for the Info. In the Info space I used a clear, symmetrical, bottom-anchored type layout that denotes the event as a film (and not a band or festival or chili cook-off).

The Nosferatu (Dracula) story is almost an archaeology story. Modern, civilized man is digging up this eastern European supernatural relic, but discovers that the relic is alive and just as curious about modern, civilized man (and woman). Pre-modern versus post-modern. Because I want to place the poster in the same era as the story, I use modern (Futura) and pre-modern (Blackletter) fonts. Also, I used zeroes for the letter O, because Futura's zeroes are perfect circles, to create more of a turn-of-the-century feel.































On the final, inked, colored version, I only made a few changes.

The Female's face became a profile, again for clarity and also to reflect the profile of the Vampire. The Vampire's head becomes a bit more refined and the shape of it changes from a round egg-shape into a parallelogram whose angles point directly at the Female.

The Female's hair no longer flows dreamily around. Now it hangs almost directly down, this makes her body seem to rise directly up from the Vampire's palm.

The Vampire's hand originally was very dark, almost a silhouette. This felt too grubby, so I went in and filled in all the details for the hand and gave it a more 50/50 ratio of black shadow to white flesh. This creates a more real sense of depth, and it makes the fingers more animated, more spidery.

Lastly, to tweak the overall layout I reduced the width of the yellow-colored background, and added a circular shadow into that space. This makes the overall layout seem a bit taller and focuses the viewers' eyes away from the dead black space of the Vampire's body and toward the dreamy/intense space between the Vampire's face and the Female form. The Vampire's body now becomes fluid, connecting the Info to the Female in an elegant fiddle-head shape.

Quiz Monday, class dismissed. Hah.

Skateboards on Zazzle

So Zazzle got ahold of me a few weeks ago to see if I'd submit a design for their new skateboard line... I designed it so that when the trucks are attached, they poke out of the eye and mouth.

Click here to check out the listing...

RadioLab's Robert Krulwich

I know I'm always pushing RadioLab. But give this a listen, it's one of the hosts of RL giving a commencement speech. It's one of the best things you can do with a half hour.

Tell Me A Story

Flea Market KISS

SO! Look what lucky me did find at the lovely flea market down by the Port of Worcester. THAT"S RIGHT LOSERS! KISS COMIC BOOK. Here's a few gems from I've decided to share...

Also, even though the creators of the comic weren't affiliated in any way with KISS, they used this disclaimer (or ...KISS-claimer? hmm):

This thing really made me say "Uhhh" all night.

Detour 10

So, it looks like Andy Fish's latest anthology is now available online and possibly in your local funnybook seller. Andy submitted this edition to Diamond Distributors, so it has a national audience. I haven't seen the other contributions to it, but it does include Love Story (see below). Also, I did the cover.
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Clipping

So, this is one of my first, best WTF moments. I was in college (probably 1995) and came across this listing in the newspaper for a television program. This was in either the Telegram & Gazette, or Worcester Mag, I wish I'd saved the whole page for context. Anyway, it lists the time, the channel, a short description of the show, and a bit of opinion.

Enjoy.



























Click for larger version.

First Screened Poster...

So...this whole trip was completely experimental. I don't really know anyone local who is doing this, and I'm basically swinging a baseball bat in the dark.

I did everything wrong. I used old curtains, not silkscreen. For the black, I used housepaint with about 10% floetrol and not any kind of a proper screening ink (it got really gummy and gross). I used a couple different kinds of paper, with different surfaces, just to see what each would do. And with these piss-poor tools, I chose to attempt a good-sized two-color piece. My philosophy is, if I'm going to screw up, might as well screw up early, and big. Figure out what's ok to skimp on, what's better to spend the money on.

That said, the thing that completely tripped me up was my own stupid noodling. I had pieced together about 8 sheets of actetate per screen. A bit of light had burned through the less opaque areas of my acetate, resulting in a little bit of blocky (from the overlap of the acetates) haze on the clear parts of the screen. I was concerned about that blockiness showing up in the print.

What the hell. I'm a painter, I got my screen cleaner and a small paintbrush and cleaned up a few of the larger areas, them some of the medium areas...then calamity. Literally, on the word 'Calamity'. I don't know what I was thinking, but at one point, the 'MIT' just disappeared. So-so-so stupid. Dummy, this isn't like an acrylic painting you can just wander around the canvas touching up this and that. Now those letters are just gone. I got my screenblock stuff, laid the acetate under the screen for guidance and tried to touch it up, recreating the letters as best as I could. Which wasn't too horribly awful. I let that dry overnight, went home to brag about how I was the stupidest moron alive.

Next morning, the screen block didn't really hold up to a lot of passes and started leaking at about my seventh print. And it was leaking that gummy black I described earlier. Rather than go nuts trying to salvage any more, I called it a day, with lessons learned. I ended up with six prints that look ok. And a lot of lessons learned about paper, curtains, exposure, inks, and patience. I may re-burn that screen this week onto a real silkscreen (the curtain was a bit too low of a mesh for the details on my black screen, but it did ok on my less-detailed red screen), and finish my print run (about 30 pieces total was the plan).

Well... Here's one of the final prints. You can see the issues with the lost letters. Again, the red was designed to be rough, so that if it came out sloppy (which it did in places), it wouldn't ruin the overall piece. This isn't one of the 'better' prints, it's about where the screenblock started breaking down. The other issue I was having was that the ink was getting sloppy at the top of the red plate, and what I discovered was that the small bits of board I was using to align the paper was a bit thicker than the paper.

Two HUNDRED!

Hey, I just checked my website stats and it looks like Love Story has been downloaded 206 times! Holy crap!

Love Story

I finished my short comic story last night. Anyone who is interested in reading it
can download it here (it's a 2.9MB pdf).

11 pages, no dialogue. I'd love some comments or feedback.