Some more from class

This is a collage for my first project, which was to create a figure out of characters. He is a Xerox dog. I like the bad-copy textures on the D, but my professor wanted me to blacken them for my portfolio.



This was for my second project, which was to design a sign for a Coney Island business. Have you been to Coney Island lately? The only rides left are the Big 3: the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, and the Parachute Drop. It is not very inspirational, to say the least. Before, it might have been run down, but now it feels completely gutted.

Looking at this drawing reminds me of how much I hate working in color. I have no knack for it. I had fun with the inking, though. I had to rush the building and the professor hated it.

This was my third project: redesigning the Ford logo. I haven't been keeping up with the news, but I'm pretty sure Ford is heading the same way as Coney Island...I tried to set that aside as I created this. I wanted to convey the ideas of grace and speed, which are things I like about riding in cars (to be honest, I hate cars and don't even have a license). Originally I had the single Garamound f with the road stripes substituting for the crossbar, but I decided that was too confusing, and added the little flash across the f to adequately express that the f was a letter and not just a weird curve. It also makes the logo less static, I think. I had to use the copier's negative function to create the black, because my markers weren't giving me an even color.

Ink stuff

I have to say, Blogger's NEW AND IMPROVED image upload manger is a piece of shit.

It's made creating this post an incredible  pain in the ass, but for some reason I can't load up the old manager's web page.

I don't know why web designers like to destroy anything simple, quick, and straightforward,  and replace it with clumsiness and complication. Were the masses really clamoring for a slower and more awkward way to upload images?

Anyway...I'm taking a class in Experimental Typography, which is exactly like Typography except I need the credits from the second class to graduate. That's pretty much the main difference: between graduating (HOORAY) and not graduating (damn).

Here are my inked works for my first project, which is to use type to illustrate a figure or object or subject or whatever. I inked them using my new fountain pen, which was a lot of fun but kind of tricky, since I'm still learning how to use it.

This is a goofy goat that I went a bit overboard in illustrating, because other people couldn't tell what the hell it was supposed to be. I thought using the E as a body and the g as a head was absolutely brilliant when I sketched out the concept, but execution made it hard to distinguish from a dog. Or a horse. Or a cow. Really, I didn't settle on it being a goat until I added the extra serif as an ear to the g.

This is the concept of a drink can illustrated two different ways. The can with a B as a pull tab was done first, but it seemed lonely, and I had finally figured out a way to draw a can using the letters of the word, with a bit of thought. The B can wasn't colored in to balance its thick letters against the other can's lighter typeface. B can's a mish mosh of typefaces, but CAN can(?)'s Futura, because I liked the geometric shapes of the letters. They seemed perfect for a cylinder, a circle, and a triangular punch hole.

This is a Franklin Gothic kangaroo. I came up with him after reading an article on Russian constructivism. I think his name is Olaf. It's too bad I can't ink his big A in red.

End of school special

This was for an aborted typography project. Obama looks like he's swallowed a canary.



This is a sketch from last post, colored. It illustrates the idea of families being mostly cobbled together from dead body parts, string and tar.



This is another colored sketch, illustrating the idea that crows don't like to ride the bus, but Sniz from Nickelodeon's Kablam show is pretty much ok with it.




This is an idle sketch from illustration.



This man's fingers are melting due to his cigarette habit.

Sketches from Illustration

These are some pen sketches I did in Illustration and Illustration Style.





And this, which is for 3 Cups of Tea, a book that reads like an early 20th Century adventure novel. It's about a guy who goes climbing in Afghanistan and winds up wanting to build schools for the poor people living there. I don't think this came out too awesome, though the girl looks like a cross between a purple ninja and a Medieval Virgin Mary.

Urban Animal Alphabet

I had to design an alphabet for my typography class. I had many ideas, such as a hair alphabet, and a face alphabet, but the professor liked my drawings of animals.

There are a lot of alphabets based on animals, but I tried to base mine not on exotic jungle beasts or zoo animals or farm animals or anything like that, but on the pets and pests we have in New York City. Originally, I used a human as my Z, but my professor insisted I keep my alphabet "consistent".

Sometimes it was tempting to get a bit uncommon, with bats or red-tailed hawks or owls, but I restrained myself. The least urban animals I included were a chipmunk for C and a pet ferret for N. I regret not saving a spot for a roach, but they're not very evocative of any particular letter shape. It was hard enough coming up with a different animal for each letter (though I did include 3 dogs).

The animals are, in order: Rat, pigeon, chipmunk, possum, hornet, dragonfly, squirrel, raccoon, millipede, grasshopper, mantis, mouse, spider, ferret, earthworm, moth, bulldog, house fly, cat, tern, centipede, chihuahua, ant, two-winged thingy, Asian long horned beetle, and spaniel.

Inking this was a bit tricky, because the figures are so small. I usually use a two-tipped marker to do everything, but this time I needed to switch to a micron for the finest details. I used the finer point of my marker for outlines and thickened my micron line for features within each figure's body that could use it, like mouths or tails. I was inspired by the original guy who did Spy Vs. Spy, who I heard created varying line widths using nothing more than an unvarying technical pen.

This is a Xerox of the original, which I have to mount on matte board tomorrow.

Progress

This is an incompletely colored drawing I did of a witch. I'm thinking of doing some Halloween cards to sell at Everything Goes Book Cafe.



This is a copy of the inking job I did on my Illustration project. It's the same project I was discussing in my recent post on inking. It is currently fully colored, but the copy machine didn't do such a good job of preserving those colors, so I'll be taking a photo of it soon. Unfortunately, scanning it isn't an option yet.



This is quite ancient. Remember when I entered the major fair poster contest and placed second, and was going to take a photo of my fully colored poster? Well, I never got around to it until just now. But that OTHER poster I was just talking about, you know...that'll be TOTALLY different!



Here's a sketch for my next Illustration Style project: a poster for my college's EcoFestival. New York has an annual City of Water day that promotes green initiatives in the city. There are actually kayak launches all around NYC. A boathouse in Manhattan even provides free boats and training. I went to a session once or twice, but I just wound up arguing with my friend a lot and drinking too much afterward.



This is a...version...of my Computer Art ad. I say "version" because I actually did half the design on a copy machine, instead of using Quark. It's really frustrating to me that I only have 4 hours of class time to work with the program. Computer lab hours are going to increase soon, though, so I'll have my pick of time slots.



Here is a bad photo of my completed watch design project. Notice how the flash is artistically reflecting off the glass!



These are some sketches I did for my latest Typography project. We have to transform one letter into another, and tell a story with it. Here I am, transforming a Bookman typeface-inspired P into an R, by making the letters into a stylized frog. I used Bookman because I had a sheet handy showing all the letters and numbers in that typeface. It's the same one I used for my Brooklyn Book Fest poster, and some of the watch designs.

Where I've been for the past 2 weeks

Bacon in a Bottle logo design.

These two are for my Computer Art class. We're learning how to use QuarkXpress 8. I've never even used a Mac before, so it's pretty confusing, but I've done print work and know how to use other image manipulation programs, so it's not THAT bad. Right now, my main nemesis is Bezier curves, cuz I want to do some bacon fat white and yellow stripes under the logo text, like the Coca Cola logo.



These are for my Typography class. My professor wants "practical" yet "nontraditional" watch face designs, which drives me kind of crazy, because it seems like she likes my designs better when I just scribble a jumble of numbers together. She would probably disagree with this and say she prefers asymmetry and sophisticated compositions. I missed class one day because I was working the primary elections, so I'm out to sea on what she expects. I just started playing with the numbers for these two and crossed my fingers that she likes them.




Speaking of which, these are some subway studies from Primary Day. I wasn't interested in being very realistic. I just wanted to copy down as many little details as I could.





These three are from my first day of Illustration. We had to wander around campus and sketch interesting compositions. My professor didn't like my compositions very much and said she'd prefer more cropping and asymmetry. I actually think one of my faults is that I often don't include the whole figure in the frame, so I've been working against that to make my pictures clearer. But I agree the mongoose picture could benefit from tight cropping on the two opponents' faces. We actually DO have a stuffed mongoose and cobra on campus, right next to my old Art History classroom.



Right now we have to design a poster for the Brooklyn Book Festival. This is my sketch for it.





These are studies for my poster. The last one includes a sketch I did of Housing Works when I went to see Dr. Frank at his book release show for Andromeda Klein. MC Chris was there, too, and was awesome. There were also a bunch of other folks, including a pretty good band that played 2nd. I never caught their name but they rocked.



Finally, this is the latest version of my first Illustration Style project. We had to paste our images on to the article. My professor recommended I add gray to the background. She liked the grassy texture I used for the gray. I think I should have grayed in the foreground, too, but oh well. It's turned in.

Inking and line

I've been working on a poster for my Illustration class, for the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2010. I unfortunately don't have a scan to post, but I want to write a little about inking and line.

I don't really have a settled method for inking, but I do know that having everything look stiff in the final makes me crazy, so for this poster I tried to get all the real drawing done in the inking. I did a really rough sketch just so I would know where everything was, then went over the general shapes at a lightbox and used the original rough sketch for guidance.

In inking, I did the foreground characters first with a thin marker point. I wanted them to be attention getting, much moreso than the background. Tonight I went over the lines I already inked, selectively thickening them and adding detail, on the theory that it would make them stand out more and be more interesting to look at.

Then I went over the background, using a thin, unvarying line.

I originally thought it would be better in general to have a bright foreground over a greyish background...I think it comes from my days reading MAD, where very often the backgrounds were a gray ink wash. However, after poring over old cartoon stills and Frank, I think I'm much better off with dark foreground figures on light background. They pop out more. They don't even have to be black, though areas of black are really attention-grabbing, especially if they surround white areas like mouth or eyes or hands.

Illustration Style homework

Professor asked us to illustrate an article from the NY Times about the criminalization of poverty. Cities and counties are increasingly cracking down on the homeless and imposing tough fines that disproportionally burden the poor, partly to fill the coffers during these "tough economic times". What strikes me in particular about this issue is that the law is tying people down to being poor, creating obstacles to a better life and being sternly self-righteous about it to boot. The original article has a very stark illustration of a shopping cart with prison bars, but I consider my strength to be more in cartooning than in creating really designy, symbolic images.

The border around the cartoon is quite sloppy, and I worry that the greys on the poor vet blur together and make him hard to make out clearly. However, I'm happy how the policeman came out. The line work and the background especially owe something to my studies of Frank.

Screaming Yellow Something

This guy needs a Xanax.

I think the background should be cooler...

I used a yellow watercolor pen for the body, then went over it with a green pencil for shading. I like the effect.

More cards

You can buy my cards here: http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=7773105

You know...if you want.

GameFAQs requests, cooperation-style

I sometimes take drawing requests on GameFAQs.com if I'm feeling bored and want a challenge (you can see some others if you click the "GameFAQs" label on the sidebar). This time around, I decided to take the first 4 requests and chunk them into a single image. It's easier than coming up with 4 separate images, because in that case, you need to create a context for each one, and it can get kind of overwhelming if you're impatient like me.

So far I've done 5 rounds of drawings. They're often quite sloppy because I was trying to get them down as quickly as possible.

Round 5, a wooper fighting a bear over a shot gun, and that guy from The Offspring eating pretzels, fighting a giant pineapple monster with a ribbon sword, while underwater...Requests from geeoe, the moonlight knight, Cosmic, and da_gee_man:



Round 4 was me eating hands in the middle of a Zerg rush with a pear tree in a partridge. Ideas from Chimpy 4 (it was a slow hour) and HyperRyun:



Round 3 was a hamster riding a penguin while smoking a cigar that fires lasers that turn into flapjacks, with the Spy from Team Fortress 2 disguised as a penguin about to backstab the hamster. Requests from Valkskorn, twinkie daddy, DR583V3, and Lloyd1992:



Round 2 involved a giant catgirl (meganeko HAHAHA) wielding a giant frying pan and a jetpack, a raptor on rollerskates with a flamethrower, a macaroni cheesecake eating a slurpee with a fork, and the user LastExile...yeah. See. Ideas from Lastexile0, the moonlight knight, KageShinobi, and Googloplex.



Round 1 featured a dinosaur, the Heavy from TF2, and the Tank from L4D on a barbecue grill, with the dinosaur firing lasers and the Heavy attacking the Tank, and they're all talking on headsets. Thanks to RE4penguin, pizzaman95, Lifeless, and bigtwo.

Chicken

Felix monsters

This sketch is based on a dream I had a year or so ago. These horrible, cat-eyed aliens were eating people and trying to collect genetic samples for a human farm.

Pikadeth