Makin' bank

Things have been busy here. Two houses to work on and one to paint, playing with my new 3000 psi pressure washer!
Meanwhile over at my blog… Right now I'm working on a series of bank illustrations.
Yes me doing illustrations for a financial institution. There are six total. Originally the client wanted to match a painted style with something they would initially use on their new website and possibly later for print/collateral uses. I knew that vector art would work well for web use, and allow for scalability, but how to match, or get close to a painted look/feel for print? Texture and lots of it! I have been slowly building a folder of custom patterns and textures to use in P-shop and Sillly-strator. The one I'm using in this series is something worked up from a scan of one of my airbrush illustrations. I used it like an old stacked screen. (Anyone out there remember those? Buller, Buller…?) the texture is on two layers, one set to normal at about 40 opacity and the other set to multiply at about 20 opacity. And like a stacked screen they're angled to offset. This way the texture builds up a more random look and works over the entire value scale. The shapes are very simple, that's more in keeping with what the client wanted stylistically, but each shape may have the fill and stroke set to different opacities. All in all, the Transparency palette and I are quite friendly now.


The illustrations will be used very small and have the potential to be very big, so I wanted to give the client art that would work at both ends of the scale. Conceptually it's a cake walk, but technically?… there's where the work is.

I also decided to have a common background and cloud motif for all the illustrations. Their previous set did not have much in common at all. I was going to have the background be the same color in all, but the designer thought that might be too repetitive. We'll see how the shape up on the website. Even though I have a Wacom all this was mostly mouse work. Parlor tricks!The"In-House-Art Director" really likes these illustrations and says so whenever she passes by my computer, and the client is happy. Well, and so am I. More so with all the technical stuff I was able to do and how I played with texture and transparency.

Near Art Part One

Whew, the first part of my comic novella is out the door! What a long process it's been. A lot of tweaking, fine tuning, editing, course changing and grumbling from me as I had to be smart and give up on some inside jokes and plot elements that would only make any kind of sense to me. What remains is a better story with a clear plot that gets up and running in no time at all! Twelve pages is not that much to tell a long form story and to keep interest over a month between each is a lot to ask. I've done short comic stories ranging from 5 to 11 pages, and read at once it's a good read.
Page count and time aside my goal from the start was to do something different, hence a pop love story, confection, eye candy.

Of course I can never leave thing alone so I had to keep dumping in a lot of stuff and the whole thing took on a love story ala Philip K. Dick tone. Which would be nice if, again, I had the space and pages to set things up. We, the editor and I, had hoped to do a strip within a strip, a twist on reality, a mobius strip. See, it even takes a while to set up a bad pun about it!

I started by coming up with my (half baked) idea, then doing thumbnails. Visually driven, I wound up falling in love (no, no pun intended) with some ideas.
Bad cartoonist, no credit line!

Since this is the launch, I don't want to spoil it by giving too much away. The magazine described it as semi-autobiographical. I like to think of what the writer Denny Eichorn once told me. I had been illustration a few of his auto-bio comic stories and I asked him if they were true, he replied, "Well, they're true enough."

New City Arts comic novella

My new comic is under way! City Arts magazine was so happy with the response to "The Flitcraft Parable" and the way it turned out that they asked me shortly after it was finished if I'd be interested in doing a 12 part story. They are increasing publication to go monthly and cover Seattle and Bellevue/Eastside as well as Tacoma. Who could resist. Cartoonist accepts offer, comedy ensues!
My first idea was to do another detective strip like Flitcraft, but a good friend of mine said,"You've done two, people know you for tat. You do another and you'll be BRANDED!" So I went the other way, and after months of working on ideas I finally came up with a romance story. Ahh, sweet love!
Of course that was just the start. Initially it was to be a sort of romance ala Philip K. Dick story, with a somewhat circular plot mimicking song structure (say wha!?)
Yeah, well, that was a thought. So over the course of developing the story characters disappeared, merged, split,grew and shrunk. I also fell into the trap of desperately holding onto bits of dialog. So back and forth with the editor, me, and my "In-House-Art Director", till me likkle head was in a whirl! But now the characters are set, all 12 parts outlined, the first strip is written and on the drawing board.
The title is "Near Art", which oddly enough is part of a line of dialog that was pried from my cold dead hands (how to really mangle a metaphor!). It was used as sort of a joke placeholder and has really taken on a greater value and added more meaning to the strip.
So this is the first bit. I plan to post more "Near Art" art in the future.

Granted

Well, after two remodeled houses, a rough Holiday season, a much needed vacation and a glut of work I'm back to posting.
This is an illustration of Alejandro Escavedo. It's my final piece for No Depression magazine. They closed up shop this month, the last issue. I've known the editor, Grant Alden for years. Just about since the beginning of my career. This illustration is, in many ways, much or more about him and the magazine we met on, The Rocket.
The textures of the illo for me hark back to our Rocket days and the over all treatment, I hope, evokes some of the Seattle punk rock era. Pre-Grunge, mind you.
The overall treatment speaks to what I was doing then, not only for Grant at the Rocket, but alongside him. He started type setting then moved to writing and editing. Whenever I stopped by "The Rocket Towers", I would hang with him and whomever was art director or assistant art director. Later, Grant, as Managing Editor, would ask me to create a comic strip ("Alan Bland, Guerrilla Artist")for the Rocket.
If memory serves, he also had me do one of my first illustrations for the Rocket of Camper Van Beethoven. Years later, as editor/art director of No Depression, he asked me to create a six page comic for Camper Van Beethoven's reunion album. Grant is also an illustrator of no small skill. (He's an all-a-rounder, a triple threat!) His eye for illustration, design and type (whew!) made working with him, or just being asked to work with him a joy and an honor. I have done some of my best work for No Depression. I will always look forward to working with him.

"Thor" Energy Biz Magazine

Yawn, sleepy me.
Since I have noticed a lack of updates on my favorite blogs, I knew it was time for me to post something. This was part of the very merry month of December's screamin honkin' stinkin' busy workload. The assignment was a cover, later the A.D. asked for
a full page illus to go with the cover. So being the page hog that I am I came up with a two page spread. The concept springs from the idea of Danish wind power. Thor being the mythological god of storms and wind. The A.D. wanted a bold comic booky feel. I would have airbrushed it to get a moody textural black and white image that I would then color digitally. However due to time limitations I did the base art in Illustrator and added some effects and color in Photoshop, then taking to the Wacom and adding a few lines by hand. THE OLD FASHIONED WAY! Anyway the texture is one I created from scanned airbrush art. A trick I will use on an upcoming series of illustrations for a bank. I'm not overly fond of the windmill in place of Mjolnir. I wanted the hammer itself, but, to paraphrase, "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets." Is that paraphrasing? In the end I would have liked even more texture and moodiness, however I had to leave space for type to appear over the illustration.
If all goes well I will post the bank illustrations as the adjunct textural experiment to Thor, and by the way the "Flitcraft Parable", for which I used a rough newsprint texture.

Live fast, draw hard.

Flitcraft Comes Alive!

Okay slight pun with the title. But, "The Flitcrfat Parable" is out in the Jan/Feb issue of City Arts Magazine. Check it out if you can and let me know what you think. A blog like mine is like mine is like a message in a bottle. Oooh, another bad musical reference.

The Flitcrfat Parable: Sam Spade, a rather pleasant blond Satan.

The Flitcraft Parable is done, completed! My wife (a designer by trade, the "In House Art Director")made a few last minute lettering changes, corrections, and gave me some art direction. So in a few working hours the finished five pages plus cover illustration will be in the clients hands, or server. Since I've posted a fair amount of the stuff I'll wait and let City Arts magazine publish the story before I post anymore of the final art. It should pub sometime in January. In the meantime here is a rough color test I did over the final inks of a close up of Sam Spade. I tried to stay as close to Hammett's description of him.

"Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose,...He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan"

Live Fast, draw hard.