Art & Story Blog

We didn’t make a holiday mix CD in 2005, but we did get our acts together to make one this year! Hey, finding stuff that doesn’t make you want to throw up is challenging stuff. This year’s concept is Holiday Lights.

Mele Kalikimaka, everyone!

A couple of years ago, my girlfriend and I collaborated on a Holiday mix CD to send to family and friends. The idea was to have a few Christmasy songs scattered throughout, but just to put songs on there that we liked and that might play well in a wintery, festive, giftwrap-ripping environment. Hopefully it would also be a CD someone could listen to at other times of the year and not have the urge to regurgitate. We called it Holiday Here and There. Playing off of that title, I thought of how our families were scattered about here and there in Hawaii, Seattle, San Francisco, and Cincinnati and designed this cover/insert:

(Note that the colors are slightly off from the print version. I’m having calibration issues between Photoshop and Imageready.)
Front of the CD insert:

Back of the CD insert (what you’d see with the CD case open):

The full insert unfolded:

Below is a flyer and poster design I’ve just completed for No Shame Theatre’s 20th Anniversary. This one will be distributed in Iowa City, where No Shame originated (the first No Shame performance was out of the back of a pick-up truck). An alternate version will be used for the Los Angeles No Shame and we’ve also discussed putting this image on T-Shirts.

Okay, so it’s rather grotesque, but keep in mind that the forms are abstracted and you could not see anything grotesque in it, were it not for the aid of your own imagination. Any resemblance to forms or actions deemed rude or obscene are purely coincidental. Given another look, I’m sure you’ll see that what you thought was one thing is really just a nose, or eyes, etc., of a silly cartoon character. Harmless G-rated fun, all around!

“Whackjob!” was a literary reading series in San Diego that I did flyer designs for. I was given pretty much total freedom to interpret each reading’s theme title and would employ whatever tools or styles seemed to fit the bill. The themes illustrated below are “Better Than Hope,” “Genie In A Bottle,” “Poemectomy,” a Valentine’s Day theme, and “Wipe Out,” respectively.

Continue reading ‘Red Pimento Pondering’

And here’s another doodle from Thursday that got put through the ringer.

Continue reading ‘NY State of Mind’

A doodle from Thursday, which I then took into Photoshop and did some color experimenting with. For a long time, I have toiled away at trying to eliminate white pixels from scanned line drawings, so that color layers will show through. I’ve used the wand tool, but with limited success. There would still be those maddening little grey pixels sticking to the lines. Thank goodness, a guy named Guillermo finally tipped me off to an easier technique, and I’m going to share it here with anyone who is interested. All you have to do is set your line art’s layer to “Multiply” and create your color layers beneath that. Voila! Guillermo also gave me some tips on tweeking brush settings to get more out of my Wacom tablet, which I’m also experimenting with here. Still needs some work, though. Anyway, please try to enjoy the ugliness.

Continue reading ‘Two Turds’