Today's sketch

This weekend while meandering through Georgetown, I picked up a great book at Fantagraphics about the life and art of Dan DeCarlo. I didn’t know him by name, but recognized his work from the long-running Archie comic series. I’d seen his strips and books in passing, but never took the time to really look at the artwork. Thanks to this book I have a new appreciation for DeCarlo’s amazing talent, particularly for how expressive his characters are. I’m even more in awe of his ability to capture the human form in such an economy of line. Today I was inspired to do a couple sketches in the spirit of his style, mostly as practice and to learn how he (so successfully) simplifies faces and figures.

This gal represents no one in particular, but the facial features, which are more realistic than the Archie characters, are based on a style DeCarlo used for a proposed Bettie Page comic book series.

A group show and art party!

It’s the summer of Ballard! I’m showing again, this time at BallardWorks, an artists’ studio space in same building I used to haunt in my printmaking days. Come for the drinks and art, stay for more drinks and music.

The Three Little Pigs. Two-sided art. Can you guess what's on the back?

Godzilla Lose Ice Cream

Hanging the show.

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of showing off some art during the Ballard Art Walk. The good folks at Stoke Strategy hosted the event, and have generously provided their presentation wall as a temporary gallery for the next few weeks. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and check it out.

Close-up showing the linework close to actual size.

Full illustration. Click on the image view it large.

Here’s an example of an illustration style I’m trying on. I drew the outlines with one No. 2 pencil and many sheets of tracing and layout paper. To get the detail in the face and bicycle parts I worked large, breaking the drawing into parts. I then scanned the parts in, reassembled them in Photoshop and brought in a few textures from a texture library I’ve been building over time. After I added the color blocks, I spent a good while tweaking the color palette and finessing the layer transparencies.

Color-wise, this could easily have been a springtime or fall scene (or a winter one if not for the flowers and sundress) but I ended going with a warm, golden, end-of-summer look. Which is nice to reminisce about when the frost on our deck is barely melting during the day.

Fortunately, Illustrator also provides tools that help you turn your napkin sketch into vector art without digitizing the life out of it. I sketched this spot illustration with a marker brush, creating large-stroke drawing for the bird plus a batch of pencil outlines for the color blocks. I then scanned the pieces and outlined them with Illustrator’s Live Trace tool, using different settings for the thick brush strokes versus the thin color outlines.

After combining the resulting vector outlines, I was able to play with color until I developed a palette I liked. To me this is one of the major benefits of vector art. I can explore and change color quickly, testing ideas and keeping multiple copies of variations I can go back to later. And if a client needs a change, I can work more quickly and efficiently with a vector file, without having to go back to the napkin.

A cleaned-up version of the brush drawing.

Final spot illustration.

Outlines for the color blocks.

The Submarines poster on display at the "Sasquatch! Posters!" show.

A few months back I was among the lucky designers invited to create a poster for an artist playing at the 2009 Sasquatch! Music Festival. Through a controlled lottery I ended up with The Submarines, an indie-pop group with female vocalist and a lighthearted, sunshiny sound. Because this was a labor of love (read: no compensation) and I was paying for the printing, I pretty much had total creative control. Which was somewhat intimidating at first, but I’m really happy with the result.

Although the show organizer requested only 12 posters from each designer, I printed a total of fifty, with a few extras thrown in by the printer. The remaining posters are now for sale at gigposters.com.