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.

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.

The poster set the look and feel for the 2010 Seattle Restaurant Week marketing materials.

Last week I received a few samples of the poster LookatLao and I designed for Seattle Restaurant Week. My partner-in-design Geoffrey Smith first spied it a few weeks ago posted up in the window of Anchovies & Olives, one of the over 100 restaurants participating the upcoming event.

This poster provided a jumping-off point for the folks at The Seattle Times, who have been busy rolling out the design in all manner of marketing materials and social media outlets. It’s been great to see the concept at work and to hear excitement building for the event. It sounds like it’s going to be a success for restaurants and patrons alike, and will hopefully be the first of many Seattle Restaurant Weeks to come.

A new logo for a new Seattle restaurant event.

In lieu of repeating such a well-written blog post, I offer a link to LookatLao’s account of our recent team effort in designing the Seattle Restaurant Week logo. A fancy poster is nearing completion, which will hopefully grace every storefront window in Seattle by mid-March. Stay tuned!

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.

I also incorporated transparency and ink effects to mimic glazing techniques often used in oil and water color paintings. The resulting illustration is somewhat complex and would likely need to be converted to a different file format for printing. But I think the visual effect is interesting, and I plan to explore simplified combinations of textures and gradients in some upcoming illustrations. And as always, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to comment!

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.