Courage Creative

A Couple of Watercolor Studies

2012-01-31T16:59:00.000-08:00

Just a couple of quick watercolor studies of water. Trying to get that translucent-water look is not that easy.

Ram's Head Lighthouse

2012-01-27T13:26:00.000-08:00

My latest painting is of Ram's Head Lighthouse, which is just outside of Boothbay Harbor, Maine. It was done as a birthday present for my father-in-law. I based the painting on a photo that I took on a trip to Boothbay 2 years ago. My wife and I stayed at a little place called the Tugboat Inn, and as part of our package, we got a free trip on an excursion boat around Boothbay Harbor. The photo was taken as we cruised by the lighthouse. The day was cool and foggy, so I added in the blue sky, the dory, and the seagulls. The painting is 14" x 18" on stretched canvas, and is painted in acrylic.

Christmas Kitties

2011-12-23T14:59:00.000-08:00

My latest painting. It is of our two cats, Pyewackett and Cleo. It was supposed to be our Christmas card this year, but we were too poor to get it printed as a card. It is painted on a 5.5" x 9.5" wooden panel in acrylic. Maybe we'll use it for our Christmas card next year! Merry Christmas everyone!

Nemo's Daughter Bookcover

2011-12-13T19:51:00.000-08:00

A while back I completed a painting entitled "Nemo's Daughter". I decided to design a bookcover using the image. Now I just have to write it and get it published.

Village Blacksmith

2011-11-29T08:14:00.000-08:00

I don't usually post my photography on this blog, but this photo of one of the Pioneer Village blacksmiths, "Mr. Snitch" (Kevin Stirnweis) taken by yours truly during the regular October season at Pioneer Village, Salem, won first prize in the "People and Places" category of the 2011 Essex National Heritage Photo Contest. The link to the contest site is here:
http://www.essexheritage.org/photocontest/index.shtml

"Chambers of the Cursed" Art

2011-11-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

If you read my blog, you know that during the month of October, I was performing in a show called "Chambers of the Cursed" for History Alive! at the Old Town Hall in Salem.
After the end of the run, I decided to do a painting of myself and my fellow cast members as the characters we played in the show. I did the original painting in watercolor and had a limited number of prints made at White Light Digital in North Beverly, MA. Although we each played multiple roles in theproduction, I chose the parts which were most iconic and recognizable.
From left to right are: Armerys Suarez as the banished Quaker Mary Dyer. Myself as Minister George Burroughs of Wells, Maine, former pastor of the First Church in Salem Village and one of the victims of the 1692 Witch trials, Jasmine Myers as Bridget Bishop, the first woman put on trial during the Salem witch trials, and John Chapdelaine, as Roger Williams, banished friend of Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson, and founder of Providence, Rhode Island.

Recent Work for the Salem Theatre Company

2011-11-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Here are some recent posters I have done for the STC during October and November.
Salem theater is busy this time of year!

Trustee of Reservations Signs

2011-10-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

About this time last year, I did some design work for the Trustees of Reservations. I produced files for about twenty interpretive signs that were going to be installed at various locations around the Crane Estate in Ipswich, MA. The signage was installed this spring, but I never seemed to have time to get up to the estate to take a look. Well my wife and I finally got around to traveling up to Ipswich to check them out in situ. They looked terrific. The Crane Estate is one of my all-time favorite places, and the fact that something I worked on will be part of the landscape there makes me very happy.

What I've Been Up To

2011-10-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

Since I haven't posted since June, those of you who follow my blog may be wondering what I have been up to. I have been working on several projects including; starting a new business partnership, collateral for the Salem Theatre Company, and a logo design for a nonprofit in Lynn, MA, however, I have been too busy to post about them, because I have been very busy working for History Alive!

The author in costume at Pioneer Village

History Alive! is a public outreach program run by the Institute for Public History, a department of Gordon College, a Christian College located in Wenham, MA. They have a mandate to bring history to the public in a way that is accurate, informative and entertaining. Currently History Alive! leases and manages two properties owned by the City of Salem;
Pioneer Village, a 3-acre recreation of 1630 Salem located at Forest River Park, and the Old Town Hall, located in Derby Square in downtown Salem.

The Old Town Hall is an early 19th-century building that once housed the town's government. It now houses the Salem Museum, a chronological overview of the history of Salem, from it's founding in 1630, to the Great Fire of 1914. Upstairs is performance space for Cry Innocent: The People vs. Bridget Bishop, an interactive recreation of the trial of Bridget Bishop, the first woman brought to trial for witchcraft in the Witch Trials of 1692.

Pioneer Village is a full-scale replica of early Salem that was built in 1930 for the 300th anniversary of the founding of Salem.
I work as both an historical interpreter and tour guide at Pioneer Village, and as a museum guide at the Old Town Hall. Working at the village requires that I dress in 17th-century Puritan clothing (linen shift, wool breeches and doublet, hose, and shoes) and explain the history, structures, food, tools, beliefs and manners of the early Puritans. I enjoy this work both because of my love for history, as well as the ability to work outdoors and interact with people of all ages from all over the world.
The Village is open to the public until the end of October, then closes for the winter, re-opening in the spring.

Filming The True 1692 at Pioneer Village

In addition to being open to the public, Pioneer Village has also served as a location for the filming of several productions including a National Geographic documentary, The PBS series We Shall Remain,
and most recently, The True 1692, a 35-minute film about the Salem Witch Trials. I was recruited along with many other local actors, including, History Alive! and Cry innocent alum.

Chambers of the Cursed cast

I am also rehearsing for a Halloween show called Chambers of the Cursed.
"Walk the dark halls of the Old Town Hall and hear the voices of Salem’s past–cursed and clamoring to be heard. Live actors and interactive media immerse you in tales of murder and betrayal, telling the story of a city still defined by its dark history."
This show is being performed at the Old Town Hall Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, the last two weekends of October.
I will be back to my regular schedule of design posts by November.

Rebel Shakespeare Company Logo

2011-06-23T06:53:00.000-07:00

Just completed a new logo for the Rebel Shakespeare Company, a summer theater camp for kids and teens that is based on the North Shore. They have been around for 20 years and yet according to their founder Keri Cahill, have never had an official logo.
When we first met back in April, she told me that she wanted something that would reflect the outdoor and summertime nature of the group. She also wanted to avoid treatments of Shakespeare wearing sunglasses or a bandana, and favored a circular motif. So there are the essential items, Shakespeare, outdoors, kids, circular motif.
With those things in mind I set to work researching and sketching.
First I collected every Shakespeare-related logo I could find, everything from the Royal Shakespeare Company to Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Almost all of them had a stylized portrait of part or all of Shakespeare's face. Although I liked some of these logos very much, this new logo was going to require a different approach.
During my research, I came across several logos and images that caught my eye.
One was this photo of the Shakespeare statue in Central Park.

Another was the logo for the Ithaca Shakepseare Company.

The other was the logo for the Boston Athenaeum, which I ran across on a visit to the Edward Gorey show that was there this spring.

These all started to percolate in my mind. Keri really liked the idea of Shakespeare outdoors, under a tree, possibly reading to a group of children. I tried a couple of quick thumbnails.

Although I liked the basic idea, I could see that the figure of Shakespeare would be difficult to read, or hold together visually, and that this concept would make a better illustration than a logo. So I started looking for ways to render the idea in a way that would be clearer visually. Going back to the Ithica logo, I started looking at trees and tree shapes. Luckily there is tons of reference for trees nearby.

Then I started looking for reference for the figures of Shakespeare and the children.
I found two pieces of public-domain silhouette art by 19th-century German artist Paul Konewka that fit the bill. I liked the idea of using his artwork, as he had produced illustrations for a collected volume of Shakespeare's work in the 1870's, and I liked that historical connection. Plus his work is superb. If you are going to steal, steal from the best.
One piece was of the Pied Piper of Hamlin.

The other was of children dancing in a rural, pastoral scene.

I took the Pied Piper from the first, as I liked his prancing figure, and the dancing children from the second. I isolated them and re-drew them in Illustrator, adding "Shakespeare" details like a ruff collar and a quill to the piper, and eliminating the dog and the uneven ground from the children. I then created a couple of different tree silhouettes and tried various compositions combining all of these elements.

Now the question was, what to do with the type. It was clear that although I liked the non-symmetry of the right hand composition, it made it more difficult to incorporate the text into the image, or drop it into a circle. so I tried dropping knocked-out text into the negative areas above and below the main image.

The one with the text above seemed to work better, but after meeting with Keri, she re-iterated her preference for a circular logo. So I tried dropping the artwork into a circular format, similar to the Athenaeum logo. After trying half a dozen fonts for the text, I settled on AT Handle Oldstyle, a font that was very readable, but had a bit of the flavor of the old-fashioned typeface on the Athanaeum logo.

This seemed to be on the right track, however, there was concern expressed over the figures of the children, that they were so young that they may alienate the older kids and teens who join the group. So I developed the idea of removing the children and replacing their dancing figures with two figures from one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream; Titania and Bottom. Besides being one of my personal favorites, I thought that the figures of Bottom and Titania would be instantly recognizable, and would emphasize not only that the left figure was Shakespeare, but would also highlight both the outdoor setting and magical summertime nature of Rebel Shakespeare productions.
Again, I found more public-domain art by German silhouettist and illustrator, Paul Konewka.

I altered the image somewhat, removing much of Titania's wrapping and replacing it with fairy wings. I added them into the existing composition. I had to alter the foliage on the bottom of the tree to fit in the taller figures.

Now there were two competing logos. As a compromise, I tried some other variations that combined all of the figures, but none of them seemed to work as well.

So Keri did some rudimentary market research and showed both to a group of her former students and directors. They overwhelmingly chose the original composition with the figures of the children.
The next step was to introduce color into the logo. In keeping with the al fresco nature of the group, it was decided that green, would be most appropriate. I selected a dark green Pantone 336, which works well in both solid ink and in 4/C process, with an accent of light green, Pantone 376.
I also worked out several variations for use of the logo, including a version that could be used on a black or dark background, and versions with the type outside of the logo, that would be readable at a small size.

The final package of logos and variations as well as a simple guide to the components of the logo were delivered to the client. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
If I get the time, I may try a version of the logo that is rendered in a style similar to the Athanaeum logo, just for fun.

Another Random Sketch

2011-06-15T14:56:00.001-07:00

Sketches from "Cocktail Culture"

2011-06-15T13:52:00.000-07:00

My wife Amy and I recently went to the RISD art museum in Providnece Rhode Island. While there we took a tour of their exhibit "Cocktail Culture" which is an exhibit of fashions and accessories associated with the growth of drinking as a social custom. Before prohibition men went out to bars or private clubs to drink. These establishments had an exclusively male clientele and drinking alcohol with a woman in any kind of respectable social setting was unheard of.
After prohibition, drinking and entertaining at home, and in mixed company became a neccessity and over the years, increasingly popular. The fashions reflected this fundamental change in American culture as men and women became more comfortable and indeed celebrated the cocktail.

Since I was unable to take photographs of the exhibition, I did a few quick sketches and made notations while we were in the gallery, and then colored them with watercolor later.
It was a great exhibit and I would recommend making a visit.
The link is here:http://www.risdmuseum.org
The exhibit is open until July 31st.

Latest Projects

2011-04-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

I've been lax about postings the last month or so, (partly it is because I gave up Facebook for lent), but I'm going to make up for it with this one long one. I have been very busy.
Recent projects I have been working on:

A logo and website for Stage Soup, a Theater program for kids and teens located in Brookline MA.

Event materials for the Institute of Contemporary Art Party on the Harbor including an HTML e-mail invitation, a promotional postcard and a half page ad for STUFF at night magazine.

Background screens for a production of the musical PIPPIN at the Arts Center at Endicott College.

A Logo and graphic standard for the Essex Coastal Scenic Byway. An 85-mile long scenic route that stretches from Lynn to Newburyport. This work is being done for the Essex National Heritage Commission, which works to promote all of Essex County and the North Shore.

It's been a busy couple of months! Hopefully this trend will continue.

Cleo Painting

2011-03-05T12:28:00.000-08:00

Nothing too earth-shattering, just a tiny little painting that I did recently as a gift for my wife, a portrait of our cat #2, Cleo. The painting is only about 3"x 3"on canvas. I post it to remind myself that I can occasionally still paint.

Some Recent Work for STC

2011-01-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

One of my regular clients is the Salem Theatre Company. I have been producing various print pieces including large display posters, show identities, and signage for the last 3 years. Here is some of my recent work for them.

The Dickens You Say!

2010-12-21T13:49:00.000-08:00

A client recently hired me to do some Photoshop work on a photo so that it could be printed and given as a Christmas gift. I'm posting this partly to show what I am capable of doing in Photoshop, nothing too fancy, but definitley took an artist's eye.

Here is the original photo. It is a picture of actor J.T. Turner, who does an annual reading of Charles Dicken's "Christmas Carol" as who else, Charles Dickens. He had this lovely photo taken of himself in his 19th-century Dickensian costume, the only problem was the decidedly 20th-century building in the background.

It was fairly easy to isolate the foreground elements and eliminate the background, replacing it with color sampled from the snow shadow area.

So far, so good. Now the client asked me to make it look more like an illustration, similar to a technique that I developed for use on several posters. I couldn't do it by just by running a Photoshop filter on the original photo as that almost always looks like what it is; a Photoshop filter run on a photo. It needed to look more hand drawn than that. I solved the problem by making a line drawing of the photo, tracing a print of the photo on vellum, and then scanning it into Photoshop.

I then selected the white areas of the flat art, inversed the selection so that only the black was selected, and then copied and pasted the black line art onto a new
layer in Photoshop. I then took the original photo, ran a modified watercolor filter on it, and pasted it on the layer beneath the line art. Some areas of the line art did not line up exactly and needed to be modified, as did some of the areas of the underlying photo. For instance the area around the eyes needed to be cleaned up, and the side of the coat extended. Once everything was lined up to my satisfaction, i flattened the document. Here is the finished product.

You get the illustrative style of line art, with the tonal gradations of a photo.

Firedrops!

2010-12-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

A client of mine has been in the process of developing and marketing a product called "Firedrops". These are organic sugar drops loaded with cayenne pepper, which if taken at the first hints of a cold, will almost literally burn the sick right out of you. At first she made them in small batches at home, but they became so popular that she looked into having them manufactured in larger, industrial quantities. As she did this, she realized that they would need a definite identity. She asked me to help.

She liked the idea of a shield motif, as the drops were a "shield against colds".
She also wanted to convey how hot they were, as even the reduced strength drops were very hot, sweat-inducingly, tongue numbingly, hot. She also wanted a look that conveyed that the ingredients were all natural and organic.

I started by doing some sketches by hand.

I wanted to get down as many ideas as possible. Some ideas included a phoenix, or firebird motif, the possible use of a dragon as a mascot, a flaming meteor, and a throat showing the spreading warmth. Although she found some of the ideas intriguing, none of them were quite what she was looking for.

She tried doing a rough sketch herself. Here it is.

This took me in a different direction.The directness of picturing the cayenne pepper seemed like a good idea, but how to do it in a way that was visually interesting and conveyed the hotness of the drop. The sketch also seemed a bit text-heavy, but I gave it a shot. First I did research on cayenne pepper and the plant that supports it.

Working directly in Illustrator, I worked up several basic ideas. The first was just a simple reinterpretation of the shield motif.

This seemed kind of boring. So I started to add in the elements of flame, as well as the rest of the copy. Trying to find a balance of the elements of image, colors and text.

These ideas were well received, but some were eliminated, the rest were tweaked, refined and simplified.

This second round is where we left off, with me waiting for the client to pick an option. Which one do you like?

Dragon Hunters

2010-11-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I had a very vivid dream in which men hunted dragons in the sky with flying boats. I was probably influenced by a trip to the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, MA., where I was amazed. impressed and horrified by the tools and practices of that trade. The image that stuck with me, was of men, in a small open whaleboat in open water, chasing and harpooning whales, that dwarfed the men and their boats, sometimes weighing in at 50 tons or more.
In the dream the hunters shot harpoons attached to weights into the dragons and eventually wore them down. Once the dragon was exhausted, they fell into the ocean, where the flying boats would land, and dispatch and dismember the dragon, much as the whales were hunted and slaughtered a century ago by whalers from Nantucket and New Bedford. Like the original whalers, the dragon hunters were a special class of men with their own habits, language and society.

After the dream, while the imagery was still fresh in my mind, I did some sketches, imagining the boats, the men, the costume, technology and the culture of these dragon hunters. At some point I would love to develop this idea further, but for now, here are some sketches and notes from my sketchbook.

Ideas and Unfinished Projects

2010-10-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

These are some color sketches for a painting I have had in my head for a long time. It is a blind angel of the apocalypse, playing a mandolin in front of the ruins of a church.
Kinda weird. Can't decide what the color scheme, time of day or weather should be. Suggestions?

Unicorns and Dinosaurs

2010-10-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I posted a political cartoon on FaceBook. I really liked the style and content of it. My friend Lola, a fellow blogger said " i love YOUR illustrations. back to your blog sir!" I was rightly chastised, as I have been very lazy about posting on my own blog the last couple of months and I told Lola I would draw something just for her and post it. She replied " after careful consideration, I decided that i would be most excited to see something that involves both a dinosaur and a unicorn". So here is what I have come up with, not one, but three ideas involving a unicorn and a dinosaur.

The first one is the most straightforward. It's an encounter between a unicorn and a T-rex. At first I had considered a raptor, as they are more in scale with a unicorn, but i liked the contrast in size, and the idea that a unicorn would actually take on
something 10 times its size.

The second one came to me as I started thinking about similarities between a dinosaur and a unicorn. Although the triceratops has 3 horns instead of one, I thought that of all the dinosaurs, it was the most similar to a unicorn. It's an imagined meeting of a fanciful and a kind of "real" unicorn.

The last one was a bit of humor. I know some people who are "young-earth creationists" and who believe that humans and dinosaurs existed together and that Noah's flood is what really wiped out the dinosaurs and "confused" the fossil record. So why not include a unicorn in that scenario, it seems appropriate somehow.

What do you think? Which one do you like? If this works out it may become a regular feature of the blog. Requests anyone?

Metropolis

2010-09-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

Last Friday night I attended a viewing of Fritz lang's 1927 science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis at the Cinema Salem. It is "The Complete" version that restores the film to its almost-original condition, incorporating footage discovered in Buenos Aires in 2008. Nearly a half an hour has been restored into the film, seen here (almost) complete for the first time since the film’s Berlin premiere in 1927.
Immediately after the premiere, German distributor Ufa re-cut the film from 153 minutes to 114 minutes, and it was this version that was distributed internationally, including an American release through Paramount Pictures, who hacked even more content from the film to fit it into a 90 minute slot as well as to tone down the political themes at the core of the film. This is the version that had been available to audiences for nearly 80 years. The rest of the film — excised and unseen in decades — was considered lost.

The discovery of A 16mm complete collector’s print of the film in a film vault in South America was a major find for film enthusiasts. Aside from 8 minutes that were too badly degraded to restore, The Complete Metropolis is indeed, complete.

The last time I saw this film was in a college film class, and I remembered it as an assemblage of visually striking images and set pieces of epic scale and imagination, but the (then) poor quality of the film, and the somewhat confusing story caused me to dismiss it. That is not the case with the new version. The restored version is stunning and the additional footage not only clarifies the story, it also clarifies character action and motivation.

If you are not familiar with the story, Metropolis is a techno-utopia, a futuristic city, enormous and technically advanced, however there is a great social disparity. The leader of the city, Joh Frederson’s and the rich elite live lives of luxury and comfort in the upper levels of the city while a working underclass toil endlessly to service the machines that keep the city running, and live underground in the lowest levels of the city. The workers lives are bleak and exhausting. Their only hope comes in the form of a saintly girl named Maria who cares for the workers children. She tells of the coming "Mediator". A messiah-like figure who will act as an intermediary between the elite class and the working class. This turns out to be Joh Frederson's son Freder.
His conscience is awakened by an encounter with Maria, and he attempts to assist her in her mission to better the lives of the city's workers.

One of my favorite characters is the mad scientist Rotwang. He is a distinctive-looking man, with his shock of unruly hair, his long coat and gloved, artificial hand.

He creates an evil robot version of Maria, on the orders of Joh Frederson to undermine the worker's confidence in Maria and undo their social uprising. Unkown to Frederson, (and to us until this restored version of the film), is that Rotwang was in love with Frederson's dead wife and created the robot to take her place. When he is called upon to turn her into Maria, he does so with the intention of destroying Metropolis, Jon Frederson, and Freder. It is Rotwang's creation that is perhaps the most iconic image of the film, and sets much of the story in motion.

The scene where Rotwang transform the metal robot into the flesh-and-blood Maria is a masterful showcase of special effects, that for my money surpasses the even the creation scene in Frankenstein, which it predates by four years. Rotwang also figures prominently in some of the films most iconic shots.

This film is a virtual watershed of sci-fi imagery and themes and seems to be the inspiration for almost every major sci-fi movie of the twentieth century. Giant cityscapes, social commentary, a political struggle between the haves and have-nots, and between good and evil. Movies such as The Matrix, THX1138, Blade Runner, Dark City, Star Wars, and at least a dozen others.

Don't be deterred by the fact that this is an older, black and white and silent film. The images and themes are powerful, and the silvery black and white only deepens the dream-like quality of the film. I strongly recommend seeing this film.

Keeping the Spark Alive

2010-08-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

My output as an artist has varied greatly through my life. Sometimes I have had periods of incredible productivity, followed by long dry spells of producing little or nothing of any significance. I am in one of those fallow periods now. I'm not talking about what you do for a living, what I do in my job as a Graphic Designer. I am talking about personal work, the projects that you dream about doing. The things you would do if you didn't have to earn a living.
As you get older, it gets harder and harder to believe that you will ever get one of these dream projects off the ground and bring it to successful completion. How do you keep the spark alive?
What gives me hope?
Through periods of productivity and non-productivity I have always maintained the habit of carrying a sketchbook and drawing in it daily. I have done this even through the worst personal experiences. This gives me hope. Ideas come to me every day. Ideas for images, ideas for stories, observations. Most of them are crap, but a good number of them are very good. Although I may lack the time, self-discipline or enthusiasm to bring them to a "finished" form, I have to get them out on paper. This is my most basic and irreducible creative drive. This is how I keep the spark alive. That I do this gives me hope when it seems like I have the artistic equivalent of performance anxiety, when completing a personal project feels like passing a kidney stone.

Will these little sketchbooks become "seeds" that will eventually grow into something more substantial? I don't know, but like anyone who keeps practicing their craft, even at a very basic level, I hope so.

Press Checks and Good Customer Service

2010-07-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

When I was still working at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, one of my regular duties was to travel to Long Island, New York to supervise the printing of the bi-monthly members magazine. Press checks, in general, are not much fun but I actually really enjoyed doing this one. This was largely due to the talents of the sales representative for the New York-based company that printed the magazine, a man named Larry Whitten. Larry, who was from Long Island but lived in Andover, was our dedicated rep from the very start of our working relationship with Spectragraphics. He was a frequent visitor to our offices, and handled all aspects of the production, from color adjustment and retouching, to general trouble-shooting.
For the press checks, he would arrive at my house early in the morning and drive us down to New York. Larry was a very affable, energetic and upbeat man, and we would often chat away the time as we drove from Boston to Connecticut. We would take the ferry from New London to Orient Point and drive to Comack where the main printing facility was. Sometimes the ferry ride could be a bit scary, such as on my first trip down during a February winter storm with surface conditions so rough that the captain of the ferry requested us to sit or lay down in our seats for the duration of the journey. I spent the rest of the day a little green around the gills. My job was to make certain that the printed page matched the color approved on the final proof. This could be a bit tricky as the pages printed on a form containing 8 pages above and below each other, and the color on the upper part of the page could affect how the color appeared on the page below it. For example if you had a solid block of red as a page design element directly adjacent to a photo with a lot of people's faces in it. The red could make the faces appear as if everyone had a sunburn. But all the pressmen at Spectragraphics were excellent, and very good at correcting for such instances. This made my job a lot easier than it might otherwise have been. Press checks can be really boring, a lot of your time on a press check is spent waiting for a sheet to be ready for you to look at. There is a lot involved in prepping files, setting up the job and the sheet-fed press, and getting the ink balance and color to a point where it is optimal. Sometimes pressmen, like mechanics, can be intimidating or resistant to input, but at Spectra, they were friendly and co-operative.
The press checks usually took a day and a half, which meant that I would stay overnight in a hotel located near the printer overnight. This provided opportunities to sample the cuisine of many of the restaurants in Comack and the immediate area. I had my first and last White Castle burger as well as one of the best steaks I've ever eaten on one of these trips. Excellent customer service made what could have been a very tedious experience into one that was actually enjoyable.
Printers and vendors, take note...

Toy Soldiers

2010-07-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

Another project that I have been working on for several months, are a series of illustrations for Glencoe Models, a company that produces and distributes a variety of plastic model kits and toy soldiers. The owner needed some new art for two different boxes of soldiers, French WWI infantry, and South African Zulu Warriors. The client said that one of the complaints about box art is that the painting rarely shows the actual poses that are found on the figures in the box. He wanted to me to do something that was a realistic-looking scene, but at the same time, as accurate as it could be to the actual poses of the figures. He sent me samples of both of the soldiers. Progress has been slow, as the soldiers are mono-colored, and I had to research both the details of the uniforms and equipment, as well as the probable landscape that they would be found in. I then had to blend what the historical record had to say with the actual appearance and detail of the soldiers. I shot some photo reference for the soldiers. Then I tried to imagine what kind of landscape and groupings the figures would look natural in.

Since there were only 4 poses per French set, I had to bet creative with the arrangement.On the the French Infantry, i stuck to keeping the four main figure poses in the foreground. It seemed sensible that there would be only one officer, so that was easy. Having him direct the gunfire of the two firing soldiers also seemed pretty straightforward, however what to do with the one marching was a little tricky. I was also able to add smaller figures in various poses in the background.

On the Zulus, it was little more difficult as there are only 3 poses per set. Again, I followed a layout and landscape that seemed logical for the poses.
These sketches are the result. Once the client approves the sketches, I will execute a finish of each in acrylic. They will be more finished and contain more detail than the sketches.

Children's Book Update

2010-07-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

An update on the book that my wife Amy and I have been working on, off-and-on, (mostly off) for almost 2 years. We were able to work on it over vacation, and finally completed a first version of the dummy, with sketches and text pasted into place. We've read it out loud and shared it with a few friends. The reaction has been pretty positive. The overall structure seems to flow pretty well, but we've tightened the focus of the story, and our research into the 18th-century pepper trade has shown us the need for a fairly major revision in the storyline.We also have some areas where we can expand the story.The next step is for Amy to make the story revisions and for me to revise the sketches further, so that it is very clear what the action is, and produce a couple of more finished illustrations, I did a finished wrap-around color rough for the cover.
It's starting to come together, ever so slowly...

Robin Hood Shirts

2010-07-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

Came across these the other day buried in the bottom of a closet. Several t-shirts designs that I did for Pastimes Entertainment for the now defunct Robin Hood Faire at Hammond Castle. Pastimes used to produce a t-shirt for each of the shows, which were sold at the faire, and wound up with cast and crew members alike. They never made much money, but they were a cool reminder of some very fun shows. I kinda miss doing them.

The Zero Effect

2010-07-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

I was going through some of my old VHS tapes last night and came across a movie that I haven't watched in several years. Popped it in and found that it was just as good as I remembered it. I am referring to "The Zero Effect"(1998) Written and directed by Jake Kasdan (son of Director Lawrence Kasdan) the movie is a modern-day detective story loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes story "A Scandal In Bohemia". Bill Pullman stars as Daryl Zero, a brilliant but eccentric, and very reclusive detective. Like Sherlock Holmes, he is only truly at his best when working on a case. When not working he secludes himself in his high-security apartment, writes and performs terrible songs, drinking Tab and eating Tuna from a can. Like Holmes, he also has a bit of a drug habit, taking amphetamines to keep his mind "sharp". His "Watson" is operative, associate and front man Steve Arlo (Ben Stiller). They are hired by wealthy businessman Gregory Stark (Ryan O'Neill) ostensibly to find his missing keys, but there is much more to the case than meets the eye and soon Arlo and Zero are immersed in a plot involving rape, murder, and blackmail. The movie is handled with a light and deft touch. The darker material never overwhelms the charm and light comic appeal of the main characters.

There are several things I really like about this film. Number one is Bill Pullman's brilliant performance. I often think of Bill Pullman as a bit of a lightweight in the acting department, but he really delivers the goods in this film. His character is an eccentric, ego-centric and troubled genius who borders on being an asshole, but you never find him to be so obnoxious as to be unappealing, because there is real intelligence, humor and a hint of vulnerability in Pullman's portrayal. His chemistry with Arlo (Ben Stiller, playing it mostly straight for once), is also very good. Much like the relationship between Holmes and Watson, their relationship is a strange male dance of admiration mutual need, and irritation. Like Watson, Arlo has a girlfriend, and she is getting tired of his prolonged absences and strange demands of his job . She thinks their relationship is "weird" and wants Arlo to leave Zero's employ. I couldn't help but make comparisons between the dynamics of this relationship triangle, and the interpretation of the same relationship in the recent "Sherlock Holmes". The relationship between Arlo and Zero actually feels truer to the original source material.

But the real heart of this movie is the developing relationship between Zero, and and the blackmailer Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens). Dickens plays her as a genuine and multi-faceted person, truly admirable in her determination, and intelligence, in spite of the fact that she is a blackmailer. Gloria essentially is the Irene Adler character of the story, and as in the original story, Zero/Holmes develops an admiration and empathy for the blackmailer. Starting as an adversary, Gloria and Daryl slowly develop from an almost offhanded initial meeting, to mutual attraction and respect. This, more than the mechanics of the blackmail plot, is where the film pays off. Their relationship draws Zero temporarily out of his shell, and helps to humanize his character. It is this that makes us care for this eccentric and brilliant man.

This movie came and went at the box office in 1998, and was largely overlooked by audiences, although critics , including Siskel and Ebert gave it "Two thumbs up, way up!".
If you get a chance check it out as a rental or on Netflix. I strongly recommend it.

My Strange Sense of Humor

2010-07-04T09:12:00.001-07:00

As part of the "having fun with drawing" I came up with these sketches. The Cute/Evil idea was the result of noticing the juxtaposition of a German-made Steiff teddy bear, and a model of a WWII German Panzer Tank on my bookcase shelf. They just seemed to go together.
The "Nose of Sauron" came about thinking of replacing the "Eye" in The Lord of the Rings with another body part. You just never know where your mind is going to go.

Drawing for Fun

2010-07-04T08:51:00.000-07:00

You can turn anything into a chore, including drawing. Lately, I have been so focused on drawing for an end purpose, that I forgot about just drawing for fun. Drawing needs to be fun, because when you are having fun with it, your brain comes up with all sorts of odd things, strange connections, and just plain goofiness. Today I was goofing around with an old drawing pad, and just drawing what popped into my head. Nothing great produced, but I was having fun. Kids know how to do this instinctively. Kids don't worry about making great or meaningful art, they just draw. Someone said that "genius is the ability to remember childhood at will". I believe that. Sometimes you just need to forget what people might think, or about producing a "product" and just go with whatever pops into your head. Follow where it leads. You may not come up with anything profound, but if you are enjoying the process, maybe that's not so important.

Miranda (1948)

2010-06-16T08:33:00.001-07:00

As many of you know, I am obsessed with mermaids, and mermaid movies. Since there is a definite scarcity of good mermaid movies, (the abysmal adaptation of Aquamarine being one example of not good) I feel compelled to call attention to a good one when I come across it.
When the movie is an older, British-made, black and white gem, even more.
Which brings me to Miranda.

Miranda was made in 1948, directed by Ken Annakin, who also directed Swiss Family Robinson, the madcap comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and the World War II epic The Longest Day. It is based on a successful stage play by Peter Blackmore, who adapted it for the screenplay.
I have had a soft spot for this story since my high school drama class did a production of the play, which I saw and read. I loved it and was obsessed with seeing the film version, however I was never able to as it is rarely on TV and there are no official DVD versions available in the US, unless you find a DVD-R copy (usually recorded off of a broadcast such at Turner Classic Movies) or can find it online. As it so happens, after much searching, I found it online, so after 30 years I was finally able to see the film. I must say it was worth the wait.

The plot goes something like this...With his wife uninterested in fishing, Dr. Paul Martin (Griffith Jones) goes on holiday to the Cornwall coast by himself. While there fishing, he snags Miranda (Glynis Johns), a real mermaid, and is pulled into the water. He's knocked unconscious, and awakens in her cave. Their first exchange is one of my favorites and sets the tone immediately. When he asks how he got there, she tells him that he "Fell out of his boat"
"Pulled is more like it" he replies.
Without missing a beat she quips "You're a terrible swimmer".
She keeps him prisoner in her underwater cavern and only lets him go after he agrees to show her London. She has always wanted to see Buckingham Palace, Billingsgate Market and most especially, the opera. He disguises her as an invalid patient in a wheelchair and takes her to his home for a month-long stay.

Martin’s wife Clare (Googie Withers) reluctantly agrees to the arrangement, but once she learns that the "patient" is an attractive young woman rather than an elderly one, convinces him to hire someone to look after their guest. He selects Nurse Carey (Margaret Rutherford) for her eccentric nature and takes her into his confidence. To Paul's relief, Carey is delighted to be working for a mermaid.

Miranda’s seductive nature earns her the admiration of not only Paul, but also his chauffeur Charles (David Tomlinson) and Nigel (John McCallum), the fiancé of Clare's friend and neighbour Isobel (Sonia Holm), arousing the jealousy of the women in their lives. Nigel breaks off his engagement, but when he and Charles discover that Miranda has been flirting with both of them, they come to their senses.

Clare finally figures out what sort of creature Miranda really is. Miranda overhears her telling Paul that the public must be told. Since Miranda had a mermaid aunt who was captured and pickled, she wheels herself down to the river and makes her escape.

The movie moves along at a rather brisk pace. Some movies like this spoil themselves by going on too long, if anything this one, at 80 minutes, is too short.

The film's chief asset is its casting. Glynis Johns is simply wonderful as Miranda, and she's a good part of the reason the film succeeds. She later became immortalized in film by playing the mother in Mary Poppins, along with David Tomlinson. She's a joy to watch here, but she's hardly the only one. The film makes excellent use of Googie Withers, as Paul's haughty wife Clare, David Tomlinson as his glum chauffeur, by the chauffeur's girlfriend Betty, also the maid, played by Yvonne Owen, and, especially, Margaret Rutherford as Miranda's eccentric and devoted nurse.

Having been based on a stage play, the film sometimes seems in some ways oddly constrained. Surprisingly little goes into exploiting the story's potential for visual comedy, nor into showing how Miranda fares outside of domestic interiors. For this we get only two short sequences: one in which she gorges on a street-vendor's entire stock of cockles, and the great scene in which she catches a fish in her mouth during feeding time at the zoo. This curious reticence may in part have been dictated by the limiting nature of Johns' prosthetics, though what little we see of her tail (made by Dunlop, according the credits) looks entirely convincing. However, I think this constraint actually adds to its charm. One can only imagine how this could be mucked-up in an American, CGI-laden remake.

Another surprise is the mild, but nevertheless stunning raciness of the film. Miranda is an outrageously flirtatious, nearly-nymphomaniac mermaid, very open about her attraction to men, who likes being kissed, carried and admired. When Clare ponders Miranda's various eccentricities - she sleeps in a cold bath, drinks salt water, eats raw fish sandwiches, the most horrifying is, "she never wears panties!" There is also a scene in which, while out for a night-time drive in the county, Paul and Miranda come across a lake, and take an impromptu, and apparently nude swim. There is also the matter of the final scene of the movie, where, Miranda
is shown on a rock, holding a little merboy on her lap. Where did he come from?
(My guess is from the night-time swim with Paul). Although exceedingly mild by today's standards, this seems incredible in a movie made in 1948!

While watching the film, I couldn't help making the inevitable comparisons with the movies
Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, and Splash, (both favorites of mine) several scenes play in a very similar manner, and both try for the same light tone, but they aren't nearly as charming as this. Miranda retains considerable charm and novelty, and was successful enough to prompt a sequel, Mad About Men (1954).
Miranda is not a perfect film by any means, mostly due to it's short length and cheap rear projections in some outdoor scenes, but I haven't been so delighted by a film in a long time.

I am hoping that someone will give this semi-obscure gem a decent DVD release.
Is anyone at Criterion listening?

Figurehead Carving

2010-06-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

One other reason I have been lacking in posts for the last month or so (besides being really easily distracted by shiny things) is that I have been doing things for the new England Pirate Faire, billboards (see last post) updating their website, and making props. I was called upon to make a full-sized figurehead of Sir Francis Drake, an English "Sea Hawk" or privateer, who fought the Spanish on behalf of Queen Elizabeth. This was no easy task, as I had never made anything quite like this before, had no idea where to start, and only had about a week to figure it out. I do love a challenge.
After doing some research on figureheads and Sir Francis, I very quickly ruled out wood for several reasons 1. It would be too heavy, 2. it would take too long to work it, 3. It would be too expensive. So what material could be cheaply and locally purchased, would be sturdy enough to stand up to some mild abuse for 2 weekends of outdoor pirate-faire adventure, and could be easily carved? Answer: Blue insulation foam. You know the stuff you use to insulate new construction on houses. I had heard of people carving Mardi-Gra sculptures and theatrical scenery out of foam. The blue stuff was dense, lightweight and readily available. Luckily, I have a good friend who is a carpenter and not only has a workshop in Gloucester, but a great deal of know-how about tools and construction materials. We purchased (5) 8'x2'x1.5" sheets of blue foam, a tube of adhesive and a role of rosin paper.

We cut the sheets of foam in half and glued them together into a block. This gave us a roughly 2' x 2' by 4' block.
We then drew a rough outline of the figurehead onto the front surface of the block.
Then it was time to start carving.

Originally I was planning on using an electric carving knife, like you would use to carve a turkey. But my friend Micah, (the carpenter), was using a nifty little device called a Rockwell SoniCrafter on a remodeling job, and suggested it for carving the foam. It worked like a dream. The SoniCrafter, has a short serrated blade that oscillates back and forth in a short arc at about 20,000 OPM. That means it cut the foam like soft butter.

There was a lot of carving and a lot of blue "dust" small particles of blue foam that got everywhere, and clung to everything. Another difficulty was making sure that the blade did not bite too deep into the foam.

I was able to rough out most of the figure on the second day.

After two days of carving the figure was largely done. It was a process of refining and adding in detail. My original plan was to only use the foam as a foundation and cover the entire piece with paper maché. I thought this would allow for more detail, and also "seal" the foam panels. I found however, that this step was largely unnecessary on everything but the face and a few surface details. I also had to make the head removable. (for reasons that were crucial to the plot of the faire scenario)

This is how the sculpture looked at the end of the third day.

Next came the painting. My friend Dave and I primed the entire sculpture with white acrylic paint. We then filled all the crevasses with black paint, both to outline all the surface details and fill any deep cracks. Then we covered the entire thing with a coat of brown acrylic, to give it depth and the look of real wood in any areas that were not painted in a color.

The color scheme was influenced by traditional color schemes that appear on some figureheads in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum. Here is the final appearance of the figurehead.

What I've Been Up To...

2010-06-11T06:39:00.000-07:00

To the few people who actually follow my blog, I would like to apologize for a lack of entries for pretty much the entire month of May...but I have an excuse as I have been busy working on several projects for the New England Pirate Faire, which opens June 19, including a billboard!. Yes, art fans, my artwork writ large on a 12 foot by 24 foot billboard on Route One in Saugus, MA. The design went through several revisions before the final, in-your-face version. If you are driving into Boston, take a look, it is on the northbound side of the highway just past Kappy's Liquors. And hopefully we'll see you at the faire! Arrrgh!

Watercolor Portrait of Amy

2010-04-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, after a busy week of work, my wife and I packed up a picnic lunch and a blanket and traveled up to Maudsley State Park in Newburyport, MA, to commune with nature and enjoy the great weather. We found a nice little grove of pines and spread out our blanket and lay down under the trees and sky . It was sunny, clear and warm and you could look up at the sky and be perfectly comfortable. I brought along my Windsor Newton watercolor kit, and did a quick watercolor sketch of my wife. She said its the best likeness I've done of her so far. I'll let you be the judge.

Some Recent Illustration Work 2008-2010

2010-04-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

More Illustration work from the last two years. Some of this has already been posted elsewhere, but it's nice to have it all together in one place.

Some Recent Design Work 2008-2010

2010-04-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

I realized recently that I haven't updated my website in almost 2 years. (I've been meaning to get to that) This is both good, (because I have been busy) and bad, because I have almost 2 years of work that isn't viewable online. So I thought I would post some of my work highlights in a somewhat down-and-dirty way. These will eventually appear on the revamped website, hopefully within the next few weeks, but for now, here they are.

The apple didn't fall far from that tree...

2010-03-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

People often ask me where I got the art talent from. I would have to say I inherited it from my father. My father drew a lot when he was younger. He drew lots of things, portraits, landscapes, cartoons. But he always seemed to be most fascinated by machinery, aircraft, cars, ships. He aspired to become an architect. He worked for Stone & Webster Engineering in Boston as a file clerk making, filing and sorting blueprints and operating their photostat machine before he enlisted as a marine in 1942. He married my mother in 1944, and they started a family. His plans to become an architect were shelved, and after the war he got a job as an equipment installer for New England Bell (the phone company) and worked for them for 45 years. He never really drew after that. One of my prize possessions is a drawing that my father did back in 1937, when he was 17 or 18 years old. It is his design for his 1937 dream-car. It is interesting to note that although the the car has many of the same features , it looks more like something from the 50's than from 1937, when cars still mostly looked like this.

It makes me wonder what sort of career he might have had if WWII and family hadn't intervened.

Old School

2010-03-11T09:54:00.000-08:00

The other day I was clearing off some shelves when I found 2 boxes of black and white illustrations I had done at my first job after college. My first job was for a newspaper publisher located in Ipswich , MA called North Shore Weeklies. I started there as an $6-an-hour paste-up "artist".
For those of you too young to remember, this was before computers, and we had to physically cut and paste the ads and pages for the various newspapers. All the type was set on an old linotype typesetting machine, in long continuous sheets that we then waxed the back of, (with hot wax) cut into pieces and pasted on a sheet of grid paper, lined with non-photo blue guidelines. We had to place the type by eye, and we added in the decorative borders with border tape. Any artwork was shot on a stat camera with a screen overlay, so that the continuous tones of a black and white photo would be turned into a series of small black dots of varying size and intensity. This was called making a "Photo-mechanical transfer". It was very labor intensive, and there was a whole back shop of people, hunched over desks like modern day Bob Cratchits, waxing, cutting, and pasting, the people in the camera department were shooting PMTs and then shooting the finished pages, which were then chemically "burned" onto metal plates, which were then fitted onto the press. These are things that would take 5 seconds on a computer today, but back then, it took hours to put together a simple black and white publication.
After several months laboring in the 'back shop" I was promoted to the "front office" position of "Graphic Artist". I still did paste-up, but now I did special projects, which included producing illustrations for several regular newspaper columns. One was a guest editorial column called "Sitting In", which ran in the North Shore Sunday weekend paper. The other was a guest recipe/cooking column called "Kitchen Call"
The reason I keep going on about all of this is that I developed an illustration technique that was specifically adapted to these production methods.
I would receive a manuscript for the article on either Monday or Tuesday of the production week. The newspaper was assembled and printed on Thursday night, and distributed on Friday for that weekend. This means I had about two and a half days to come up with a finished illustration. Usually I would read the manuscript and do some rough pencil thumbnails of any ideas that came to mind. The columns ranged a variety of subjects, everything from politics, to humor, to slice-of-life. The illustrations were always the same size and format, a 25 x24 pica box. After I had settled on 2 or 3 ideas, I would discuss what I had in mind with the editor. This was a guy named Greg Bean. He was from Wyoming originally, and was very laid-back. He pretty much let me do whatever I wanted, as long as it wasn't too off-the-wall. I didn't appreciate this until much later.
Once I had the idea approved, I would gather whatever reference I could get my hands on. Remember, this is before the internet, so I used magazines, and a series of printed art reference books that the newspaper subscribed to. I would do a final sketch in pencil.

At this point I needed to render the drawing in a medium that would photograph well, such as black ink. After trying a variety of traditional pen and ink techniques, including using just line, or solid areas of black and white, (see examples above) I happened upon my own technique.

Instead of working in non-photo blue and inking the drawing directly, I covered the pencil drawing with a sheet of thick tracing vellum and inked onto the vellum. The vellum was thick enough, so that if I made a mistake with the ink, I could scratch it out with an exacto knife. I could also add texture to the drawing the same way, by scratching the surface. I also found that I could add shading to the drawing with pencil. I used a very soft, very black pencil.

Once the drawing was finished, I would tape it to a piece of white paper, write the exposure directions for the stat camera operator, and send it off to be made into a Photo-Mechanical Transfer. (see picture above) The PMT had a tendency to gray out all of the tones. You got fairly rich blacks, but no true whites. When reproduced on newsprint, this made the drawings appear to be very gray, and low contrast.

I remedied this by cutting the surface of the PMT, actually removing the surface of the paper so that it would appear as pure white. This gave the illustrations their "sparkle". If you look closely at the image on the left you can see where I cut away the paper on the hippie's beard, the rest of the image has a dot pattern.

Although at the time, I felt these efforts were under-appreciated ( I was not paid any extra for producing the illustrations) I eventually won a NEPA, (New England Press Association) award for editorial illustration, which to date is the only award I have ever received for illustration.
I now marvel at the level of productivity, ingenuity and willingness to do something for the sheer thrill-of-it, that I had in my early twenties. It was a great time, and I didn't even realize it.

Portrait of Amy

2010-02-19T16:02:00.001-08:00

A small (5"x7") acrylic on canvas board portrait that I did of my wife Amy based on an old photograph that I took while we were dating. I thought the lettering on the bottle (which is raised on the glass of the bottle) was appropriate.

Drawing with Ham

2010-02-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

Last night my wife Amy asked me to do a few drawings of her. This is part of her ongoing encouragement to keep drawing as much as possible in spite of the distractions of running my own graphic design business, e-mail, the internet, Facebook, etc. It has been a while since I have drawn from life, and years ago in art school I came up with a phrase that describes how it feels to get back to drawing after a prolonged absence..picking up a pencil or brush feels like you are "drawing with a ham". It refers to the inability to get the brush or pencil to go where you want, and do what you want, becoming as awkward as using a ham, a large block of meat, to draw with. Above you can see my four drawings of my lovely wife. You might think by looking at them that it is a drawing of four different people. Each was done in about 10 minutes. She asked me to first do the first one in lead pencil in a "realistic" style (1). The second was supposed to be done in my "George" fine-line ink style (2), the third in a looser brush style (3), and the final in a cartoony, Tim-Burton-esque style (3). Although they all contain accurate bits of what she looks like, and capture certain distinctive features, what is interesting to note is that the more cartoony the style got, the more it started to actually look like Amy. To me this shows that loosening up, actually frees up expression. I have a constant struggle finding a happy balance between the labor of rendering, and the freedom of expression. Drawing from life, which I don't do nearly enough, is one key to expression that is "alive", the other, is just having fun, loosening up and forgetting what you think something is supposed to look like, and just letting your right brain take over.

STC-Later Life- FINAL

2010-01-29T13:19:00.000-08:00

Back again. Round 3. After showing the color sketches to the director, he felt that the image was a little too realistic, and as a result had lost some of it's sketchy charm. I had to agree with him. This sometimes happens when you work and rework an image. It gets more detailed and refined, but it also loses some of its energy. The word used was to describe the last round was "clinical". Not what you hope for. So now I have the challenge of pulling back and loosening up the image. The director also felt that he wanted to punch up the humor a bit as the title and the subject matter could lead people to think it could be a bit of a drag. So I also need to "up" the comic eccentricity of the image without losing the romance, or messing up the basic composition. I find that when I get to this point I need to get into a more left-brain kind of mood. Since I have a tendency to gravitate towards careful rendering, I can achieve this by physically warming up, working fast and in a medium that is loose by nature, i.e. paint, as opposed to pen and ink, brush as opposed to pen. It also helps if I have a little bit of wine...

Here is my initial attempt to rework the image in a looser, more cartoony style.

Here is the finished, or I should say, almost finished final artwork. We'll see how the client likes it before I say it is completely finished.

Well, the client ultimately did not like the final artwork, and decided to shoot their own photography to illustrate the play. Although disappointing, it's OK, as I will still be designing the final poster using their image, and I got paid. I still think that the original version (before the addition of the cartoon-ey foreground figures) worked well. Oh well, no one said illustration was easy. For myself, I painted the foreground figures out of the final painting, re-scanned it, and cropped the final image. (This was my favorite part of the image anyway). Here is the final result.

STC LATER LIFE Poster-UPDATE

2010-01-15T14:54:00.000-08:00

I am currently doing some work for the Salem Theatre Company. One of the projects is the development of a graphic image for A.R. Gurney's play LATER LIFE.
The play deals with upscale, wasp-ish characters who have a second chance at a missed romance.
LATER LIFE is set in the early 1990s, on the terrace of a high-rise apartment building overlooking Boston Harbor and takes place on an early September evening. The two main characters are a middle-aged couple named Austin and Ruth who have an opportunity to get re-acquainted at a cocktail party given by a mutual friend (Sally); They had met long ago, in Capri, but Austin had not risked pursuing a romance with Ruth, as he harbors a secret fear that something terrible is going to happen to him. As they meet again, Austin has led a life perpetually "on hold" avoiding risks, but avoiding opportunities as well, and Ruth is stuck in an unhappy marriage. They attempt to rekindle their aborted romance but are interrupted throughout the evening by Sally and assorted guests who wander out onto the terrace.

The director expressed a desire that the feeling of the graphic should be sophisticated, and charming, reminiscent of a New Yorker cover. The focus on the couple, not on the secondary characters, or the setting, and he wanted to convey both the longing of the characters for a second chance, and the tentative manner of Austin. I did a quick thumbnail of the image he was talking about.

I did some research, and assembled some images of balconies, Boston Harbor, Nineties fashion, and middle-aged couples. I also looked at New Yorker covers both online and in a book called Covering The New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers From A Literary Institution.

I worked up some simple black and white line drawings containing the basic elements that needed to be present, the couple, a balcony and some indication of the Boston harbor and skyline.

I didn't need to be too literal with the interpretation. You rarely have the actors cast before the image must be completed, so capturing a general feeling is better than specific details, although I did toy with the idea of including images of historic disasters, to convey Austin's underlying fear of impending doom.

Here are the first sketches:

I was trying to capture a mood, mostly through the body language of the two characters.
I was also trying out some type treatments, and orientations. Although vertical works best for most print, poster/flyer combinations, a horizontal orientation seems to work best for the web. I wanted to see if one image could be adapted to both orientations.
Then there was the question of style. There were so many to choose from in the case of the New Yorker, everything from the loose sketchy style of Edward Sorel, the whimsy of Peter de Séve, the crosshatching line of R. Crumb, to the stylized painterly realism of Owen Smith, and everything in-between. I decided that the loose sketchy style of Edward Sorel, who did many New Yorker covers in the mid-nineties, would be best for this particular subject matter. This leads to the second set of sketches.

As you can see I have infused some feeling and style into the sketches, refining the couple's body language and adding some color. I have also added in the typeface (AT Handle Oldstyle)which is very similar in look to the New Yorker font. This is where I am currently in the process. I will post more as I refine the sketches into the finished graphic/illustration.

Well I'm back for the next step. The initial sketch was approved, so I gathered together my photo reference. My wife loves vintage clothing, and happened to have a lovely 90's-era dress that she was kind enough to model for me, and I still own a sportcoat from the 90's, so we dressed up and shot pictures of each other in the basic poses that I was looking for using a digital camera. These two images were taken in our kitchen.

I then used these images, as well as other reference for furniture, rugs, wine glasses, etc. to do the final black and white line drawing.

The next thing to do, was to work out the final colors in a marker sketch.

This is the last step before I transfer the image to illustration board and create the final, final version of the artwork.

Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky

2010-01-06T13:48:00.000-08:00

I was intending to make posts about movies here on my blog, but realized I have only mentioned them in passing. Although I love movies, I rarely see any that are good enough (or bad enough) to be post-worthy. However, I received a DVD of Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky for Christmas, and I just had to post about it, since it is a movie that I haven't seen in over 30 years. Jabberwocky came out in 1977. I was a junior in high school and working part-time at the Strand Theater in Ipswich, MA, as an usher. Jabberwocky was one of the movies that played at the theater while I was working there, and like many of the films I saw that year, including Star Wars, made a huge impact on me.

This often neglected first solo directing effort of Gilliam's is certainly much better than its maligned reputation would have you believe. It is strange little movie, loosely inspired by Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky" . It has 2 other Monty Python alum ( Terry Jones and Michael Palin) appearing in it besides Terry Gilliam, who appears in a cameo, however although it is Python-esque it is not a Python movie.

It concerns the medieval adventures of one Dennis Cooper who, disowned by his father and seeking to make his fortune, travels to the nearby kingdom of Bruno the Questionable and through a series of misfortunes, becomes squire to a knight being sent out to fight the legendary monster (the Jabberwock) that is threatening the entire kingdom. The movie is dark, dirty, satirical and funny. It was the first movie I saw about the middle ages, that actually looked like the middle ages.Visually it seems inspired by Heironymous Bosch. There is garbage, dirt, excrement, blood, nudity, casual mutilation, and lots of bad teeth. You can practically smell the movie. This movie introduced me to the comic sensibilities and visual style of Terry Gilliam.

It was interesting seeing the film again. I hadn't seen it since I worked at the theater,( it took forever to find a copy on DVD). It was pretty much as I remembered it, although I definitely appreciate the humor even more now. The things I remembered and were happy to re-connect with were Dennis's unpleasant girlfriend, a cheeky squire who gets crushed under the bed of his mistress, a cheerful beggar with a severed foot, a beautiful but delusional princess, the Jaws-like attacks of the Jabberwock and the gysers of blood from jousting knights, that cover the king and the princess as they watch. The cast is littered with a veritable whos who of British comedians and character actors, including some who show up in other Gilliam films such as Time Bandits, and Brazil. I realize that this film, which did not get a wide release, and was pretty much panned outside of Europe, is probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I loved it, and recommend it to anyone who likes the Middle Ages, Monty Python and Terry Gilliam.

Children's Book

2010-01-05T11:56:00.000-08:00

Welcome back from the holiday break! It's 2010! Here are some rough sketches, thumbnails and a final pencil drawing for the cover of the children's book that my wife Amy and I are working on. We took some time over the holidays to work out the page thumbnails. The next step is to make the book dummy and prepare 2 finished illustrations to send along with the manuscript. This is going to take a while, but I'll post more as the work progresses.

Clever Self Promo Ad

2009-12-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

I don't usually post stuff from other blogs on here, but in this case I'm going to make an exception, because this one was both effective, and made me laugh. It is a self promotional ad for a creative agency (McCann Erickson) that decided to bring the ultimate argument in "who rules in logo design" to the table.The link is here: http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print/mccann_erickson_jes

LOGO development: Christ The Rock Fellowship

2009-12-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

Here is a logo-design project I finished recently. A logo for a church in Worcester, MA. The process took a couple of months. The client said they preferred a square logo and wanted it to contain the basic motifs of the cross, some interpretation of "the rock" and the look of either in color or in shape, of the churches stained-glass windows. Here are my initial sketches. I like sketching out ideas with pen and paper before I get into working it on the computer. I think it gives you a better feel for the logo, and keeps you from getting locked in to a particular font or color too soon. You can see that I came up with the basic workable idea in the first round of sketches.

Here is a photo of one of the churches' windows.

The next step was to refine the sketches, as you can see, I had the name wrong on the initial sketches, it was "Christ the Rock Fellowship", not "Christ of the Rock Church"
I tried a variety of colors, and used some fonts that I though would be good choices given the church is a fairly conservative entity.

Although the client's stated preference was for a square logo, I felt that a more horizontal orientation could also work, and included it in the first round.
The following rounds were refinements in font choice, color, and the relationships between the component elements.

The client had trouble choosing between the square version and the more linear version, and asked me to refine both of them.

This is the final round. The client decided that they really liked both of the logos, and wanted to use both of them for different applications.

Henry Hudson and the Mermaid-Work in Progress

2009-12-10T09:59:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I was reading about the English explorer Henry Hudson. (You know, he "discovered" Manhattan, the Hudson River and Hudson Bay are both named after him) I was surprised by a couple of things, one, that he disappeared in Hudson Bay after his crew mutinied and set him, his son, and a few loyal men adrift in a small open boat, that his remains were never found, and that in 1608, while sailing near Norway, he wrote in his logbook:

"This morning one of our companie looking over the boord saw a Mermaid...from Navill upward her back and breasts were like a woman's, her body as big as one of us; her skin was very white; and long haire hanging down behind, of color black; in her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a porposse and speckled like a Macrell."

Hudson was one of few historical figures to not only site a mermaid but to make an entry of it in his log. This gave me an idea for a painting. So as soon as I read this I did a couple of small thumbnail drawings.

The first one was just to get the idea down. On the second one I started thinking more about the individual elements, composition, and lighting, making written notations on the thumbnail.The next step was research, collecting reference sailing images of ships of the period, costume, Henry Hudson, the Norwegian coastline, waves, mackerals and porpoises. Once I had that gathered I did a more finished drawing in pencil and marker to work out basic layout, lighting and colors.

As you can see the original sketch is pretty loose, and is much wider than I had originally planned. I was playing around at this stage with the size relationship between the mermaid and the ship. I wanted her to be close enough to the viewer to dominate the foreground, but not so large that you couldn't still make out the man on board the ship who is seeing her. At this point I did a more refined compositional and color study. I was also trying to decide at this point if I should include the text of the log entry in the painting itself, which would have made it a very narrow and vertically oriented painting. (I decided against it)

The final step, was to get the painting onto a panel. I used a 12" x 24" gessoed masonite panel.I drew in the image based on the sketches. As I was working , I decided to make the mermaid even larger than it appears on the sketch. I started with a just 2 colors, manganese blue and burnt sienna, roughing in the largest areas.

This is where I am at now. I will work in more detail and color as I go. I will post my progress as I go.

Here is the latest update on the painting...

Nemo's Daughter

2009-12-03T17:02:00.001-08:00

A painting that I finished a while ago, that is in the "Nemo" theme. I always thought that Nemo should have a daughter. In the otherwise execrable 1997 version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Nemo (Michael Caine) does have one, (Mia Sara) and I liked how it played. The painting is my own version of what she might look like. Oddly enough the latest issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1910 largely concerns the death of Nemo and the reluctant succession of his daughter as captain of the Nautilus.

Character Sketches

2009-11-30T14:49:00.000-08:00

Here are some character sketches for a children's book I have been working on, "Piewacket, Ship's Cat of Salem". My wife Amy wrote the story, and she has been trying to get me to illustrate it for months. The story is about a ship's cat on board the Friendship, an early 19th century merchant ship that sailed from Salem, to Sumatra and other ports of call in southeast Asia, to trade for pepper and other spices. It was not uncommon for ships to have a ship's cat, in order to keep the rats and mice from eating or destroying the cargo. The cat in the story is based on our own cat Piewacket, who is a very large Russian Gray. The story is finished, but the artwork is definitely a work-in-progress. The top sketch is of the two main characters, Piwacket the cat, and Thomas, the cabin boy. Below are sketches for the Captain, a ship's rat, the Farmer, who brings the cat to the Friendship, and the First Mate.

Sketching

2009-11-24T08:38:00.001-08:00

Anyone who has known me for any amount of time, realizes that I hardly ever leave home without a tiny sketchpad and a pen. Most of my drawing for the last few years has been done in a series of small memo books 4.25" x 2.75", filled with plain white paper.
The size is unobtrusive, and will fit in almost any pocket nicely, and can travel anywhere. I have always liked drawing small anyway. I buy plain white paper memo pads from CVS and cut them to size.

I also use the best pen ever made, it is a Mitsubishi UM-151, a uniball pen with extremely black, nearly-waterproof, archival ink and a .028" tip. They are not available at your local stationary store and had to be ordered from Japan through Jetpens.com. I covet these pens, and love drawing with them.

I will also sometimes carry a small Windsor Newton watercolor kit, which is compact, self-contained, and very versatile. That means I can do small, quick sketches almost anywhere.

Here are some sketches that I did recently of the Iris Apfel show at the Peabody Essex Museum using this method.

Naughty and Nice

2009-11-24T06:31:00.000-08:00

Here is a poster I just completed for the Salem Theatre Company. It is for their Christmas Repertory show, Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales" (NICE) and "The Eight:The Reindeer Monologues" (NAUGHTY). The challenge was to come up with an attention-getting poster/image that would represent both shows without being offensive,
or misleading. Since everyone I know is having a difficult time financially this year, I thought that the lump of coal in the stocking image was appropriate. I just wish I had put "AIG" or "Wall Street" on the stocking.

20,000 Leagues

2009-11-21T08:54:00.000-08:00

I have always been a big fan of Disney's 1954 film version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I don't think there have been any subsequent versions that can touch it in terms of performance; James Mason's elegant and tortured Nemo, or in terms of production design; Harper Goff's design for the Nautilus is still a marvel 55 years later. I was able to see a technicolor print of the movie on the big screen at the Harvard Film Archive last year, and it still holds up remarkably well. My obsession with this movie finds its way into sketches, doodles and an occasional painting. Here is a color sketch that I did recently of Nemo on the Nautilus. It might end up as a painting someday.

Graphic Novel Anyone?

2009-11-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

Some work in my "not paying now but maybe someday" category. Some thumbnails for a page from a proposed graphic novel about WWI-era subchasers. Wooden fore-runners of the PT boat that were built specifically to hunt and destroy Nazi subs.

Latest Project

2009-11-17T09:29:00.000-08:00

Finally getting around to starting a blog. Thought i would start with my latest work, a poster for the Mugford Street Players production of "The Trip to Bountiful" at the Little Theatre (Firehouse) in Marblehead. It was done in watercolor on illustration board. The original is about 11x17.