Some Recent Work for STC

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

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.