relationship status:
The Folio Society edition of The Postman Always Rings Twice is out now. I got my copies last month and the binding came out beautifully. Check it out if you’re into pulp tales of crime and passion, or it’s one sentence description of sadomasochism that made it the “50 Shades of Grey” of the 1930s.
A new piece for The Atlantic about the future of mapping. The AD wanted a retro sci-fi look, so I was channeling a Kirby-esque cityscape. I wanted to do something with crystals projecting maps and directions and people wearing silver bodysuits, but I think that was TOO retro sci-fi.
Set phasers to “sexy”
A new piece for The Washingon Post about Star Trek and the world of fanfiction. You can read the article here.
A quick piece for last Sunday’s Op-Ed by Susan Jacoby about the sacrifices the author’s father (and other fathers) made working during the 1960s. The art director was Aviva Michaelov, who forwarded me a very nice letter from the author after it was printed :D
Another Mars piece! This one for The Atlantic about the future of martian colonization. The article was an interview with an enterprenuer who represents some investors that are beginning a company built around mining asteroids and future living on Mars. I thought it was pretty funny how flippant he was in addressing the idea of manned travel / colonization of another world.
Some of you may have seen a bit of this when I posted about it on my Instagram between pictures of my trials and errors or reteaching myself to cook after 6 years without a stove or oven. This was a concept for a client that ultimately got rejected. And while I am a little bummed out that I don’t get to finish this (on a professional level at least), I certainly don’t blame them for rejecting it. It was one of those cases where I got a little ahead of myself and started stacking concept on top of concept until finally the outcome was so abstracted from the original idea that it was unintelligible. But hey, it happens. And at least I got to draw hands and robots and moths.
I should also point out that these are by no means the final colors. They were just there to help show the client the separations and transparencies and see how they played off of each other. And while honestly I kind of like it the way it is, I hope I get some time in the near future to wrap this up with a little more finesse than what we have here.
EDIT | It was pointed out to me by a friend how similar this illustration is to one that Paul Pope did for DKNY. Which is actually pretty funny and coincidental, considering I have had Pope on the brain of recent since I mentioned him in the post with the Batman drawing and in anticipation of One Trick Rip-Off: Deep Cuts being released. It is bizarre what sort of imagery your brain will store away into your subconscious for safe keeping.
I have been working on this here and there over the last week or so, as a wind-down from my “day” job. This started out as kind of an odd exercise that I think I will call “Kitchen Sink Illustration”. Basically the desktop of my computer is full of….well, shit. Reference pictures, website, stickies with quotes, tax information, unfiled invoices, MP3’s, Wii game ROMS, photoshop palettes that I didn’t know where else to put, etc. So I took everything that was even slightly interesting on there, and just started using it as reference and inspiration to draw basically just to pass time and not put too much thought into what I was actually doing. Think of it like cleaning out your fridge, and making an omelet out of everything that hasn’t melted into a science experiment yet.
This was also an opportunity for me to try out some things I have been messing around with in Photoshop. Masking layers, dithered gradients, noise overlays…just a bunch of stuff I really never got a grasp on before now, or at least never got to use to any real extent. I still have no idea what I am doing most of the time, but it seems to work out on the back end.
So, thanks to everyone I inadvertently ripped off in the making of this. You guys gave me a much needed break from drawing mobsters and methamphetamine addicts over the last few weeks.
