Christmas post

Happy holidays! Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Haven't really done much with the sketchbook action, but here was a quick thing that I did. It's not exactly a sketchbook piece, but it's in the same vein as the birthday card stuff. It's a quick Christmas card I did in Illustrator for my three nephews. I know it's not hand-drawn, but I wanted it to have that construction paper cutout feel when I worked on it in the computer. I definitely had the most fun working on their scarves and "teeth."

Birthday Card Series 1

I started sending out birthday cards this year. Here's a recent one. It's filled with "happy birthday" in different languages, but in trying to fill up the page and fitting the words against the "happy birthday old lady" lettering, I didn't even bother trying to make them legible. The letters from happy to birthday to old lady gets thinner and thinner by a happy accident. I should have just lied and said I did this on purpose. Also, my apologies to the person I sent this to; the card wasn't this long so I had to distort the image when I printed it!! I'm sorry!

The box office is drooling & the barstools are on fire

Here's another yet another Tom Waits fixation of mine. I wanted to make the smoke coming out of his cigarettes into words, but it just ends up looking like a really bad psychedelic poster knockoff. Which would be okay if Waits was part of that San Francisco scene from a decade before. I believe I drew the image from a photo of him from around '74, when he was still steeped in his lounge lizard beatnik persona (my favorite era of Tom's...he made much more interesting music later on but the songs from this era are the closest to my heart). The words are from his song "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)".

Magic Post-It Notes that keep you from going insane

As a production artist, I was in front of a computer for hours doing work on Illustrator and InDesign. Which wouldn't be so bad if you were doing something more than boring, mechanical production work. One of the few things that kept me from falling asleep at work was drawing on post it notes. Usually what I would do is just take whatever was lying around on my desk and deconstruct it. After seeing slick logotypes and strict grid structures on the computer all day, the best remedy for me was not only doing hand drawing, but also the deconstruction. These post-its experiments were crucial for me because they led me to starting the work on my sketchbooks. These two are my favorite in particular: cigarette boxes.

Parliament:












Marlboro:

Alphabet I - Script/Sans

I was just playing around with hand lettering an alphabet and I came up with this: A script intertwining with a really badly drawn sans serif.

HOT (prosthetic) LEGS!!

This is one of my favorite impromptu assignments. In my spring '07 experimental type class we were having a discussion at the start of class. One of my classmates mentioned reading Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, which had mislabeled as Hot Invalids. Our teacher thought that would make a great assignment and told us to come up with something for the following week. So here was what I came up with. Sorry for the crumpled quality of the scan. For some reason I left that piece of paper in my bag for so long and just pasted it recently into my sketchbook.

Making the best out of boring signage

I had the unfortunate luck of having to sit in an outlet parking lot for four hours during Black Friday. Being too far in the middle of the parking to actually do any people watching, all I had to look at were some really banal store fronts all around me. Fortunately, they do make some pretty interesting shadows. I like the "food court" and "movado" ones best.

The Art Poster

I was reading about the Art Nouveau chapter in Richard Hollis's Graphic Design: A Concise History; so I decided to have a bit of fun with all the letterforms I found in the books posters.

Oh that Massimo...

This was a response to a Massimo Vignelli lecture at FIT in November of 2006. Vignelli is a staunch modernist, who called the post modernist movement a "disease." So in response, I took apart his mission statement, which says "I like design to be semantically correct, syntactically consistent, and pragmatically understandable. I like it to be visually powerful, intellectually elegant, and above all, timeless."

7 train fun

Here's another one I did on a train ride; this time a particularly long 7 train commute.

Send me off to bed forever more...

Here's a drawing of Tom Wait's silhouette along with the words to "Tango Til They're Sore." It didn't really come out the way I wanted it to; the words don't look like extensions of the branch. Instead they look like some weird leaves. I posted greyscale, black and white, and a vectorized image 'cus I wasn't sure which looked better, but if for some reason I get some comments I'll edit the post.

Greyscale:















Black & White:















Vector:

Go your own way? Taken by the sky?? what's with all the Fleetwood Mac?!?!?

This is the first in a series of what I guess I'll call the "subway series" (how original, huh?). Whenever I get bored and want to pass the time, I'll just start drawing all kinds of letterforms in my sketchbook; either I start making them up as I go along or I look all around and find whatever I can see and copy them. In this case, it's a combination of both. I was at the DMV waiting for my sister and was listening to some Fleetwood Mac and just started jotting down whatever lyrics I was hearing. I'm trying too hard to get an Ed Fella feel.

What the hell is a milkfish?

What's going on, humans? Now you're asking yourself: what the hell is a milkfish? According to google, a milkfish (chanos chanos) is an important food fish in Southeast Asia and is the sole living species in the family Chanidae. In tagalog, it is known as bangus and is a common food to pinoys. Now you're asking yourself: why the hell do I need to know that? You don't. I'm just trying to fill up your time with factoids.

Anyway, I'm gonna be using this blog to post the stuff that's in my sketchbook. I'm obsessed with letterforms of al kinds and I like to draw them to no end. Train signage, advertisements, street signs, newspaper headlines, magazine mastheads, storefronts, graffiti, etc. So here's a sampling. The fish is composed of the words milk and fish in different languages. That is, if you can read them.