Birthday Card Series part 2

Megaphone Blast

Here's a quick sketch I did the other day while taking a break from getting my portfolio together.

Fuse/Sawblade

This one was one of the harder assignments from my Typography class last spring. The teacher brought 4 different manila envelopes for picking. Each envelope contained 2 random, seemingly unconnected items. When it got time to picking our envelopes, what I got was a fuse and a small sawblade. The assignment was as follows: make something and bring it the following week.As easy as that sounds, it wasnt. It was a little hard to think outside the box at first. I scanned both items into the computer and literally tried to make "things" out of them. All I could think of was making the blade an arm of some sort and the fuse as its joint. I spent a long time just trying making shapes but it felt like all I was doing was making tinkertoys. Finally, I came up with two spiralling patterns: one circular spiral and another triangular. During critique I mentioned that I liked the circular one, but everyone agreed that the triangular one was more dynamic and therefore more successful.

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: