Monday, August 31, 2009

Revisions and new stuff

It's been a productive week here. I've been trying to finish up the last of these summer spots.

First things first,
I was unhappy with my Master and Margarita spot:

so I went with a simpler method and revised it to this:

While I still like some qualities of the first one, I think the simplicity needed to be stressed for the intended size of this piece.

If you took a look at the site in the past few days, you may have seen a new fish floating around:

which I then attempted to make into a book cover with the following steps:


(and while I find that last step to be very clean, it just wasn't "me" enough,
so I re-did the type by hand, and changed to a more consistent color scheme:


And finally, a new spot about the decline in honey bees, now speculatively attributed to a string of viruses:

and the final:


More to come soon, I'm sure.
Have a good night :)

Friday, August 7, 2009

Summer Spots with Progress

Here's the first batch of our 8-spot summer homework.

I'll start with somewhat of an illustration no-no. I came up with the image first and then assigned a suitable topic to it.

Here are the sketches:
guns

and the final:


In the end I decided it was a spot about gun control...sure.

A couple of these just focus on a single author or book, as opposed to an idea or article.
The first story is "The Turn of the Screw" by american author Henry James. The story takes place at an estate in England, and features a governess who's duty is to protect her students from a pair of ghosts (the student's former caretakers).
The idea is pretty straightforward here:
turn of the screw sketches


Another book I've chosen is "The Master and Margarita" by Maikhail Bulgakov.
The novel is metaphorically anti-communist, in which the devil appears in Russia, accompanied by his minions (the most prominent of which is a large black cat), and wreaks general havoc. I started with the idea of a satanic communist cat and this thing pretty much drew itself.

cat sketch


This last one is my favorite so far.
It's about Marcel Proust's series "In Search of Lost Time/ Remembrance of Things Past", particularly the first book, "Swann's Way". The entire story takes place within the narrator's memory of his childhood home village, which is summoned by the taste of a familiar tea cake. Once again, it's a pretty straight-forward metaphor:

proust sketch
which became:
proust final

and finally, with a digitally-added background color,


More soon.