Poster Fun

Making a new poster for a fundraiser event, to be put on by Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, featuring home cooked comfort food and musical performances. I didn't take the photos used, but I did do the graphic design and finished illustration. The idea was to evoke the old Norman Rockwell covers from The Saturday Evening Post, in style and mood. I'm pleased with the results. It does indeed evoke Rockwell.


(Click on image for larger view.)

I'm told that the guys modeling for the photo shoot also got to enjoy eating the props afterwards. Lucky guys!

The logo for the poster was my idea, and it was a fun piece to pull together. I found a typeface that closely matches the one used for the old magazine, then added the musical elements to evoke the nature of the event. So far the feedback has been all positive.

Meanwhile, hope some friends can come to the event. Not only will it be lots of fun, with lots of good food: I am premiering a new song that I recently finished writing.

Heartlands Concert Poster

(Click on image for larger version.)

This is the official concert poster for the premiere, next summer, of Heartlands, the new music I was commissioned to write, and have been writing all year. The commission has amounted to a full concert's worth of music (a whole CD), around 70 or 80 minutes of new music, and will be premiered in June 2012. The music was commissioned for the Fifteenth Anniversary Concert of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, the gay and gay-affirming men's chorus of Madison, WI. The piece will be premiered in Madison, then performed again in Milwaukee.

Then we will take part of the concert's worth of music and perform it in Denver, CO, in July 2012, as part of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Choruses (GALA) convention that happens every four years. The GALA convention is a chance for choruses to get together, perform for each other, feature new music, and network both musically and socially. It's a huge celebration of music, of life, and of joy. A lot of people will hear my new music at GALA, and I hope that Heartlands will be performed again, and that I'll get more commissioned work from this exposure.

I hope all of my friends who are able to attend one of the concerts will do so.

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I made this poster early, using one of my own photos of rural south central Wisconsin, so that it would be available for marketing and fundraising. The poster is tabloid size (11x17) with versions to be used as postcards for mailing, and also smaller concert flyers.

The music score is currently being engraved and typeset in music software, and I am almost done proofreading. I plan to publish the score in book form later this spring or summer, and will use the poster illustration and typography to make it have a consistent look and feel. That's about branding, in graphic design: consistent visual imagery and style, and consistent typography, that create an identify, a recognizable logo and image for an event or person or business. Making this poster early means we can brand the concert early, and begin marketing campaigns and future fundraising mailings immediately. I have also made a letterhead and identity system for Heartlands and for the Fifteenth Anniversary Concert season.

I'm very satisfied with this poster. The idea was to emphasize the horizontal lines, the big sky, the open spaces of the land. I chose to do it in B&W for the evocative tone, and converted the photograph to a mezzotint to give it a classic antiqued look. The poster will probably be printed on colored paper; off-white or pale sepia, to give it a sense of being rooted, solid, and tied to the land. A vintage look, if you prefer, like some poster you might discover in a barn or farmhouse, both old and new.

New Business Cards

Every little while, just to keep your hand in and your design talents sharp, it's wise to reinvent your own marketing. I review and revise my own identity systems (letterhead, logos, business cards, envelopes, etc.) every six months to a year. You don't have to do it that often, but it's a pleasant way to spend a free afternoon designing and illustrating.

I've actually gone so far, in the past, as to invent phoney bands and fictional design firms so that I could create an identity system for them. It's quite fun, really, and it does keep your skills sharp.

This afternoon I made a new set of business cards versions, to reflect my own changing priorities and needs at this time. Since I am writing music on commission now, and since I am also wanting to restart my photography and graphic design career, post-surgery, I thought it was a good time.

I started by playing with my photography business card. The background illustration is a grayscale photograph of mine made in the past few days. The image is screened back so that the type stands out in high contrast in front, without being drowned out by the photo.

I made two versions of this photography card, the only difference being in the choice of typefaces. The first version uses some more obscure and decorative fonts, for a retro Art Deco look. After completing that version, I wondered if the typefaces would be too challenging for some folks, so I redid the card using more plain and legible typefaces.

(Note: I've obscured my cell-phone number here, as I don't intentionally put that out on the internet; although my email is open news, so I left that in.)





The next card I made was a card advertising music composition. I began by playing around with ideas using clip art with musical notation to accompany the text. That seemed a little boring, though, so I then thought about using my own musical scores for the art. Regardless, my thinking for the design of a music business card was not very different from these pjhoto business cards.

But then I had an inspiration. I have used Scrabble tiles in the past to make messages, words, short phrases, haiku, etc., then photographed them to make a design image or illustration. It's a fun way of playing with handmade typesetting; the look and feel of the wooden letter tiles has its own beauty.

So I got the inspiration to make the music card out of a Scrabble-tile illustration. I chose the phrase "Words and Music" and my name for the card, and laid them out using tiles. I made a background out of the very music and words I am writing right now for the new music commission. I made an arrangement of notebooks, writings, blank score paper, and Scrabble tiles. Then I photographed it in color and B&W, to get enough material to work with in Photoshop. I photographed with enough margin to be able to crop and edit the edges to make the business-card-sized illustration. A standard business card size 3.5 x 2 inches in dimension.




I added the phone number by laying out blank Scrabble tiles, using their blank backs, then typesetting the numbers onto the blank tiles in Photoshop. Since Scrabble tiles use a generic sans-serif font, I used Helvetica for the numbers.



Then I copied the phone number art into the business card art, and fused them together in Photoshop, using layers. I intended the numbers to be smaller than the words on the image, so I scaled this whole image down once it was made, before inserting it into the business card art.

The blank card-stock paper I was using to print these new business cards is a light tan parchment in appearance, so I color-shifted the entire artwork towards sepia, using the Color Balance dialog box in Photoshop. Sepia is a toned effect I use often for my monochrome photographic prints, and used here it is a complimentary color to the card-stock, giving an overall effect of being contemporary yet also somewhat classically antiqued, like an old photograph. I think the end result is rather pleasing.



Last, I thought to use the back of this business card to provide more detailed contact information, laid out more clearly, as pure type. The front of the card is after all an artistic illustration, so the back can be just type, with all the relevant data laid out very simply.



So, that was an afternoon of design play. I like the results, especially the music composition card. To do it as an illustrated art-card was a genuinely useful but of inspiration. This is the sort of design idea that makes your work stand out and be memorable: it's unique, customized, and different from the norm.

Next, I'll use this or a similar idea to make flyers, letterhead, and other materials for a music composition identity system. Later for that.

Getting Back Into Book Design

I'm thinking about getting back into book design work, to offer my services to those authors who have decided to self-publish and self-promote. I think I can provide a useful service that many authors would find supportive, and I am someone who understands their needs because I too am a writer. It is sometimes easier to deal with someone who already shares your interests and concerns. I would be a niche designer offering services to a niche writers' market.


Pleasures of Books

Writers Beware has written about questionable submission guidelines to watch out for. That article prompted me to think that, while it is necessary to be cautious when submitting to journals and publishers you know nothing about, it's perhaps overly easy to become paranoid about such things. It can make one cynical and reclusive, if burned one too many times. While hurt feelings are understandable, they don't really serve you if they linger on too long.

Certainly as a graphic designer I've been screwed by clients. Who hasn't? It happens to even the most highly-regarded and famous. Everyone occasionally encounters a client from hell. There is always a client who decides they won't pay: not because they can't, but for mostly selfish and illogical reasons. Architects run into this as well, as do interior decorators. I've had one or two clients over the years who seemed honest, yet who turned out to be trolls when it came to billing. They count on the fact that they will get away with it because they can afford better litigation than you.

And what artist and designer hasn't had requests from potential clients to use their work, the fruit of their labors, for free? Some requests are phrased as though the asker were doing me a huge favor by asking to use my work for free. The usual argument is that it's more public exposure for one's work, but that's specious: I don't need more "exposure" for my work, I need clients who want to pay me for my creativity. I may not be the best in the business at self-marketing, but neither is this my first rodeo. Most offers of "exposure" assume that one is a rank beginner, just setting out on a career, and that the offered "exposure" will benefit one's career. In fact, most moments of artistic "exposure" will never be seen by anyone who cares to follow through and hire me. The reason they're asking me to use my art for free is that they themselves have no budget. Therefore they are not likely to have a budget for marketing and promotion, either.

I very occasionally say "yes" to requests to use my art for free, for my own reasons—mostly because I take a liking to the person who is asking—but never when the request is expressed in a tone of superiority, as though I should be honored merely to be asked. I am not masochistic in any way, and even the most politely-phrased demands to abuse my good nature and my creative work will be ignored. In fact, my self-esteem as an artist and designer is just fine, thank you. I have no need to have my vanity flattered, nor do I crave attention to the extent that I need grovel for it.

At this time, I don't take projects on for free, on speculation; I require the client to put some earnest money down in order to engage my services. Not much. It's merely a token of honest intent. The amount, usually a percentage of a bid, is flexible and negotiable; but experience has taught that the act of exchanging money makes clients take you and your work more seriously. If they balk at providing earnest token, well, there are plenty of other designers out there they can turn to. You can consider it an initial sorting process. Serious clients only need apply. Dealing with deadbeat clients is not worth my time, so not even starting with them is usually better for me. If you're really serious about wanting my particular work, style, talents, and view, then you'll agree that you won't find that anywhere else. Therefore, the amount of earnest token is negotiable, but the fact of it is not.

Keep in mind: deadbeat and problem clients are a small minority; don't get paranoid, and don't fall into the trap of thinking like a victim all the time. Most clients are honest people who want to be reasonable and fair. You learn to spot the potential problem clients by their behavior and questions early in the process. After that, it's your choice if you want the project is interesting enough to you that you might decide to go ahead anyway. Or not.

These kinds of difficulties happen partly because non-creatives frequently don't understand or value the work that creatives do, out of ignorance as much as malice. How many times have I heard in an art gallery some person remark when looking at a piece of Modern art, "Heck, my child could have done that!" Well, the fact of the matter is, sir, your child didn't. And no, they probably couldn't. Whether or not they could is in fact irrelevant. But this example exemplifies how poorly non-creatives understand the work that goes into making art. At its best this is merely ignorance. At its worst it is willful ignorance, dismissive of the time and effort required.


(A couple of coffee-table special-interest books I designed.)

But partly my desire to get back into book design is rooted in aesthetic self-preservation: there is just so much bad design out there, and so many writers who are taken advantage of, that it seems reasonable to want to do something the situation. Bad designs always outnumber good designs, so whatever trickle of good and effective design I can contribute back into the world of publishing during these turbulent, difficult times seems worthwhile.

I am still recovering from major surgery, but my mind is clear enough today to start thinking about how I would need to set up another website for this, and market it to authors, starting perhaps with the POD people. I'm not capable of taking on a lot of design work at the moment, not till I heal some more, and regain more of my strength. Still it's worth cogitating upon.


Book of Leaves

Books remain for me tangible objects that I enjoy with more than just the sense of sight. There is the texture of the paper and printing, the smell of ink and binding and other materials. The weight and heft of the physical object is part of the pleasure of reading it. A substantial literary effort that feels substantial as an object can enhance the overall reading experience.

What is missing from e-readers such as the Kindle is everything except the raw words, the pure text. Everything else about reading a book is gone. That's not to say that e-readers have no merits. Portability and ease of transport are two such advantages.

Nor do I ignore the truth that many writers have absolutely no care for (or sense of) anything but the raw words, the pure text. Such writers have no visual sense, in my experience, and are "all about the words" to such extent that seems bizarre, so little do they care about anything else. Such writers will find good homes in text-only media such as e-readers. They don't really care. But not all writers are so blind to other aspects of publishing.

Several great poets come to mind as writers who did in fact care about presentation, about the experience of the book as an object, about the multi-sensory act of reading. Federico Garcia Lorca made numerous drawings and illustrations. Walt Whitman was trained as a printer, and for his first edition of Leaves of Grass he chose the paper and set all the type himself. I've done that myself, following in Walt's footsteps, by organizing every aspect of three or four of my published chapbooks, from paper choice to typography to illustrations and logos. I also think of poets such as William Everson, another printer and designer whose small press editions of contemporary poetry are exquisite art-objects beyond being just books. So there is a tradition of writers who care about the book beyond the words.

The craft of the hand-made art book is experience a contemporary renaissance, as is the small handset press and lithograph. Limited editions printed and published by small presses are becoming popular again. Poems published as hand-set broadsheets are far more common now than fifty years ago. There is no need to elegize the death of the published book, despite the turbulence occurring in the publishing world on the national level. New media as well as old are taking up the slack. Each time the death of the book is announced, more books are published art objects than ever before.



So I am thinking about getting back into book design. Perhaps it's folly, and no one will know or care. But it could be fun, and have the side benefit of keeping me connected with poets, writers, and other such creatives who might want to add a bit of visual flair, of typographic elegance, to their best, most publishable work. Consider my doors open at this time.

A Poster for Poetry Month 2

(Click on images for larger versions.)

A version of the poster I designed for National Poetry Month, used as an element of another design idea. Not the first image I've rolled through one of my vintage typewriters, but this one definitely fits into the poetry/words/type/art theme of the original poster.



This is an idea I've explored before, in which the image emerging from the typewriter is one impossible to have done so: an anachronism, a technological impossibility, yet evoking both the history and the development of printing technology. The contrast and overlap are poetically evocative, for me.



This close-up, tightly-cropped version is my favorite version here, I think. I like the image emerging from the machine, as though it had been typed up. The dominant element is the Poetry Month poster, though, not the typewriter. The balance and composition of elements is important in any poster design, and I think this has a better balance than the overall view.

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Questions were raised in comments on my original presentation of this poster design, from Eshuneutics (who is always worth reading), that are relevant to the poster design and concept on several levels:

. . . Would anyone notice it [the poster] is gay? Now, isn't that the eternal question again: What is gay art/poetry? This intrigues me more and more (because as you wrote in a post, the gay image [in] mid-America is not the same as on the coasts, in other words, we don't belong to the stereotype). If the wordle had SEX, QUEER and the image was a male couple, hey, it would be obvious. Yes, obvious to the gay stereotyping mass. To me, there is an ambience to the poster that says something. . . .

These are really interesting questions. They don't really have answers, at least not definitive answers. Some answers can be found, personally and locally, but these questions will remain open-ended for most writers and artists. I want to return to the question of ambience, or sensibility, later. But first, let's deal with the obvious.

Yes, I could have made the poster more obvious, more openly and overtly homoerotic (gay, LGBT, homosexual, etc.) by including more obvious elements such as gay-tagged words in the Wordle clouds, or a photo of two men embracing (which I do have, from past photo shoots), or two women, or other obvious signs and symbols. (Bang a cymbal to make the symbol more obvious.) It's not hard to make LGBT content explicit: all you have to do is depict same-sex couples together.

Although, let's be realistically honest about same-sex couples nowadays, and avoid one older set of stereotypes: in other words, let's use psychologically-positive and openly-loving images of gay couples. Depictions of gay lovers as innately self-hating and self-destructive, bitchy, unstable, and promiscuous are themselves stereotypes.

There can be purpose to using the stereotypes. With some people it is necessary to make it obvious. With some others, maybe less necessary, but perhaps polite. My intent was indeed to make a poster mining the oft-overlooked wing of poetry that is openly, even proudly, LGBT.

But what makes a poem gay? Subject matter? Sexual content? Explicit statements in the body of the poem, along the lines of those explicit signs already mentioned? The fact that a love poem written to a man by another man might logically be considered gay in intent and subject? (Not overlooking the truth that a poem written from a persona or character viewpoint isn't necessarily portraying the author's character or viewpoint, even in a so-called confessional lyric.)

While I have been explicitly homoerotic, even sexual, in some poems and art, I also find myself wanting to be subtle and indirect about as often: an oblique approach to the subject matter, that evokes rather than bludgeons the audience. Perhaps this is Midwestern reserve; at times it probably is. In other instances, it may be because I am less interested in reportage and more interested in metaphor and parataxis. No-one writes the same poem in the same way all the time, or ought to.

It can also be a desire, in my case as an artist and writer, to depict love and desire, rather than simple fucking. To present eros as itself, in its aspect as life-force, the power under all life, that moves us to unite as two solitudes meeting, on an energetic/psychological/spiritual as well as physical level. I am more interested in eros and Tantra, in my own art, than I am in producing work that others might view as purely pornographic. I am interested in transcendence—which does not exclude the physical, the raunchy, and the explicit, but rather embraces it—since the essential practice of Tantra is to take the power of the raw, base emotions and convert them into fuel for attaining enlightenment.

There are ways to subvert artistic stereotypes, just as there are ways to subvert clichés in poetry, by turning them on their edges. One tactic is to overdo the stereotype to the point of absurdity or irony. (An overused tactic of postmodernism, one I don't like very much.) Another is to make substitutions that are near to the stereotype, without exactly repeating it; the audience will perceive a conceptual echo of the stereotype, but be thrown off because it's not an exact replay.

I find myself, in a poster design such as this one, as well as in art and poems from time to time, preferring the oblique approach. I want to evoke, not bludgeon. I don't want to fall into stereotype, precisely because I want to give a fresh take on Poetry Month, from a different direction. There is also a connection between Wordle word clouds and both traditional concrete poetry and contemporary VisPo (visual poetry), although the latter has (like much post-avant-garde poetry of the present moment) more theory than practice supporting it.

It is possible to evoke LGBT literary and artistic history, I also believe, by using the old, pre-Stonewall, pre-Gay Liberation tactic of the "coded text." It was common, in much LGBT art and literature prior to the modern LGBT rights movement(s), to hide or "code" the queer content by using tropes familiar to subcultural insiders that outsiders would not know about, and therefore completely miss. Signs and symbols, turns or phrase, images, coded words: these were all used to evoke "the love that dared not speak its name" to those already "in the know" while excluding those ignorant of the code.

For this poster, using coded texts seemed an appropriate way to give the poster a gay sensibility without being stereotypical or blatant. In this case that meant using some of my own poems that are homoerotic without being sexually explicit as source texts for Wordle. It also meant using a male nude from a previous photo shoot, although the nudity is mostly hidden by the text itself. For one version of the poster it also meant using pink as the dominant color, which is a color associated with gay rights via the historical pink triangle used by the Nazis in World War II concentration camps for homosexuals, and reclaimed since as a positive gay rights emblem. Although personally I prefer the blue version of the poster, on purely aesthetic grounds, an art director might use the pink version precisely because of what it evokes. Again, how direct do we want to be?

To return at last to the question of ambiance or sensibility, the question arises again and again regarding if one is able to locate or identify a "gay sensibility" in artwork and poetry. Is there indeed a gay sensibility produced in his art by an artist who happens to be gay, even if the content of the artwork is not overtly (blatantly, stereotypically) gay, sexual, or homoerotic?

Although I do have an opinion here, at the moment I want to point out that discovering a gay sensibility in an artist's work is often a sub rosa attempt to identify the artist's biography with their artwork (the authorial fallacy), under the assumption that any gay artist must produce gay art even if they don't overtly want to. This assumption is itself a sub rosa (perhaps unconscious) attempt to categorize an artist's work based on their "innate" character or sexuality—which is itself a subtle form of homophobia. (Even liberated gay artists sometimes find subtle forms of internalized homophobia in themselves and their work; it can be a major opus to root it out.)

Homophobia? Indeed. You almost never see straight (non-LGBT) artists' sensibilities discussed in this same way, as though their sexuality was the dominant and deterministic factor in their artistic sensibility. The fact that it matters at all if there is or is not a "gay sensibility" can be taken as covert homophobia, and in practice it often is just that. For many straight critics discussing LGBT art, discovering a gay sensibility can be a road towards critical dismissal, a way of saying that this art doesn't matter to normal people. Indeed, for many mainstream critics this is a common and typical road towards critical dismissal of any and all "genre" art, from LGBT content to science fiction—and thus are enforced the critical and psychological standards of normative social and sexual expression. Normative critiques against non-normative stereotypes can be a direct, if subtle, forum for reinforcing what is considered normative: dismissing the margins keeps the center in power.

Discovering a gay sensibility in art, however, can also be taken as an attempt by gay artists to reclaim a formerly negative label as a positive emblem, in exactly the same way that the pink triangle was reclaimed. But to be taken this way, it seems important to know that the reclaiming is being done by other gay artists, rather than non-LGBT critics. This brings us back, full circle, to the insider's coded text. The distinction between insider and outsider, regarding discovering a gay sensibility in art by a gay artist, therefore, may be as simple as knowing whether the motivation behind the discovery is homophobia or reclaiming.

My own opinion is that there is indeed some kind of gay sensibility in art—the word "ambiance" is apt—although pinning it down can be elusive. It must vary from artist to artist, so it may be more useful to discuss gay sensibilities (plural). Different aspects appear at different time, in different ways. The subtle line between overt and coded. Can I tell you exactly what gay sensibility is? No; and I doubt anyone else can, either. In my own art, I can say that I do think that because I am a gay man who makes art, some aspect of my own sensibility, which is that of a gay man, gets into all my art, whether or not that art is openly, blatantly gay in content or not. It can be very subtle.

I do believe that one fundamental aspect of my own sensibility, which is a gay sensibility, and which might be shared by other gay artists, is empathy: the ability to walk a mile in the Other's shoes. To use imagination to create unity between disparate people. The use empathy to feel the suffering and joy of others. To be very aware, having grown up as an often-attacked Other within my own culture, of how the Other thinks and feels. Sympathetic thinking is after all one road to genuine empathy. if you can understand how someone Other has felt like a victim or a victor, you can walk a mile in their shoes. And thus all of my poetry, all of my art, I believe, contains the certain use of imagination and empathy to make those connections. I build a lot of bridges. Parataxis and collage are useful artistic tools that I use all the time.

All this discussion from a simple throwaway poster design made on a whim, for an annual designated national month about poetry that no-one except poets really cares about or will pay attention to!

The Aliens

About ten years ago, just as a fun exercise, I designed some classic "alien abduction" imagery, just as a practice illustration. I ran across it again recently, and it made me smile, so I'd thought I share it here.

I was working at the time with the publishers of a monthly magazine that specialized in the Unknown and Unexplained, occult studies, crypto-science, etc. They had a great sense of humor, and of course we were all science fiction fans. So I made this fun illustration on spec, just as something to do one afternoon. It was never used in the magazine, but laser-prints of it appeared as mini-posters all over the office. It was a popular piece in-house, then, even though it has never before been published.

This illustration is made from a few pieces of clip art, with the overall shimmering acid-green field, the textures, and the gradients made as custom processes in Photoshop. I particularly like the subtleties of the texturing used in the large iconic alien "face" (really more of an icon, in this day and age) in the background.



I found an old laser-print of this piece when I was looking through my old art and photo prints for material to make into papier-maché art pieces. This illustration still makes he smile: that is one surprised-looking cow! "Moooo?!" Part of the humor of this illustration is that, here in the Upper Midwest, there is all sorts of folklore about alien abduction, about cow-tipping, and other weird unexplained events. Rural Wisconsin has many tales of people being abducted or influenced in ways no one can explain; I myself have driven down some dark unlit Wisconsin rural roads off the beaten path late at night in remote regions, where there developed a feeling of spooky electric anticipation in the air that could make one almost believe in such tales of strange events. Who knows?

As a designer and illustrator, it's always good to fool around with your materials, just play, and/or make illustrations for no reason for books that don't exist. Every so often I get inspired to create an entire identity system for a project or design company that doesn't exist. It's like five-finger exercises on the piano: it keeps the mind fresh, the wit sharpened, and hopefully you enjoy yourself during the practice process.

Completions

I just went through some really intense physical exertions, this weekend and last weekend, giving a couple of concerts, driving long ways to do so, and so on and so forth—and I'm not as wiped out as I thought I would be. Certainly not as much as I used to be. So I guess I'm getting stronger again, betting better. More than I think.

Isn't that interesting?

Last weekend was the scheduled concert series with Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, for which I had made a poster, and then made another:


(Click on image for larger version.)

I made the second poster on my own initiative, as a way to add to the publicity. This was because we were performing again my piece Weavers of Light, for male chorus, flute, bells and piano, which I had written in autumn 2009 and which we had premiered a year ago. We were giving it a second premiere, in part because I had revised and corrected the score from last year, and also to get a better live performance recording. So I made this second poster, and paid for it myself, and distributed it in as many other directions as I could. The difference between this poster and the other one is that this one emphasizes the premiere of my own music. So call it a bit of personal chest-thumping, of self-marketing, and I won't mind. I don't know how effective it was—you almost never get to know—but it was worth doing. And I'm actually rather fond of the design of this second poster. Another of my photo-illustration posters. By the way, regarding the original concert poster: I have received tons of positive feedback on it, including board members saying they thought it was the best-designed winter concert poster for PHMC they'd ever seen. That was nice to hear.

Last weekend, we did the first concert, and things went okay. My piece didn't go that well, though, and I was not at my personal best for a concert. I am still dealing with chronic illness, and chronic tiredness. So I didn't feel that good about the concert.

But wait! There's more!

A Chorus member had kindly offered to let me stay at his apartment in Madison for the nights in between the concerts, so I wouldn't have to drive there and back twice in a weekend. A major winter storm was supposed to come in on the day between concerts, and then the second concert was supposed to be a clear, cold day.

Well, the storm was late. It started with freezing rain, then escalated to snow, to blizzard, to a storm so powerful for this early in the winter season that it even made the TV news in Europe. I was staying at my friend's place, trapped and unable to get out till the plows came through, as his place is in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a hill, which I could not get up till it was plowed. Unfortunately, I had a toxic reaction to some innocent use of cleaning chemicals, which meant I had a horrible night in addition to being trapped. It was nobody's fault, although it pretty much destroyed me for the weekend. I did try to get out at night, when it was still snowing, a choice on my part that made things worse, as I got nowhere except to exhaustion. I was so exhausted by morning, when we did finally get out, that even had the second concert not been cancelled on account of the blizzard, I would have had to just go home and not perform, regardless.

Anyway, the concert was postponed for one week. Same venue, different day.

But wait! There's more!

On the drive home, I passed two severe road accidents on the interstate. One of them was when a car had apparently hit an icy patch, skidded off the road, and slammed sideways into a stand of trees. The entire driver's side of the car was crumpled. Emergency vehicles were everywhere, although I could not see that anyone had actually been seriously hurt.

i've been in an accident like that. My previous pickup truck, one winter when I was driving in northern Minnesota, skidded off the road, spun out, and rear-ended into a stand of trees. We were not injured, and my friends were able to help me get a tow-truck out there, 20 miles from electricity, etc., to pull me out of the ditch, after which the truck was okay, although the read hatch never worked properly again. But I had PTSD from that accident for some time, and bad dreams, and a lot of emotions. So I felt for those strangers as I drove by, seeing the side of their car stove in. I wished them the best.

Once home, it was pretty much a collapse scenario. I unloaded, and went to bed early. I thought I'd need a couple of days of doing nothing to recover—but I didn't. I was back on my feet in a day. I did my chores. I made presents to give people for Xmas, and mailed them off. I did some cooking. I set up the small Xmas tree in the living room, although I haven't done much other decorating as yet. Still want to hang some ornaments on the tree. Make things merry and bright.

Then, yesterday, I drove down to Chicago for some time in the recording studio where I work part-time, and the annual studio Holiday party, which meant I get to bed late. (Yes, making of music was involved. Yes, so was a wee dram of good Scotch whiskey.) Then this morning I had to drive from Chicago to Madison for the rescheduled second concert.

We didn't cancel the concert, we postponed it a week. So we did the concert this afternoon, after I had driven in directly from Chicago.

And the concert went very well. The performance of my piece was probably the best live performance we've given it. I was very pleased. I will eventually get a recording of it. Several friends who couldn't make it to the concert have already asked me about the recordings. (More on that at a later date.) The entire concert was very well-performed, in fact, and the audience was terrific. We all received many compliments afterwards.

And so I drove home this evening, very tired, but not as exhausted as I thought I would be. Nonetheless, I am doing nothing about anything till tomorrow. (Have to get the tux dry-cleaned, but I'll deal with tomorrow.) I'm taking the rest of the night off. And I'm not exhausted.

So I guess the IV drug therapy is working. I am, I guess, getting more of my strength back. I am, in fact, feeling better. There's a long way to go, and I'm not out of the woods yet. And I'm also not doing as bad as I used to, so I guess I'm doing better.

We're all much bigger than we think we are. We're all more capable of coping with and managing difficulties than we give ourselves credit for. We're all much more empowered than we realize. We all have more ability and more flexibility than we imagine. The main thing that keeps us from being at our best is some idea we carry around that we can't: in other words, we self-limit because of our attitudes, because of mental/emotional blocks.

I find myself, tonight, feeling pretty good about everything. And especially about this just-completed concert series. I far exceeded my own expectations, this concert, and am pleased with that, because it means that I'm doing better than I had though I was, or could have hoped for.

Tomorrow will take care of itself.

Visionary Artwork 5

Going back through some older archives, looking at some early visionary Photoshop work, I pulled out a few pieces to make fresh prints of. It's good to look back on the work you did some years ago, to reflect on the process and how it's changed. And how you have changed.

It's interesting to look back over some of this old work, at the moment, as I proceed forward into a new phase of productivity, in art-making and music composition.


Prince of Air (c. 2000)

A piece made for a proposed Tarot deck, actually more of a Jungian archetype deck. A friend modeled for me at the lake, and I assembled this from several sequential poses and images. The feeling I had, as I played with the images, was of that of a man leaping into the air and flying. It was definitely a leap, not just floating up. So I represented the upward take-off as sequential and layered images, with wings on the sides. The side panels are Art Nouveau angels from a decorative clip art book.

This version of the piece, printed and framed at 8 inches square, has been shown in a number of group exhibitions in the Midwest. It was this square version that I stumbled across when browsing through my old archives that made me think to think make a new print edition.



This version was the one that I actually made for the proposed deck of cards. I still work on this deck from time to time, although I still haven't found a publisher for it. There are some 48 or so finished images, with several more still in progress, and a dozen or so images I made that I've decided not to include.

•


Gambuh

A self-portrait taken in Surakarta, Central Java, c. 1985. This was taken in the living room of the house I rented. I was dressed in traditional Javanese court garb, and playing a Balinese bamboo flute called a suling gambuh, suling meaning flute, gambuh being an ensemble composed of pairs of these long low-pitched suling played using circular breathing technique.

I don't do a lot of self-portraits, but occasionally as an artist, you need to. Just to see where you're at, to locate yourself in your work. A form of artistic self-assessment, if you will. At this moment, I was studying traditional Javanese court gamelan in Surakarta, on a Fulbright grant. I was studying as a composer rather than as an ethnomusicologist at the time, although of course those interests converged at times.


Gambuh Sunset

In the early 90s, I combined this self-portrait with an image of a winter sunset taken overlooking Lake Mendota in Madison, WI. The pink, orange and red sunlight reflected on the ice of the frozen lake, haloed the trees, and spread across the sky. When I combined the layers I did some dodging and burning, and some masking of parts of each image, so that the elements I wanted to have appear were clarified. For example, I created an oval vignette around myself playing the suling, so that face and hands and flute would not be lost in the trees of the sunset image.

One thing I like about this image is that it combines two climate zones and locations that have been important in my life. It combines the tropical heat of equatorial Indonesia with the frozen sub-arctic tundra of the northern Midwest, my birth home. Some 45 degrees of latitude and nearly 180 degrees of longitude separate the two locales in which the separate images were made. To combine these images like this represents my life's history in microcosm. So this piece is symbolic, for me, of how big parts of my life have merged.


Chamber Music CD cover (1995)

In 1995 I produced and released a CD of some of my composed chamber music. The album had five pieces on it, which I had digitized from the original performance recordings, all originally recorded on stereo reel-to-reel tape.

To make the cover art I re-versioned the Gambuh Sunset piece. A lot of graphic design is re-versioning, when it is based on pieces that were originally stand-alone art pieces. I used two different typefaces for the Chamber Music titling, heavily modifying each word in Photoshop.

Using this self-portrait piece for the CD cover was actually to fulfill a request from a friend, who believed that people would want to knew who the artist was. I'm not big on author's photos on book covers, or composer's portraits on album covers, as I like to think the work can speak for itself. In this case I acceded to the request because I knew I could do something a little different with it, play with the image and type, make it new.

Halloween Typography Fun

Making a poster for a gig I'm going to be playing later this month—live improvised music to accompany the silent horror film, Nosferatu (1922)—I went looking for free clip art and fonts. I'm not quite done with the poster yet, but in my search I found several Halloween-themed free fonts available for download. So, here's a preview of fun fonts just in time for the season.

Halloween Fonts is the best themed site for these materials that I found in my search. Also useful, and with additional free fonts is Acid Font's Halloween fonts.

Here is the titling sampler chart I made up while working on the poster. It shows a few of the fonts I found potentially useful for this project. When you set out on a project, it's sometimes helpful to make a font display like this. It lets you see the fonts together, gives you options, and lets you see might work well together, and what won't:



When I go out on the Web looking for specific materials, I usually search using Dogpile, a better meta-search engine. I find Dogpile far more useful than other search engines.

There are a million typefaces out there on the Web. Not all are freeware or shareware—all of the big font foundries have a Web presence—but you can often discover something very useful to you, for any given special-topic graphic design project, that is either very reasonable or cheap. And I keep my eye open for the unusual and useful typeface.

Some of my favorites are:

The Tarmsaft Collection

Chank Diesel's Type Foundry

Planet Typography

Among the very best high-end independent font foundries for excellent fonts are P22, who specialize also in historical and artist's handwriting typefaces, and Emigre, which has often been on the bleeding edge of design and typography, and whose founding members are interesting writers about design theory and history. Emigre used to publish a tabloid-sized print magazine which was full of articles, graphics, and font showings; I still have a collection of back issues in my basement.

An essential resource is the online Elements of Typographic Style. And here are Twenty Useful Typographic Tools.

And some of my own original typefaces can be found at White Dragon Type Foundry.

•

Update:

Here's the finished poster:


(Click on image for larger version.)

Normally I would never use this many fonts for any graphic design project. To create a clean, classic design, usually you should never use more than two or three fonts, and those should be complementary, fitting well together, supporting each other. I rarely use more than two fonts for any given project, unless they are a set meant to work together as a unit.

But sometimes you have to throw out the rules and guidelines.

This poster is to advertise a fun Halloween music gig. At the gig a group of improvising jazz musicians will perform original music to accompany a classic silent horror film, in this case Nosferatu.

So I went to town, and picked several fonts from the Halloween-themed sets linked to above. Even the bats are from a dingbat font, called, humorously, BatBats; I converted these into clip art and manipulated them a bit. Sometimes you just have to overdo it, and have fun. And this was fun to do. Actually, I think these fonts do work well as a group, because they're all variations on the Halloween theme. The font I used for the majority of the informational text is called Burton's NIghtmare, modeled on the titling font for Tim Burton's animated film The NIghtmare Before Christmas. Using one font like this for the main body type, with pull-outs in the other fonts, is what holds the overall design together, when using so many individual fonts.

I will be one of the musicians playing this gig. When I lived in San Francisco, I played in a band that played live music to silent films once a month at a café downtown. It was always tremendous fun, and our Halloween gigs always drew a big crowd. So this won't be my first time playing music to Nosferatu, which is even now a genuinely creepy masterpiece of horror. For this gig, I'll be playing Chapman Stick, probably bass guitar, and probably making sound effects on my laptop, as well as my usual looping gear. I look forward to the gig; it ought to be loads of creepy fun.

Imaginary Interview: Graphic Design

—. . .

—Did I ever want to run away and join the circus? No, I wanted to run away and join NASA. To be part of someone walking on the moon, to be either an astronaut or one of the guys who built the rockets. Rockets, you see, aren't very complicated. They are engineering problems easily solved, in terms of physics and mathematics. The hardest part of building a rocket is the materials science: balancing weight against strength, finding the right materials that allow it to fly without blowing up. It has a lot of little parts, to be sure, but none of them are that complicated.

—. . .

—No, my first job right out of music school, which I achieved within a month or two of graduation, was in publishing and graphic design. It was at Mathematical Reviews, in the library department, which catalogued and prepared all the articles and books to be sent to the reviewers. I stayed there for a few years, eventually becoming the editor and photographer for the in-house staff magazine, and also reviving the humor/satire rag Math Refuse, which was tremendous fun to put together with photocopiers and printers.

I first learned how to set type and design printed materials at MR, using Donald Knuth's powerful math typesetting language TeX. It was the very first generation of desktop publishing. The Apple Mac wasn't out for another couple of years, but we were already working on laserprinters using the very first iteration of the PostScript printing language, which was and is the language that printers use to convert a computer file into printed dots on the page.

—. . .

—Yes, we were the ground zero for the desktop publishing revolution. We had the tools that hadn't even been publicly released yet, to produce MR, a monthly review journal of all printed materials mathematical and physical published worldwide, approximately 40K reviews per month. The whole thing was done on the AMS mainframes using TeX.

I taught myself how to program in TeX, and a little bit in PostScript. These days only academics and hardcore Adobe programmers do that anymore. That was the complete extent of my training in programming: one class in college using an archaic programming language and punch-cards, and a lot of self-teaching at MR.

But it opened the door to a career, after getting my degree in music, in graphic design, typography, and their related skills.

—. . .

—No, no one knew at the time where it was going to go technologically, only that we were on the bleeding edge of desktop publishing. Because I had that head start, I stayed on the bleeding edge for a long time. It was as I said a bit of a career.

—. . .

—I still have a design and typography portfolio, yes. I've designed several typefaces, as well as lots of printed pieces, and a fair bit of Web design, too. It's a diverse portfolio, and pretty wide-ranging.

—. . .

—I guess I'm proudest of some of the CDs I designed and illustrated, and other projects like that in the service of creative groups. Music, dance, photography, etc.

—. . .

—A few typefaces have been used in national level publications, yes, but mostly stuff you've never heard of.

—. . .

—Well, I seemed for awhile to have developed a reputation for doing type design for foreign languages. Converting English language fonts to be used in other languages by adding special characters, diacritical marks, and so forth. I did a fair bit of that for the Native American languages department at the University of Minnesota, which still pleases and somewhat amazes me.

—. . .

—Mostly for Lakota and Dakota language projects. The Hopi font idea never get off the ground. It might have been fun, though.

—. . .

—Well, one thing I like about graphic design is coming up with creative ways of conveying information. You end up working with a diverse range of clients on a diverse array of projects. I've done several books, magazines, and marketing pieces ranging in size from business cards to billboards. Designing a coherent identity system is always fun; it's conceptually rather like fractal design, conveying the same concept on several different scales with slight variations.

—. . .

—I know a lot of graphic designers who think about their work talk about that. I think it's bollocks.

—. . .

—Well, because when you think about design in terms of it being a "solution" to a "problem," you end up with a lot of stale engineering diagrams. Graphic design is not engineering. It's not fine art either for that matter. A lot of the problem/solution thinking comes from the early history design in the 20th C. when designers were trying to make their profession into a rational, logical profession. Some of that is respect for the training and innate good sense it takes to achieve a good design. But some of it was also insecurity. Designers were trying to get the world to take their profession seriously. I have several books of design theory that I enjoy reading from time to time. Most of that takes itself far too seriously, and is completely wrongheaded.

And there's one other major problem with the problem/solution paradigm: It tends to lock you into the same mindset used in classroom exercises.

—. . .

—Well, think about it. The teacher presents a problem for the students to solve. Maybe they need to be creative to solve it, or to think outside the box, be intuitive, be playful. But how do we rate a successful solution? Commercial success? Artistic success? Fame? Meeting the teacher's unspoken expectations?

It must always be remembered that design is an external operation performed on texts and images to make pleasing relationships and connections between in the service of communication. But most design is commercial in the end, and "success" is usually measured by the standards of marketing and advertising, not the standards of fine art. (Or of engineering: the well-made thing.) If graphic design is purely communication, it's the phone book. If it's purely art, then the content is lost, and nothing is conveyed. Neither of these pure poles of the spectrum are considered good design. You have to at least make the phone book look good, easy to use, and inviting to read. Otherwise no one will bother.

—. . .

—Because graphic design is based fundamentally on typography. It uses words. It communicates using words. Even when an image, or a logo, is so striking that it can stand on its own as, say, a one-page ad in a magazine, the logo or image has to evoke the name of the product or brand or concept. It has to make you hear the word in your head, even if it's not on the page.

—. . .

—No, most writers and even publishers have no clue about good design. it's a skill that takes time to learn, just like any other. You might write your novel over a period of years, and it's a great novel, but the book design is the presentation, or performance, that connects your words to the reader. A bad design is going to kill the joy in reading your words, and no one will finish the book.

I know lots of writers who believe unquestioningly in the supremacy of words. Because their first response to life is to put it into words, they tend to assume that words are the highest form of art. And they tend to deny that there are some places where words utterly fail, where they are completely useless. And many of these same writers, with their bias towards the word, are completely hopeless about how the word looks on the page. Sure, Courier is a legible typewriter-style font. But using Courier makes your sheaf of poems look amateurish before it's even been read. Remember, printing is a performance.

Just as with those many poets who read their poems in a shoe-gazing monotone, many poets' ideas about typesetting are also bland and monotonous. I've noticed more than once that writers who are clueless about how to read their work in public are equally clueless about its visual presentation. To them all that matters is the words; yet they complain when nobody likes their words as much as they do, never realizing that the way they presented their lovely words was entirely self-defeating.

That's why writers needs designers.

One of the profound lessons we can learn from graphic design is that communication can be entirely wordless, yet incredibly powerful.

—. . .

—It's easy to say what bad design is.

Bad design is simply those choices that get in the way of the experience. They get between the content and the reader or viewer. Things that detract from rather than enhance or support the content. Things that keep you from reading the content. Things that stop you when instead they should keep you moving forward.

Of course the whole grunge typography period in the late 80s and early 90s turned these assumptions about content being blocked on their heads, making illegibility into a positive value. It might better have been called punk than grunge, but I digress. The classic example was David Carson's designs for skater and music magazines, for example Ray Gun. (I still own most of the original run of Ray Gun issues in a box in my basement. They're collector's items now.)

—. . .

—Well, because, once again, the idea that an interview with a band in a music magazine, or a poster advertising a painter's retrospective show, is a problem to be solved is absurd. There's no problem at all. There's the search for a memorable and interesting and exciting way to present those things, so that the reader or viewer gets excited about them, and remembers them. There are lots of ways you can do that, of course. Lots of design ideas, and a whole history of design ideas to draw upon. But where's the problem that needs to be solved? There's no problem.

Making the memorable and exciting poster is what some designers will argue is the solution to the problem. They define the problem as how best to present the content. But there are usually several ways to do that. That's where creativity comes in.

—. . .

—No, designers aren't artists. Not even the famous name-recognition designers. Of course there's overlap in terms of technical skills, and some artists have designed books or magazines, etc. Some designers have also been artists. But the mindset is different. I've heard it described as the difference between the externals (design) and the internals (creative art) of any given artwork or object.

—. . .

—Well, of course there's great design, and bad design, and there's kitsch, and unholy kitsch.

Whenever I'm in a thrift store, passing by racks of really ugly, kitschy little objects, I think to myself, "You know, someone designed that. And they probably got paid to design it." That's food for thought. I wonder if it wouldn't be wise, sort of as a professional inoculation, to require all grad students in design to spend some time in thrift stores reminding them that, you know, that ugly piece of useless material was designed by someone very much like the students in question. It might keep the profession as a whole more properly humble.









On the other hand, now I wish I'd bought those two bronze lobsters. I've already thought of a dozen ways to use them to make new art, or surrealist visual joke photos, and so forth. But I let them get away, one of the few times I've ever regretted not buying something at a thrift store.

Making a Concert Poster 2

I was asked again to make a poster for an upcoming concert, this time for a concert featuring winter solstice, Hanukkah, and Christmas music. Unlike the previous poster made for the same organization, this time out I reverted to my photo-illustration style. The photo-illustration style, as opposed to drawing or painting, is my trademark in illustration and design; it's not the only style I use, but it's one I'm known for.

I chose one of my favorite portrait-oriented (vertically oriented) photographs of the winter snowscape of my small Wisconsin town, and built a poster around it. Here's the image in its B&W version, although for the poster I chose to use the color version, so I could use the blue of the sky as a poster element:



This image is from a series of winter photos made in March 2008 after a heavy snowfall. I often take walks during and after snowstorms, or go out driving in a blizzard, in order to get some of my best winter photos. Thus I once made an illustrated version of Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

One reason I chose this snowscape photo is because of the large snow-covered bushes in the right foreground: I knew I would need a large open area for type, for the concert information, and the snowy bushes would provide space for that. Note that in the finished poster I screened out the detail in the bushes in order to increase the contrast between the type and the background. Legibility requires contrast, so this was necessary.

For this poster, since one of the concert's themes is Hanukkah, which is a festival of Light, I wanted to use candle imagery, as in a menorah, to symbolize the miracle of the temple lamps in Jerusalem. I searched through my photo archives and chose an image I'd made a few years ago, of taper candles on the dining room table, reflecting on the glass of the window at night:



For me this image symbolizes the light in the darkness. I chose it for its suggestion of the menorah candles, but also because it is not literally a photo of a menorah.

I usually like to evoke poetic associations in my illustration work, when possible, and not be too literal. Sometimes the oblique or slightly off-center representation of an idea is far more poetic, and thus far more poetically evocative.

It took a very long time for the client organization to come up with an overall name for the theme of the concert. They finally settled on "Winter Glow," which I am satisfied with because again it's poetically descriptive without being too literal. The struggle about naming the concert was because it had gotten stranded on the deserted island of literalness.

Part of a graphic designer's job is to choose the most appropriate typeface. This is actually a critically important task. All too often designers make choices wherein the typeface overpowers the text, and such choices are often made so that the designer can show off their prowess. It's an ego-choice, rather than in being in service to the text. I believe that graphic designers need to balance humility with their desire to express themselves creatively; not necessarily humility towards the client, but humility in the face of the project itself. It's about making the designed object do its work as well as it can; self-expression comes second.

In the case of this poster, since I was trying to illustrate the idea of "Winter Glow" via a type design that could almost stand as a separate logo, I allowed myself to err on the side of directly illustrating the concept via the type. In effect, I wanted a typeface or typefaces that would showcase the text while also evoking its setting.

There's a well-known typeface called SnowCaps, which consists of block sans-serif type with snow draped on it. This is one of those familiar seasonal typefaces you see pulled out every winter season to be used on posters, TV programs, and so forth. It's become fairly recognizable even to non-designers.

As whimsical as SnowCaps is, though, it didn't entirely satisfy my logo/illustration needs. I ended up using it only for the initial caps for the "Winter Glow" logo/illustration.

For the body text of the logo/illustration, I discovered a marvelous illustrative font called Kingthings Christmas, available via download from Kingthings, the Internet home of UK artist and illustrator Kevin King. I recommend several of his display fonts to your attention, many of which have fascinating elements and details. The aspect of Kingthings Christmas as a typeface that I particularly enjoy is that the lowercase letters appear to be half-buried in snowbanks, with snowflakes falling all around them. Because it contains such rich detail, this is a display typeface best used at large sizes.

So the "Winter Glow" type logo was ultimately made up of a combination of two typefaces. I like the result enormously.



To put the finishing touches on the logo, I used Photoshop's Chrome filter to make reflective outlines that highlight and punch out the edges of the characters. This is layered together with two other colored versions of the logo type.

Throw in the PHMC logo, and the text giving concert dates, times, and ticket info, et voila, a finished poster:


(Click on image to see larger version.)

Making a Concert Poster

I was asked to make a poster for an upcoming concert for Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus in Madison, WI, of which I am a member. It was an interesting project, the process of which I want to describe here by way of example. The process of making the poster itself was interesting. And there are thoughts about being a freelance creative that it brought to mind.


Click on image for larger version

The theme of the upcoming concert (at 7pm, May 22, 2010, at Mills Concert Hall in Madison) is Broadway theater music, and the show is titled Broadway, Our Way. (I had some input on the name of the theme, a few months ago.) I'm not that big on Broadway musicals; I like certain composers' work very much, notably Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, and there are some great songs that have come from Broadway and become jazz standards, as well as standards in the "American Songbook." I've performed in numerous musicals over the years, among my extensive musical concert experience, and have enjoyed myself each time; yet Broadway isn't my Big Thing, and never was, not the way some other genres of music are.

The process of making this poster was different than many other concert posters I've made. In the past, I have often specialized in photo-based illustrative posters, in Photoshop, combining elements that I've photographed, scanned, or drawn in vector software such as Illustrator. The basic elements of this poster, for the first time in a long time, were hand-drawn.

My first decision was to make this an 11x17 poster in landscape (horizontal) format, rather than the usual portrait (vertical) format, because the theme of the program is Broadway theater, and I wanted to show the front of a Broadway stage or movie theater, and build the design around that.

I tried to do a photo-based poster at first. It just didn't work out. It didn't want to happen, and I eventually felt the concept to be stale and stuck. I looked at clip art for inspiration; I went out and photographed some renovated movie theaters in my area, with classic marquees and poster frames and doors and lighting. But it wasn't coming together; it felt stale.

Meanwhile, I had recently seen a wonderful 4-hour documentary on Andy Warhol on PBS, which included some archival film of how he made those large screen-prints (serigraphs) in series: multiple versions of the same image, often with variations in color or detail. What caught my attention was that Warhol had often screened the color fill-ins as underpainting first, over which he printed the black ink of the basic posterized image of, say, Marilyn Monroe. I was inspired to make this concert poster an homage to Warhol, evoking a poster look inspired by his screen-print style.

I chose a color palette of pink, yellow, and green pastels, as the basic background colors, for two reasons: the association of pink with LGBT cultural productions—not least the pink triangle—and because Warhol had often used similar pastel colors for his screen-prints. I like to incorporate these sorts of associative visual puns in my illustration work, adding layers of association and meaning that pun on "insider" cultural knowledge, but can also be seen as purely decorative design elements. It makes more fun for me, even if no one else gets the visual joke.



I drafted the basic poster background elements in pencil, measuring with a ruler, and drawing straight lines with a straight-edge, the image of the front of the theater. I drew the theater marquee, the doors, the poster displays, the sidewalk, the shapes of the front of a theater entrance. I had my basic image. Then I inked over the image, keeping to a closely-matching but calligraphic line of varying thickness, using a Japanese calligraphy brush pen.



Then I put a new sheet of paper the same size paper over the main drawing, and using a very broad sumi-e brush and sumi-e ink, did large splashes of painting, following the basic illustration's forms, but loosely covering them over.

Both sheets, the original fine-line calligraphic drawing and the broad-brush drawing, were scanned into Photoshop, where I colorized them and started adding the posters other elements in layers. I added the type, some other details, made posters for the Broadway shows whose music would be performed during Perfect Harmony's concert program, and added logos, etc. (By the way, the current version of the PHMC logo is one I designed a couple of years ago for the Chorus, in collaboration with Jim Larson and Kyle Richmond.) As a last joking touch, I signed and dated my name and Warhol's in a corner of the finished poster: just to make the homage more obvious.



The clients and many other people have all said that they really like this poster. I'm glad for that.

I'm not jumping up and down with it, exactly, myself, however. My heart wasn't fully in it, I was distracted by some personal health problems during the process, and I was frustrated that my initial photographic conception had not worked out at all. So, this isn't my favorite piece of my own illustration work. Some of it was quite fun, though, and the decision to draw rather than photograph the basic elements was very pleasing; I have been teaching myself to draw over the past few years, and it was a pleasant test of my new skills to make the poster using calligraphy brushes. With that aspect of the final result I am very happy. I hope to play with similar ideas again soon.

(By the way, I hope to see you at the concert!)

•

Some comments now on freelancing, which I think apply whether you're an artist, a writer, or whatever.

A very important rule of freelancing: You can't always satisfy your own creative needs by doing commercial illustration work.

And not everything you do will be a masterpiece. You just have to learn to live with that, and keep doing your own personal work anyway. Do it on the side, after hours, if you must; but keep doing it. The goal of a design or illustration project for a client is to give them what they want—and to do so without betraying your own artistic instincts. When everyone is pleased with the outcome, be satisfied with the job you've done, and accept the praise gratefully.

The professional artist does not linger over might-have-beens, but goes on to the next project with everything that has been learned via successfully completing the current one. You won't always love everything you do—but that's okay, that's normal. Your job is to do the best you can given what you have to work with, and if the client is happy with the finished product, you've done very well indeed.

Another very important rule of freelancing: Don't work for free. You must always receive something in return.

Now, it's okay to do some volunteer work, and donate some of your creativity to causes and/or organizations that you believe in. (Over the years I've donated my creative efforts, and also some artwork, to various AIDS support organizations, the American Cancer Society, and others.) But you need to make it clear that you are donating, and that normally you get paid for your work. Don't be self-important or rude about it; just gently remind people that your creative time and effort is valuable.

I receive numerous emails every year, asking to use one of my photographs, illustrations, or designs. Most recently, for example, I was asked for the use of one of my photos for the cover of a to-be-published book. I responded with my rates for the usage of my artwork, and have not heard back; I do not really expect to. A lot of the requests I get via email are from people I don't know who expect to be able to use my artwork for (almost) free; in most cases, I refuse. I am more than willing for my artwork to be used in whatever project people would like to use it for—and I expect to be paid. You'd pay your lawyer; why won't you pay your artist?

In truth, most of the requests I receive are very nice and very polite, and I respond to them nicely and politely—yet they offer me nothing. In many cases, the person requesting my art for free argues that "It's good exposure for your art!"—well, to be blunt, that's an argument that, when made to any professional and experienced artist, comes across as a request made in bad faith. I don't need more "free exposure," I get plenty of that already. (I'm not saying I've always turned down such requests; it depends a great deal on the nature and purpose of the request.) What I require is that my creative work and artistic skill to be respected—which means I need to be paid.

Now, I may not charge much at all; but I will charge at least a token fee. There is a necessary exchange of value for value, that betokens respect. In the past, when I've let some client talk me into using my work for (almost) free, in many cases I never heard from them again: I never received promised payment, and I never received the copies of the finished book or magazine article which had been promised to me. Well, live and learn. But learn this: Don't let yourself, as a freelancer, be taken advantage of. If you don't ask them to pay for your work, you're showing them that they can abuse you, because you're not respecting your own work enough to charge for it.

For this poster I was asked to design for the Chorus, I was offered a payment in trade. I sometimes accept that, if the client is a non-profit organization that I support. In this case, being a member of the Chorus, I received a few perks in exchange, and also an advertisement in the concert program for my photography work. I find that acceptable payment. Here's a version that ad for the concert program—the creation of which was an entirely separate process: