Fantasy LP Covers

Fantasy LP covers made from my own artwork and photography, and used to both appear in gallery shows, and to promote my own music. Some of these have been printed as 12x12 prints and attached to vintage LP record sleeves found in thrift stores. A couple have been displayed in gallery show openings. At least one was used to promote a new song I have written. Which also gives me the idea to finally record and release an album of my own songs. I'll get around to that soon, I hope, life willing.







This next group of LP covers was made for the opening of a showing of my photographs of Silverwood County Park:

Cabaret 2014 Banner

Just finished designing and illustrating the poster and web banner for the next musical event that I will be part of: Cabaret.

This began with a photo shoot with members of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, I then used several different digital painting methods in combination, to make the main illustration. The titling were made in Illustrator, where I usually do logos, or titling that needs special effects work.

Autumn Arrives

Moonrise over fields, September 2012

Illustrations and illuminations. It's good to celebrate the turning of the Yearwheel. Mabon is the Autumn Equinox, in the old religion on the old calendar. Continuing with explorations of art-making on my digital devices, creating digital paintings and illustrations, and panoramic photo-montages.


Mabon Blessings 2012

Last year I gathered leaves falling from the trees out back in a wicker basket and did a photo shoot with them. This year I took one of these images and painted over it on my iPad, to make this illustration for celebrating the equinox.

I also used some clip art found on the Interweb to make this illustrated poem for the autumn equinox. Fires and memory. Burning piles of fallen leaves. The harvest moon. Cold nights, clear days. All those things that mean autumn in the temperate zones.



Then I went back to my original illustration and made some typographic art from it.



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Autumn is arriving early this year. It's been an extraordinary year for weather, with a drought and a summer full of record heat, and this fall all the leaves are turning a full month early.



The fields are already harvested; due to the strange summer weather the corn crop was stunted and unhealthy, and partially failed, never growing very tall except in some scattered fields. Now are already brown, or plowed, the hay mown and gathered, and everything ready for winter.



The maple trees are already turning bright colors, although some other species are holding on to their green. Until the dryness in the air turns them directly to brown, with no moments of splendor. The fall colors are already half-over though they've barely begun.

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.

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.

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!)

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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: