Our Bodies, Our Bikes: Part One

Ms. Elly Blue, femininst bicycle zinester and awesome small-press publisher, invited me to create the cover for her upcoming book, Our Bodies, Our Bikes. (Just a few days left to fund the project!)

We agreed that it would be inspired by the awesome tricks that bike dance groups like the Sprockettes and the Derailleurs perform.

Having a team of people engaged in the same pose was a great opportunity to allude to diversity of experiences in the book.

Not to mention the themes of interdependence and the importance of supporting each other.

Progress! But wait, is this looking to static? Too well-balanced? Do we need more dramatic tension?

I suggested a twist of Nude Descending a Staircase. Elly suggested a dose of Laocoön. Oh hey, says I, there's this neat French statue of Hercules wrestling a giant snake at the Portland Art Museum right now. Field trip!

Sketched while the baby was awake...

...and then sketched when the baby finally fell asleep.

With that inspiration, the bicycle acrobats are revisited.

Feather boa stands in for the snake, of course. Better! A future post will have the color version--stay tuned.

Turkey Dioramas

As I worked on the Mushroom Festival poster this year, I found myself wresting with the relative scale of things. Turkeytail mushrooms are about 7 cm wide, while a wild turkey is at least a meter long. How best to show them both in one image, knowing that the smaller mushrooms need to be the center of attention?

I took a sheet of foam core and cut out a tree branch and a turkey approximately to scale, and then covered the tree branch with paper mushrooms. Then it was diorama time in the front yard!

 

Even with crude, out-of-focus photos, this exercise helped me a lot with my experiments in composition. From there, I did a few very rough color mock-ups of possible poster layouts in Photoshop.

Sending these rough ideas to the festival committee, the response was overwhelmingly positive for the three-turkey parade in the distant background of the tree branch. Hurrah! Next post, I'll go into the details of how I took that crude scribble and turned it into the final poster art.

T-Shirt Ideas

The poster design for the Wildflower Festival always gets converted into a t-shirt design as well. I often find that starting with a simplified set of colors that would translate well to screen printing helps me make some of the big decisions about tone and contrast, which then inform the more elaborate art for the poster. Here is a record of the day's experiments! * El diseño para el cartel del Wildflower Festival siempre se convierte en un diseño para camisetas, también. Para mí, trabajar con colored limitados que se traducen bién a serigrafía es útil para hacer los decisiones fundamentales sobre el tono y el contraste, lo que guía el arte mas detallado del cartel final. ¡Aquí hay mi documentación de los experimentos de hoy!

Bikes in Space in Progress!

I was delighted to be invited to create the cover for Taking the Lane Volume 10: Bikes in Space! The editor, Ellie Blue, described by mission thusly: "I envision a two-color cover that depicts a super dramatic feminist bicycle beyond-the-atmosphere showdown in the fine tradition of pulp sci fi covers..."  So I busted out the sketchbook and started goofing around. * Fue un gran placer ser invitado a crear el imagen para la cubierta del libro de Taking the Lane Volume 10: Bikes in Space! (¡Bicicletas en el espacio!) Elly Blue, la editora, describió mi missión así: "Imagino una cubierta en dos colores, mostrando una confrontación feminista y super-dramatica, en bicicleta y más allá de la atmósfera, en la tradición divertida de las revistas 'pulp.'" Agarré mi libro de dibujar y empecé a divertirme.

I came up with three ideas that interested me, and I did simple thumbnail sketches to share them wtih Elly.* Llegué a tres ideas que me interesaban, y los compartí con Elly con dibujos muy simples.

Elly decided that the space-shark showdown was the most fun and dramatic. You can see how I developed this idea in the slideshow below. All the art was drawn in Photoshop. * Elly decidió que la confrontación con los tiburones era lo más divertido y dramático. Puedes ver cómo desarollé la idea en la serie de imagenes que sigue. Todo fue dibujado usando Photoshop. 

"Bikes in Space" should be coming out at the end of April 2013--assuming that we can get the rest of the funding for the project by March 23. (Now's your chance to help!) * "Bicicletas en espacio" debe ser publicado a fines de Abril de 2013--si podemos lograr algunos fondos más para publicarlo. (¡Tú puedes ayudar aquí!)

Idea-Gathering for Wildflower Festival Posters

It sounds like the official Wildflower Festival posters are going to start appearing around the Eugene/Springfield area of Oregon this weekend! To celebrate, more preliminary sketches from that project--when we were still trying to decide what species of bird, and what species of butterfly, would work best. Ideas, measurements, data, doodles.

Some of those quick drawings of birds singing their hearts out are so funny to me. Makes me think of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, where the song sparrow bursts into a rousing chorus of "On Top of Spaghetti..."

4/22/12 Edited to add: Realizing folks may not have followed the link at the top to see the final poster in all its purple glory, will include that image here. Yay!

Wildflower Season

Mount Pisgah Arboretum invited me to do the poster art for their Wildflower Festival again this year. The event, which is scheduled for May 20, 2012, is always a delightful one--great music, great food, great people, and hundreds and hundreds of local wildflowers with botanists galore to tell you all about them.

The featured flower on the poster this year is the riverine lupine, Lupinus rivularis. Since I am such a fan of talking about sketching as a process, here are some of hidden, early layers in the Photoshop file that show me doodling rough shapes and colors before settling in on the final arrangement.

Similarly, the yellow-rumped warbler went through a lot of different poses and refinements before it ended up in its final state.

Keep your eyes open; volunteers will be putting posters up all over the Eugene/Springfield area soon!

More posts about creating posters for festivals at Mount Pisgah Arboretum:

• Lobster Mushroom
• Monkeyflowers
• Witches's cap with banana slug
• California oatgrass

Lines, lines, lines

I'm working on the Wildflower Festival poster, developing the delightfully complex layers of leaves and stalks and flowers that make up the lupine shrub. I'm at the stage where most of the line-work is done, but I need to look it over and tidy things up: cleaning up any wobbles, adjusting line weights, and making sure that things are overlapping correctly--none of the leaves that are in the back should be drawn on top of a stem or a flower that should be in the front, of course.

Which makes me remember a book that I enjoyed as a child: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. I enjoyed the story as a child, but I also remember being startled by the illustrations. They are lovely line drawings by Beth and Joe Krush. The illustrators use what, to me, was a totally startling and even rebellious approach: they didn't fuss with planning out the foreground/background relationships too much, so that you can see the lines of stuff in the background right through the stuff in the foreground.

See how you can see the edge of the table right through the tiny man's legs? And you can see the edge of the bed right through the table? And you can see the lines of the bedsheet, as well as the chamber-pot, right through the cane?

Scandal! Or perhaps a clever way to hint that this is all in one's imagination? Or perhaps just a really fun, anti-uptight approach to line drawings? Hats off the to Krushes for being starting and delightful in a way that has stuck in my head since elementary school.

(More images from The Borrowers. Seriously, it's worth a pop by the library to revisit this one.)

All right, back to work for me.

A Flock of Butterflies

Working on the poster art for the Wildflower Festival at Mount Pisgah Arboretum. Amused by the flock of butterflies on the screen, as reference photos.

I'm trying out the spring-loaded nib for my Wacom tablet for part of the line work. It started out feeling much more fluid to draw with, but as the night creeps on, the responsiveness of the nib seems to be amplifying my wriggly-handed exhaustion. To bed, then, with visions of butterflies dancing in my head.