More on this play

Hey look! more art for A Few Good Men!

A pretty final poster image:


Three teaser posters:


A logo design:

Articles about art I like coming soon.

Back home, back to business. I had some time to think over the Few Good Men designs during my travels and decided to try something a bit more bold. Maybe the result is too simple, as it would be printed quite large, but the image might still work as a flier. So here, it's a variation on the 'star field' design from earlier.


As you can see I've had a go putting the lettering together, and I'm quite pleased. Below is another variation that at first I didn't like but which is now growing on me. I splurged and actually bought the fonts but I think it's probably worthwhile to develop a good collection of nice ones.

Hiatus

I'm backpacking around Europe until July 10th, so no updates for awhile. It'll hopefully be a fruitful summer though so keep watching...

More Good Men

Had the final meeting this term for A Few Good men where we settled on the pieces I'll produce over the summer. First there's the two large posters that will go up around 2nd week Michaelmas, one of which will be based on that 'field of stars' image a couple posts back and the other on the image below. I'm going to have to be very careful to make that table work.


Then there's the teaser poster to be distributed 0th week, for which I have no mock-up but it'll be a wide horizontal image with Lieutenant Jessop and his marines lined up with slogans taken from the text above them, such as 'UNIT, CORPS, GOD COUNTRY'. Apparently they've cast a real US marines lieutenant to play the character.

There's also the flier that will have a variation of the teaser on the front and the star field on the back. Then badges, t-shirts and hoodies that will use a a logo based on the star field with a man collapsed on the star set into a roundel. To save some money we're going to use stencils for the clothing, which will look good I think but it means I need to make the stencils and post them to England before I get back.

Finally I'll post a couple reject concepts. At the top is a subtle riff on the Oxford Playhouse logo with a star in the 'O', but they weren't too keen. Below there's another poster layout that was much too busy, and at the bottom we have a totally different idea with a bloody hand smear that didn't win out.

Some magazine stuff

Another 6th week, another Isis. I spent much more time coordinating people and working on the overall look of the magazine than doing illustrations this time but I think it's paid off. Once the issue's been printed and distributed on Friday I'll up a few photos of layouts to show that.

For now, we have the designs that the table of contents, editorial and 'Isis Icons' were laid out on. We were trying to go for a sparse, geometric, modernist look, so came up with some shapes I liked and rendered them in vector. It takes a little time but ideally this kind of stuff would be used throughout the whole magazine.

Above is the left-side table of contents, below is the editorial etc.

I also did a quick illustration for an article on doing a road trip in Oxfordshire. The article was cute, but a bit dull. My illustration follows this.

Hey and guess what, my steampunk illustration ended up being used.

A Few Good Mock-ups

Throwing more stuff together for A Few Good Men, some pieces more finished than others.


I was trying to go for something more simple here, setting up the basic plot point of the marine's death. I think the poster needs more but this might be useful for badges and hoodies (there's a ridiculous advertising budget).


Those are soldiers in the red there. The producer and director liked this one, but it's not quite doing it for me. Gonna noodle with some more variations, and work on the text as it needs a big more weight.


Not sure about the figures but I like using the flag as a landscape with the Guantanamo fence and watchtower on the horizon. A visual counterpoint using the tower and the judge's bench might work too.


This is just a quick test using Sketchup but I'd love to create a more finished version where the individual soldiers would be lit up to spell out the words. Maybe not a great poster but it might go on the website.

That's all for now but I'll be advancing some of these designs in the next few days.

more

Another piece from the same sesh as last time, just letting my hand draw what it wanted. Turns out it wanted to draw robots, babes and batman, which is fine by me.

style test

Colored in some sketches I did this afternoon, mostly as an experiment for a new stylistic direction for Isis.

Also Blogger seems to suck some of the color out of uploaded images. I don't have a solution for that, just try to visualize the greater intensity.

mess about

Tried out some colors on the sketch


Also for fun I tried out using the title as a clipping layer. Feels a bit too cliché but maybe something along these lines, the words do stack well. Wide spacing might work nice, damn if typography isn't hard.

A Few Good Men Roughout

Phwow, another week another essay in the bank. To clear my head of witchcraft and gender history I decided to scribble out some ideas for a few good men. This one emerged and I think it works ok — they want something figurative and bold, with soldiers and flag etc. I think the title in a tall, simple, slender (!), sans-serif font would look good. Yeah!

Gonna try to post more progress stuff like this, keeps the blog from going flat.

Inside cover

A piece of jetsam from the last Isis – this was going to be used as a background for the inside cover and first page but when we finally tried laying it out it just seemed weird and confusing. So, I took the left side and darkened it down to use as as a more subdued first page background and cut out the figures (photo paint-overs) so they could still be used for the Isis Icons section. Sometime in the future I plan to make a more finished piece in this style, as it's a wonderful break just getting to play with color/texture/composition.

Isis Dump

It's been awhile since I last updated but Isis rolled around again so there's a clutch of new art to show. None of the images really stand out to me – I spent so much time just coordinating the other art and design that I didn't really have a chance to push myself. Oh well, they're serviceable enough. Next week I'm going to be doing some more promotion materials for A Few Good Men, which should let me really craft some stuff.

Here's a quick collage for an article on Turkmenistan, using photos taken by the writer. I was pretty lucky the different elements actually worked together as a space so well, though I tweaked the color a bit to bring it together. The background originally had a screen-tone texture I really liked but it made the text difficult to read.

Another full-page background, this time for an article on buildings that were planned but never constructed in Oxford. There was a great picture of a model for the unbuilt zoology tower in a book on the subject, which I used as reference for painting this in-construction version. The basis is a photo I took at the location where it would have been built, over which I rather tediously painted the building.


Here's a very last minute image for an article on 'guerrilla marketing'. Blah I get the feeling I've drawn these same characters a few too many times, kindof retreading the same old solutions. There's not much choice though when you have less than an hour to make a piece.


Oooh dear, oh jeez. This thing came into being sometime between 4 AM and 5 AM the morning of going to print. It was for an emergency piece commissioned to our last editor to fill the obligatory sex article spot. He chose to write about erotic snuggling so there was no choice but to illustrate him in bed with come-hither eyes. I still don't know how I feel about it.

a head

A head from my head! It started as a doodle then I spent a couple hours on it.


The other night I did a sick painting of a space girl and a man in a trenchcoat but Photoshop crashed. Fuck THAT.

doodles

Just messing about tonight.

A Few Good Men

Recently I was passed on the job to make an image for a production of A Few Good Men in Oxford. The people wanted something sort of military related, particularly involving a play on the iconic Iwo Jima image, though I tried some other ideas out too. Here are some quick sketches I did for them:
A bit cliché but I had to bang 'em all out in an evening.

Well the guys were still pretty into the Iwo Jima idea, but wanted the memorial itself to feature and suggested that perhaps the flag could be falling with the soldiers trying to catch it. With those orders I started on the final image, slowly rendering a realistic image. About halfway though though I sat back and had a look at what I had so far and decided it was terrible and boring, so in a scribbly rush I made the composition more dynamic and the style much looser, before tightening it all up a bit. I don't love the final image but I think it does the job and should read well when printed small on a playbill.

Phil Hale

This evening's project was a copy of a Phil Hale painting, which I chose for its relative simplicity. It took about 5 hours, though I can still spot a lot of discrepancies.

Steampunk

This was actually the first piece I did for Isis, for an article on steampunk that got shifted to the second issue. Well, it was cut again this time and it probably won't ever happen now, so here's the piece. It was designed to take up the whole page, with the white area left for text. Pretty dorky illustration but it is steampunk after all.


Another note: I used Google SketchUp for the first time to do a mock-up of the steam/bike/plane contraption, which was pretty invaluable.

sketches

Felt like painting tonight so I opened up Painter and had a play.


An environment, trying to practice that though I should really work from some reference. Hm, I like it enough.


edit: Painter is weird with the color profiles it assigns so the colors look a little too saturated here but oh well. 

Getting Published

Around 2:00 AM and with not many hours before the Isis had to go to print we realized there was no illustration for an article on getting published. So, I went off and had a poke around some old sketches I'd never used and found a rough version of this guy, which I combined with an old photo I had and messed around for awhile. In a couple hours I had this piece, it's a bit rough but I think it works.

River Isis

A very quick painting used as the background for an article on the river Isis. Quite boring, the colors are different than in real life.

Hot Chip

A couple illos making up a double page spread for an interview with Hot Chip. The idea behind this piece is that they are playing some tasty notes and having a really good time.

Zooplankton

I made this image yesterday for an article on zooplankton. Originally I wanted to go for something more bold and graphic, as I'm trying to push my style more in that direction, but really I was just too fond of the image of all those cute little critters floating around. It was almost too cute in the original colors so I made them a bit more subdued. Also the sort of realism of the lens surrounding them and the out-of-focus stuff in the background helps.

When I put the page together I plan to add a crumpled paper texture and the title in a big blocky font I have in mind.

Ink and Paint

So recently there was a photography competition at Lincoln College, and encouraged by Josephine and without enough time to come up with a new idea, I decided to try some more experiments with dropping white paint into glass containers of inky water. She insisted that though the theme was portrait I could really enter anything, so I collected the materials and went to it. This process depends a lot on luck and careful refining, meaning I had to keep trying over and over again and reassembling the whole set up. After one night's work I decided to stop; taking one good image is much harder than using pieces of several as I had in the past, and I was increasingly unsure whether my piece would be accepted by the judge. It seems I was right, I saw her disqualify a great image because the figure wasn't looking towards the camera enough (and hence wasn't a portrait). In any case, here's one photo I was pretty happy with, lacking a bit of photoshop tweaking.


And here's an old Abecedarian comic where I had used the technique last time:

Think Tanks

This illustration (once again for the last ISIS issue) began life in a hurry when we realized we were short a full-page image and the deadline was looming. I basically took the first idea I had and went with it, ending up with a sort of finished looking thing in a couple hours. When I went back to it though my skin crawled – the colors were absolutely god awful, and the quick photoshop brush I had used looked terrible. I slowly tweaked the image over the remaining time, and the result is that the image looks a bit too painterly, not strong or graphic enough to fit the magazine. Oh well, it's a reminder that an hour planning will save countless later.

Here we are, with those horrid colors:


Some tweaking, the colors are less jarring:



The colors are pretty much fixed:


Prettying up the brushwork in Painter 9, and Josephine came up with the orange/red background solution as I thought they were clashing too much before: