Stayed up until about 7:30… matching Kirk out in LA hour for hour as he’s doing Oscar crap for WireImage.
I knocked out this—
—and then fell asleep in my clothes for a couple hours.
I did the front from 11 – 2 PM.
Waiting for corrections. I have an audition tomorrow and a dentist appt on Thursday.
Trying to bust out the KFM cover in one daring all night jag. I’d stab someone for a 300 dpi shot of Johnny Reno’s face right now, the only thing I need to sign off on the fucking 100+ hours back design.
I went through the Unlovables tour diary and only came up with some precious images of people I used to be romantically linked with.
Fuck fuck fuck.
I want this done so I can move on to the fucking AP Test Booklet shit by Wednesday.
http://www.starbunz.com/gallery/babypics
Sure, when a BABY has an animal face on its crotch it’s CUTE…
I don’t think I’ve been saturated by enough Anne Geddes to be into this. It seems creepy to me… like training for baby furries.
And its called ‘Starbunz”
I don’t write often enough. I need to get in the regular habit.
This just in… I’m obsessed with Project: Runway. I hadn’t seen it before yesterday, when there was a marathon. We mysteriously have Bravo now. I watched 5 episodes in a row and ironically, before realizing we had Bravo, read all the online synopses that very morning.
When I got back from teaching class (having had to tear myself away from the Postal Uniform judging), they were re-running the final episode. As soon as it ended, it came on again. They must have shown it three times in a row. Way to eat up programming hours.
Austin Scarlett looks like a martian.
Yesterday, I moved on to the back. Still waiting for the actual copy for it, so this is filler. I traced the left hand border and laid in the 3-D image of the “line up,” the only photo taken specifically for the album. The right side will have 3 or so smaller 3-D vignettes of 3D show photos.
Because they weren’t taken with a 3D camera (or two cameras aligned, taking pictures simultaneously), I have to viewmaster it… cutting up the areas of the photo into planes and shifting the red-blue to make some come out and some recede. I jerryrigged a way to do this when I was in high school, just fiddling with photoshop controls, but I’ve largely forgotten how I did it. Right now I’m making three layers and turn the contrast up on the red and blue layers and setting the “fill transparency” to only affect cyan/yellow+magenta layers respectively. Setting the opacity to “darken” only seems to help. Now, if this still works when it prints, that will be the test. Working on the screen is only half the battle.
This Dutch site will make 3D anaglyphs from 2D pictures for many euros… their examples are pretty cool though. The Tintin one is particularly viewmastereque.
Anaglyph Pals
http://home.att.net/~jrpollo/ana.html
Another day of work—
I have edited my illustration section and did a “paper edit” of my design section… spinning off a CD and logo section and dropping half of what’s in there now. I haven’t be able to carry it out yet because I’ve gotten murmurs that the Kung Fu Monkeys 7” is getting ready to drop. Or hit the street. Or go to press. Or what have you.
I made a list of all the CD/7” art I’ve done, and there’s a fucking lot of it for someone who doesn’t actively seek it out. I haven’t been pally-pally with the rock and roll kids for like 2 years, but Jonnie Whoa-Oh still hires me out at least once a year. I also did a bunch of stand up CDs that I had forgotten—Marc Maron, Mike Birbiglia, and Matt Besser’s “May I Help You Dumbass” (which had the P. Bagge cartoon cover… it was just layout from me)—and probably was pretty forgettable.
The KFM 10th 7” “Electric Tangerine Smile: Shindig Volume 3 in 3D” was recorded last spring, I think, in LA and then was remastered three times and those master tapes lost and then found again and yet again remastered and all before I got a “soft-hire” from James to do the art for it like ‘Would you have time to do this?” and I said “Gladly” and then it went nowhere for 6 months. I did the center labels in December or so and then heard nothing of it except murmurs that something was wrong with the pressing or the pressing plant or so on…
I’m incorporating two divergent concepts on the art. The songs are Archies-gone-psychedelic and James requested a parody cover of the Zombies’ “Odessey [sic] and Oracle,” which is a good injoke for the record collecting nerds but an absolute nightmare of a design. Chunky acrylic paint + hash bender = this cover. The hardest part though was finding pictures of it to copy. All of the web-ready versions are tiny and the colors blurred out. Tons of people offered to give me the CD reissue booklet of it, but I figured that would still be tiny and hard to work from. I asked around for anyone who had the original 12” platter, but then Mike Faloon (of Go Metric and a former KFMer) offered a reissue 12”, which I didn’t even know existed, to work from and mailed it out. Lucky da!
The colors of the 12” on my desk are extremely different from this shitty little JPG, so that’s been my main reference for the labor-intensive parody (at right). I’ve been working whole evenings for three days now and this is as far as I’ve gotten. I made an executive decision to put the name of the band where the Zombies put their title, because of the length of the title. I think I have to draw the letters by hand and then scan them in and trace them; organic curves that look appropriately chunky and hippish are hard to manage solely digitally.
I’ve started replacing the figures on the original, who all seem to be paint-by-number adaptions of snippets from classic paintings or old tymey photographs (Terry Gilliamesque) with the KFM cartoon style. The last album they did was the split with JV which I did an all cartoon cover for. I can’t find a file of it; it must have been left on the Modern Humorist computer (I did that cover on my work computer—after hours—since I didn’t have a home one at the time). I found this weird thing though—must have been a practice one:
Now the back cover is for the label’s concept of the album being in blue-red 3d and that the collector would buy a red 7” and a blue 7” of the album and use them as 3D glasses to see the art come alive. This is a good sales tactic, but practically, won’t work. Or it will be a long shot, really, since the blue/red vinyl is unlikely to be true-blue and true-red that would make the 3D images, which I will be assembling extremely amatuerishly, on the back. Still, I will press on. In the Art Chantry book (Some People Can’t Surf available on Amazon) he talked about making banners for an Urban Outfitters store campaign in overlapped red and blue. UO passed out 3D glasses because they looked like 3D, but they didn’t do anything… just gave people a headache. That’s probably how the KFM: ETS 7” back will go.
I am in the process of redoing my whole design site nobodyssweetheart.com this week. I hadn’t changed the “face plate” since July of last year. It still said “summer” in the corner.
Yesterday I put up the front page, with a pterodactyl on it. All of the rollovers work. The last front page I did, with a “lucky cat” on it, I never actually fixed—half of the rollovers worked and half lead to blank pages. Very rush job.
I did the pterodactyl in one day, from sketch to finished version. I didn’t use any photos for reference so it’s loaded with paleontological fallicies. At least one by design – I put a long and spade-ended tail on a usually un-tailed, crest-headed Pterodactyl.
Evolution {tee hee} of the Idea:
Today I did some of the internal pages: archive, projects, and websites (which hadn’t changed since sometime in 2002). I started making a list of what portfolio pieces I want to scrap and what new ones I want to put up.
I will even link this blog to the main page, for eyes other than Will Hines to see.
Should I get this?
rentanime.com?
The site looks like one that might be the next Urban Fetch and collapse overnight. It also has a lot of widgets on its website that make me turn up my nose… like the gen-Y popup quizzes of “Who’s your favorite character in Miami Guns?!” on the side bar instead of useful things like when DVD 9 of The Twelve Kingdoms will come out or maybe English vs. Japanese title, cast lists… anything that would make me want to rent it.
They also have a “click to view cover art” which is something Netflix lacks, but the popup window of the cover art is the same thumbnail-sized image as you clicked on to view it. What’s the fucking point?
Despite their claim that they have ever anime DVD, they don’t carry The Gokusen 2: Kumiko’s Way despite the fact I’ve seen it in stores. For shame, RentAnime.com… You must do the the only honorable thing and hack off your pinky and present it to the boss. Me. I’m the boss.
Jim Flora Art. com is up and all-but-finished, I think. The Flora Children, who commissioned the site, have various demands about what the site needs, foremost among them placement on Google, which I can’t do anything about.
I’m particularly happy with the background in the internal pages… cut and cobbled together out of Flora’s painting “Sweets & JJ Johnson.” It’s nigh-seamless.
Month two of my semi-secret Blog.
Money troubles are still all the rage. I applied for and GOT a new credit card… my very own AMEX BLUE… which I meant to call in and get two months ago. Since my old trusty workhorse Mastercard is giving me the cold shoulder over 3… 4 months of unpaid bills, I decided I needed a change. I’ll still pay it off, but won’t use it anymore. Luckly my wonderful new fair-haired AMEX BLUE gave me my number right away so I could set my NETFLIX back to work after two weeks of down time. (Holy God! I need to check in on what’s happing to the teens of Boys Over Flowers!)
I need to make some doctors appointments and call up some temp agencies. That was my goal for this week and I already fumbled my Monday and Tuesday over a horrible freelance job. This same company fucked me over Xmas – New Years with the first half of this commission. When they came calling last week with another, my urgent financial need dictated I take it and my benefit-of-the-doubt suggested that maybe the problems with the last job had to do with it all occuring over the Christmas-Boxing Day- New Years nexus. This job was even more poorly communitated and assigned… there’s a subtle but important difference between a “rush” job and an “instantaneous”one. Meaning if you need 50 paragraphs of text laid out by Monday… don’t send it to the designer on Monday at 2:00 in the afternoon.
UCB assigned a ton of stuff in the last couple of weeks, so I think I can cover most of my outlaying debts right now.
