I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Rejected from the Harold Poster… this look is a little stiff. I’m redoing it.

I’m in DC this week. I had a pretty crappy week in NY, saw I could get a bus ticket on the Peter Pan for $23 one way (to compete with the Chinatown and Hasidim busses—for comparison, the Amtrack is $150)... got on the bus Saturday morning and left.

My dad retired last week and is around the house for the first time. He supplimented his birthday Video Ipod with a brand new iMac which neither parent knows how to use yet. My family has been PC users since 1990 (at at work years before that). My main activity has been loading in all his Operas on to iTunes. I’ve only done 1/3 of them.

I’m not sure how to associate his iPod with the new computer without wiping it. Actually, I’ve resigned myself to losing all the old tracks from the old computer. I don’t have an Ipod… I don’t know anything about them.

I also am watching a lot of “makeover” shows on TV.

Soviet era candy spot featuring rockbilly-esque pop and creepy Santa Claus recieving presents…those Reds got it backwards.

This puts me in the mind of my old favorite Lambrett-Twist (previously posted)

I started a Flickr account just for posting design and illustration projects too.

I’m hoping to get some networking going on and Flickr seems to be where the design nerds are (instead of MySpace, which I’m not into).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nosweet/

Right now, it’s sort of a “greatest hits” + new stuff. I’ll organize it later.

I recycled a lot of the elements from the killed “oak tree” concept into a pro bono Channel 102 job. Not 100% in love with this one yet. The elements on the left side look a little thin.

Until I get some paying work I’ll be working on that Harold poster and putting it up for sale on CafePress…

The producers of “an oak tree” have just killed the job; the author/actor of the show insisted they use the UK art (designed by his wife) with no compromises (or improvements).

I’ll probably put up the poster I had done so far on the site anyway, since I spent two days on it.

I need to get some design work fast to pay Oct rent.

The clip art isn’t quite right, the somnambulist looks more relaxed than entranced.

I had an out of the blue call to do publicity materials for the Perry St Theatre’s next play. I wish I had quoted them a higher fee, but at least its work.

I’m adapting the play cover/UK poster for the play, “An Oak Tree,” so some of the “figuring out what they want” work is done for me. The director and producer contacted me after getting a reference from a producer’s office that I had done “Tails” and “Laughing Liberally” for (I don’t have “Laughing Liberally” on the site since it’s not one I think of as a great design success, but had to be approved by a panel—design by committe).

The Perry St. team liked the cards I did for UCB LA and NY with a day-glo circus look and also the sloppy-on-purpose Four Faces of Eve card and wanted a type treatment along those lines.

They want to continue using the 19th Century engraving of a hypnotist and a subject, but the image is so degraded in the original it looks like it was taken from the web and blown up 500%. I’m trying to find a similar image in a Dover print book, but no luck so far. I may have to collage it from a couple cuts.

The pink and lime color scheme was also on the UK poster… only there they called it a colour scheme (pronounced sheem to match the Brit “shed-oo-al”)

the first steps

I think I like this drawing style for the scene circles… white outline. Maybe with some shading matching the background color of the beat. I drew the thumbnails very quickly and with a mouse (it’s tiny in this preview so you can’t make it out)—a sad man with falconer’s glove and a hawk conversing with a little girl with a giant lollipop.

If that image describes 7 of your 9 scenes in a Harold (as depicted in this chart)... it’s not a very good Harold.

When I take a design job, I never know how long its going to take. I’ve been lucky working with performers who usually have some idea of what they want (having written the show its going with) and then with a few tweaks, it’s out the door.

Sometimes, that isn’t the case.

I’ve wanted to do some sort of edu-tainment graphic project with instructional content related to improv basics.

At first I was going to do something that was more a joke, on the confrontational/accusatory model of a Jack Chick tract with a title like “Your Improv Sucks” or “Bad Improvisers Go To Hell.” I still may do that, but the prospect of hand-drawing all those tiny panels (saying “HAW HAW!”) and looking up Bible quotations to site is too much work.

I do really like the Chris Ware/McSweeneys hyper-precise aesthetic of arrows and infographics, so I started doing a poster explaining a Harold, that is simultaneously arcane but accurate. (My palate is sampled on the left.)

I need to write copy and do spot illustrations in the circles representing the scenes themselves (tinted to match which beat they’re in). I need to find a better way to represent “connections” in the third beat.

I think I might do another poster on the elements of a scene, modeled on a child’s educational poster I had in college of “The Parts of A Tooth” mixed with my kitten metaphor on the nature of game.

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UPDATE: The Illustrator file of this project has mysteriously become “corrupted,” so I lost it and have to start over from scratch. Ay yi yi.

Channel 102 has never done any promotion at all. There’s been a sudden upswing in interest in raising the profile of the site and the screenings and I volunteered to make business card sized microflyers that would be equally useful for show creators to promote their own shows and for fans to pass on to their friends.

I also still hate the 102 logo… I’d like to do a new one that doesn’t at all reference “TV Guide”

I used two of Pantone’s colors of Spring 2007 as well. I wanted to be all trendy-like. It’s Fashion Week.

Rough sketch on paper, which I don’t usually do for Illustrator-only pictures, but action poses are tricky. The brief was it should be retro-inspired and like the last scene of a screwball love story, “running away from the church” type deal. The background should refer to the look of the venue, Belvedere Mansion in the Hudson Valley (I had a postage stamp sized photo of the place to work from).

First rough pass of converting to Illustrator, tracing the sketch and building things from simple shapes. The girl’s face is generic; the hands are potatoes. Did this in one 12-hour insomniatic jag.

Flowers and champagne… and hands.

Biggest change is the background… most of the details are covered by the characters there, but every cornice, column, and moulding I could make out in the photo I added. The girl’s leg is kind of disappearing into the background unfortunately.

Waiting for feedback now before making any more changes.

Added: The client dropped some comments, leading to this revision, late in the day:

This flyer actually won’t be finished; the show it’s for has been cancelled/postponed indefinitely, but I did most of the art so I want to post it—

I’ve finally gotten another commission after the slowest summer I’ve ever had. It’s a wedding invitation.

This ones going to run next week I think, in the NY Onion

Three business cards from the archives.

I dusted them off and altered the email addresses/phone numbers so I could use them as portfolio samples without endangering the privacy of the owners.

I just realized that as certain friends become more and more famous, I have to be more sensitive about what I put on the internet (like, photographs or personal information). Or… I could also become a blackmailer.

I’ve had a shitty past couple of days but rather than hash it out here I’ll put up a bunch of random art I found or made in the past month.

Someone should start a group or do a show called “Astronaut.” Here is your logo. (From an early 80s pinball machine, recolored)

These eyes were creepy. I started doing a face to go with them, but scrapped the portrait and started over.

This ad ran in the Los Angeles edition of the Onion.

Q. What are sensory integration cookies?

A. Sensory Integration Cookies for Puppets that Swallow are pretend cookies made out of varying textures designed to stimulate tactile awareness when children explore them. For children who have sensory defensiveness, the cookies are a nice way to allow them opportunities to explore at their own pace and will.

Just in time for Homeland Security’s blockbuster new prohibition on “gels and liquids” in carry-on luggage, I’m leaving for Austin, TX this afternoon. I’m out for a wedding and an improv workshop. Back on Tuesday.

Neil and I went to see The General yesterday. We both had seen it before, but I was a frownie-face for the lacking of “more jokes.” That’s what I will say about all film classics… needs more jokes. We both appreciated Buster’s unmotivated “baseball slide” whenever he was running up to something.

The General is a comedic (well, slightly comedic… more jokes!) take on an actual event of the Civil War where a Confederate train was stolen by the Union to disrupt supply lines. Buster was a life-long train enthusiast and got the idea to make a Civil War set comedy after seeing the flashback scene in Grandma’s Boy... that’s right, the Adam Sandler produced granny-fucking “comedy” (more jokes!). (Actually, I wonder if Sandler named this piece of shit with the same title as Harold Lloyd’s movie to get back at his estate for suing him over plagurizing The Freshman in The Waterboy. Full disclosure: I hate Adam Sandler.)

Neil also mentioned that The General is a primary (or primary-and-a-half) source for Civil War research since it’s made in living memory of Civil War battles, while the photographs of the time only depict aftermath(s) of battles.

I still had Movie Crazy at home and thought it was retarded. Kirk was into it and had seen it before. But I discovered a weird connection… the credited director of this was Clyde Bruckman, who also directed The General, who also did gags for the Three Stooges and was considered this great gag writer back in the day(I also read that Buster Keaton wrote gags for the Marx Brothers after the sound era, but that’s neither here nor there), but by the ‘30s was an out of control drunk and the only person who gave him work was Harold Lloyd, who insisted on giving him credit even when he was too wasted to actually do anything. Ironically… or tragically, his last film job was contributing gags to this other movie but all his material was lifted from Movie Crazy and Harold sued him (a family legacy of lawsuits).

Broke and bottomed-out, he borrowed a gun from Buster Keaton, ate in a restaurant and realizing he couldn’t pay the bill, he went into the bathroom and shot himself (other versions have him shoot himself in the phone booth).

His name was used in an episode of The X Files (Peter Boyle played him), but the character isn’t meant to be him, as far as I can tell.