Cosmicomics Illustration

I was to do one color illustration for the cover, and one black and white inside illustration for Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. We were to choose 2 different stories for our illustrations—my choices were The Form of Space for my cover, and The Dinosaurs for my inside illustration. We were to do these illustrations in the medium(s) of the artist we researched (mine was Anne Yvonne Gilbert).



My inside illustration is done in silhouette in India ink on 3 ply bristol board.









The Dinosaurs is a story about a dinosaur who may be the very last one. This world has been without dinosaurs for so long that they've been almost forgotten. They're only known in the current time as monsters in stories the inhabitants (who seem to have evolved to be only part dinosaur) use to scare each other. No one knows what a real dinosaur looks like, and when the dinosaur comes upon some of the new inhabitants, they accept him into their community without knowing what he is. This illustration shows the dinosaur meeting the son he fathered with one of the new inhabitants.



My cover illustration  from The Form of Space was done in acrylics on Crescent heavy Illustration board. It was then scanned into Adobe Illustrator and the text was added. Pre-critique, the text was black, there was no text box, and the text was not justified.














The Form of Space centers on the thoughts of a man, who, along with another man and a woman, is falling, endlessly, separately, and without any physical contact....or is he?

I rely heavily upon reference material in almost all of my drawings...drawing out of my head is not my biggest strength...

Papercraft

 Paper craft carnage.....


Paper craft...it sounds so simple, and yet.....

Apparently I don't have the kind of mind that can look at one of these designs either flat or assembled, and visualize them the other way around. As Charlie Brown would say....AUGH!!!!!!! I thought if I put a few together, maybe took them back apart, tried to combine some pieces, that I'd figure it out. So far, not so much. I had a vision in my mind that's apparently beyond the limits of my expertise at this point, so I'm back to the drawing board.......


 

OK...so....hours and days later, I sort of got the hang of it, after admitting to myself that I wasn't going to be able to build something curved with my current skills. We were allowed to use pieces of other people's blank patterns, so Octomom is made from pieces of 2 different templates, though I changed the proportions, completely. The Octobabies were made from pieces of 2 blank templates, significantly reduced. I used some paper craft artwork for clothing references, and used Octomom photos for facial references. The Octobabies faces were made by taking Octomom's eyes and mouth & shrinking them down; the mouth was altered and new eyebrows & nose were added. All this was done in Adobe Illustrator, and printed out on HP matte presentation paper. There are a few craftsmanship issues, and I've made a few adjustments to the template since I made this model, but overall, I'm happy with the outcome.

CD and Flyer

I was supposed to get some people together who may or may not be musicians, and create a CD cover and band flyer from collaged images of them, or images pertaining to the message of the band. My people are usually in a band, sometimes as a duo, sometimes not. For the purpose of this project, they're a duo.

These first two pieces are details of choices I played with for the front CD cover. I eventually used the composition in the meadow for the final piece, because the background and color contrast were less distracting in it. The figure and meadow photos were not taken by me, but were used with permission.











I took the background photo for this one. I liked it, but the tree shapes and high contrast just didn't fit with my vision for the cover.





This is the front CD cover without text. Primary area photo with musician, taken by me.











This is the back CD cover without text. Primary area photo by me.

 These pieces are post-critique, but do not have the required text that was included on the critiqued versions. I'm making some corrections from critique suggestions, and will probably be posting those pieces, including the flyer, with the required text. The CD front was created in Adobe Photoshop from 8 different photographs. The CD back was created in Adobe Photoshop from 5 different photographs. No musicians were harmed in this process, but I think one of them got pretty bored.

Memphis in May Chile T-shirt Design

The goal was to prepare a T-shirt design for the Buckman Lab BBQ team. The winning design was printed on T-shirts worn during their participation in Memphis in May's BBQ competition. This was not it, but I had a good time making it.

Drawing #1 is a combination of 2 drawings that were previously presented to Buckman for critique. This combined drawing contains elements from the other 2 pieces (that were specifically singled out by Buckman representatives). It's a graphite drawing on tracing paper, & it was scanned into Photoshop, to edit the composition and size of some of the elements.

Final image, drawn and colored in Adobe Illustrator. The primary images are pigs doing a happy, traditional Chilean Cueca handkerchief dance on the river bluff, with a BBQ grill, the Memphis-Arkansas bridge, and a boat speeding down the Mississippi, to complete the composition. Happy dancing pigs, grilled corn, and a boat ride...what's not to like?