And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.
Just a small commission to recreate the Lorax, a cryptid who was truly ahead of his time, so far ahead of his time that it was 35 years between the publication of the original source material and the film version (retitled An Inconvenient Truth) starring former future United States President Al Gore as the Lorax. And that film was also ahead of its time, and no one wanted hear the Lorax’s message then either, and now the world is on fire. And I don’t even have a truffula seed.
Tra-la-la. We knew what we were doing 100 years ago and we could see the effects 20 years ago when we still had a chance to fix it and now it’s too late. Tra-la-la.
Here’s a delightful little commission I did for the writer Heidi Bell, for the cover of her collection, Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse and Other Stories, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, October 2024.
The way it was explained to me, one of the stories features a critter that Bell refers to as a gopher, and thus the designer chose a gopher as one of the images for the cover. But as it turns out, it’s not a gopher. Bell sent me a picture of the animal to which she was referring and I ran it through Google image search, and learned about 13-lined ground squirrels, which, in some parts of the US, are colloquially/regionally/demotically called gophers.
Perhaps coincidentally, the gopher picture chosen by the designer was drawn in a style very similar to work I’ve done in the past. After looking at the original gopher drawing and 50 photos of 13-lined ground squirrels, the work began.
On my first attempt I made his tail WAY TOO FLUFFY, so I had to erase it and start again, but otherwise it went smoothly. I am still getting used to my new computer, which has some odd glitches that I am working around for now because I have no idea how to address them (if I set the stylus down in the upper left quadrant of the screen, it makes random dots in other parts of the screen, but I can’t draw, although if a line starts in another part of the screen and continues into the upper left quadrant it works fine). I was so used to the old Wacom that drawing directly on the screen still feels weird, but I’m getting acclimated.
Also, the stylus that came with this computer apparently runs on batteries? Which died an hour after I started using it? And rather than live at the mercy of technology that could betray me at any vulnerable moment in that manner, I decided to work with a capacitive stylus. And rather than actually go out and buy a capacitive stylus, I have just been using some random pen with a little rubber nub at the end that doubles as a capacitive stylus. I got it for free at some festival over a decade ago. It has an advertisement for a private k–12 school on the side. It’s an extremely inelegant solution, but it works. It works much better than when I had to draw 3 mosquitoes with my finger on a touchpad last year.
I think it’s the exact sort of complication that helps you bloom in adversity.
This is another commission that I drew quite some time ago but didn’t have permission to share until now, and it is the map of the fictional town of Whiteheart and environs as described in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s forthcoming (WW Norton, January 2014) novel, The Waters, which is an excellent novel that you should pre-order from you local independent bookstore or library.
As for the map, it took me a goodly time to figure it out. Originally she asked if I could do it in the style of the famous “View From 9th Avenue” New Yorker cover, and I did start out with a more conscious imitation, but as the project progressed, it sort of expanded in all kinds of direction that took it further and further away from that aesthetic (including changing from a portrait to a landscape orientation). Plus, to fit the aesthetic of the novel, I needed to fit a lot of plants and animals. And the roads and the sizes of things and their relationship to other things grew murky. I just had to make choices and roll with them and I’m all in all pretty pleased with the result, but also I wish it could have been twice as big and a little more technically accurate. There are so many more things I could have drawn.
Fun anecdote: in early drafts, a raven appeared in the top right of the map, but the raven didn’t make the final edit of the story, and the very last change I was asked to make was to replace him with some mosquitoes. Hilariously, following a series of events that began with me getting COVID, my MacBook could no longer pair with my Wacom tablet, and I was under deadline…so I drew those mosquitoes with one finger, using the touchpad. Do not recommend. I ended up replacing the MacBook with a Lenovo Yoga 9i, which is a far superior machine. The keyboard of that MacBook was a crime against Apple customers. It was literally an impediment to writing.
Anyway, this map, in a slightly altered configuration, will theoretically serve as the frontispiece of the novel (I say theoretically, because it did not appear in the ARC, and I believe things when I see them) which should be a great feather in my cap. Typically, major publishers only work with in-house artists, but Bonnie Jo went to bat for this map, and as far as I know, it will be there.
if you’re like me, after you accomplish something, you completely erase it from your memory banks because my brain only allows me to recall egregious mistakes. Doesn’t want me to get puffed up and egotistical, I suppose. So I completely forgot about this kickass commission I drew at some time in the misty past, like August or September. It was a birthday present for the client’s partner, and I promised not to share it until said partner’s birthday, which is today!
Happy Birthday, Cam!
The client wanted a design that reflected her partner’s gaming tag, and, if I could fit it in, his zodiac sign. Admittedly, that scorpion didn’t make things easy: scorpions are small and covered in fidgety details in comparison to nice, chunky design elements like giant saguaros and skulls. I had to draw that little dude like 5 times before I was comfortable with him but he came out pretty cute and a little bit dangerous in the end.
In reality, the scorpions around here are itty bitty, like an inch or 2 long, but mature saguaros are like 40 feet high, so everyone got the Alice in Wonderland treatment.
If you follow this blog, you know I can work in many styles and am always thrilled to collaborate with clients on projects like this. Design work starts at $300 for this kind of logo.
Well, I know nothing whatsoever about live sound engineering, but I do know how to draw things that people describe to me, especially if, like this client, they very helpfully say things like, “Make the logo look like this Velvet Underground album cover,” and then also send me a picture of the album cover. But I didn’t make it look too much like the album cover to avoid a repeat of the time I got a DMCA takedown notice for a design in which one of my original characters cosplays as Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top. I thought that was very unfair. Anyone can wear a knit hat and sunglasses and a very, very long beard and the comic was quite specific in identifying it as NOT Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, but as someone simply dressing like him (against their will, even; the comic ends with the character deciding to shave), plus parody is protected speech.
However, as I point out in this comic, Fair Use only applies to people who can afford copyright lawyers, and even though I’m pretty sure I was in the right, I am not one of those people. So for this project I drew a totally different VU meter than the one on the Velvet Underground album. The client requested “an amber glow,” and I wasn’t 100 percent sure what that meant until I started looking at images of VU meters and saw one with an amber glow. I mentioned it to The Man and he explained that amber glow was a retro aesthetic that would fill tech nerds with nostalgia for old analog equipment. He knew what I was talking about without the visual (because he is a tech nerd). Creating the amber glow was fun, and very simple in Photoshop.
Amber Glow would be a good name for a pop star.
Another problem I had to solve was the font, which the client wanted to look similar to the album cover as well. Now, I know at least one word nerd who probably can identify fonts just by looking at them, and I was about to message them, but then I thought, “Hey, it’s 2022; surely there’s an app for that.” And there is. There are many apps for that. And then I said, “Well, if there’s an app for it surely there’s a website for it.” And there are many of those as well. It was easy to upload the image and find the name of the font.
The website I used also helpfully offered to sell me the font for $26, which is a RIDICULOUS price for a font, in my opinion, and to sell me the entire font family for $86, which is laughable. It turned out that I already owned some of the fonts in that family (Century Schoolbook) and while I didn’t own the specific one, I think I got pretty close.
The client wanted to use this logo for a few things, but since they specifically wanted to make T-shirts, I used my T-shirt template, which is…large. So this is a big, sharp file, but it should print out well in full size. I think it’s a stunning marketing tool. This guy has been in the business for a couple decades. You should definitely hire him for live sound engineering.
And I just got another logo commission! But first I have another, potentially high profile commission that I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about. But I’m very excited about both of them.
I’ve designed a number of logos here and there, mostly for myself and occasionally for friends, but this is a commission from someone who doesn’t even know me, which is always lovely. I enjoyed creating a new design for a new company, DB Media. I didn’t know what they did when I took the gig, but it turns out they create these really stunning FPV drone videos. You can check some of these videos out on their YouTube channel. My favorite is the Crested Butte video. You can also find them on Instagram at @FPVGroove.
If you’re near Denver, I think this company would be a splendid choice to document things like fancy weddings or, if you’re, say, a realtor selling big estates, it would be a spectacular marketing tool. This medium has its own unique artistry (based on its own unique technical skills).
After dabbling with a handmade font based on the client’s signature, the fonts we eventualy settled on are Brush Script Standard Medium for the letters “DB” and Century Schoolbook Bold for the word “Media.” The design is based on Colorado’s Flatiron Mountains, rendered in 2 shades of gray, so it sits nicely behind the text without fading into obscurity.
I haven’t posted in a while because I spent a couple months working on this commission! And now it’s finally done and the client said it’s OK for me to share, and I’m very excited to share.
This image, which took me about 50 hours over the space of 2 1/2 months to draw, is going someplace I likely will never go, Burning Man. (Some of it sounds fun, but not so much fun that I’m giving up indoor plumbing for 10 days.) It will be a room wrap, hanging inside a box van. The full size image is about 2 feet high and 8 feet long, but when vectorized and printed on a tapestry, it will be about 8 feet high and 30 feet long. (I would have drawn it full scale but my 5-year-old MacBook started complaining when the file was ~4’x15″ and the client said they would vectorize it themself, so I took pity on the machine; I do not know how to vectorized images). The person who bought it will be able to sleep inside their kawaii rainbow animal fantasy.
I actually have another commission I should finish next week, and I will share that one too, although it’s substantially less interesting than this one. And after that, there will be a new bulletin board! And I even have a comic script all laid out and ready to illustrate. I will try not to let the blog lay dormant this long again.
Totally forgot about these: my first-ever art commission! I think I made $25 for these 2 drawings in 1993. The situation was similar to the one with the Javelina Happi Coat: I had randomly shown a woman some of my sketches and she offered to pay me money to draw something she wanted drawn. I forget where the originals came from, but she specifically wanted these particular dragons, and I specifically wanted $25, so it worked out well.
A little worse for wear…
Wonder what became of them. Do they still exist? I recall they were to be given as gifts. Did the recipient treasure them?
There will be some newer stuff this week, although my dark cloud of “at least it will be over Monday” has been extended to “at least it will be over Wednesday.” In reality, it’s one of those things that will never be over. But this phase will. I hope. Anyway, my stepdaughter and I went to the elementary school and started a back-to-school bulletin board (my district goes back July 31, if you can believe it!). So there’s that.
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