26 April 2018

Dramatic Readings : Save the Earth!


Another one! This is based on the theme to Godzilla VS the Smog Monster because - why not? Oddly the message, such as it is, is still relevant today... more so even. Plus it's totally weird, 60's and silly.

20 April 2018

Book Jacket project: 1984

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One style missing form my current project is what I think of as "pure" design", meaning dependent solely on design elements like typography, colour blocks and simple basic shapes. I forgot I had a hardcover of 1984 and it seems a perfect fit for this sort of design. I want to get away forth idea of staring eyes and raised fists and go for something much more basic and, I hope, eye-catching.

16 April 2018

Vectorizer test

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Mike Luce did a test over at his blog with Super vectorizer 2 which I already but only used in a limited way. So I took a really old, super detailed drawing to see how it did turning bitmapped to vector.

As would be expected, the dot and line work looks pretty damn good. It did take some playing around to get there though. The doorway greyscale was done with grey chalk in original and the tones are a little too subtle to be vectorized, but still, not a bad look.

Affinity Designer does not vectorize bitmaps like Illustrator does (barely) so if you need an external program for that Super vectorizer is a good choice and very well priced.

13 April 2018

Book Jacket project: 20000 Leagues Under the Sea and Ghost Stories

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I love Jules Verne novels and have read  quite a few in English or French or both. Captain Nemo was the hero of my youth (along with Verne's Rubor the conqueror). I originally was going to make a 3D version from Verne's Nautilus plans... but the Disney version is just the best. I put it up there as one of the best ship designs in all science-fiction.

Again, I am going for a very clean, open look. I had to redraw the Grosset & Dunlap logo in Designer. I used a coloured gradient to give the feeling of the sea without having to have bubbles, or fish or anything like that.



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This tiny book of ghost stories is the last of my uncovered hardcovers, I think. I guess a way to
continue would be to take some books I love and do new covers for them. I might

11 April 2018

New Drawing - pole cleaner

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Another in my never ending acrobat series. This time I did it all in (digital) ink and painted under it in colour like I used to do occasionally with ink and watercolours on paper. It has a different feeling than my other colour stuff. I think. Hard to look a your work objectively!

06 April 2018

Book jacket project: Murders in the Rue Morgue and other stories

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Another one to work on from a small format hardcover I have had for decades and oddly enough... never thought to see what stories were in it. There is no table of contents so I added on on the inner front flap. Page numbers to come.

I decided on a long bio for Poe on the back since giving a resumé of each story wasn't going to happen. The photo is the typical one you see of Poe. I did some retouching and restoration to it and might do a little more.

On second thought- I found the above far too banal and predictable and went for something much cleaner. Tell Tale Heart is one of the stories in the book so I went with that for the artwork which I made in 3D. I like this one much better. Numbering the table of contents on the inner flap is a challenge because they start with a one digit number and progress to three digits making it look unbalanced. I changed 1 to 01 which helps a little.

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04 April 2018

Book Jacket project: Abandoned and Oracle of Nostradamus

Yet more book covers.

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Abandoned is the second book of Jules Verne Mysterious Island trilogy. I've never read (or seen) the third in the series.

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Oracles of Nostradamus is a little book with all the "predictions" he made in French with dubious English translations. Just something I keep for reference.