WiNKOUT

i was super honored to be asked to to design a "whimsical and slightly edgy" baby announcement for little elliot! final result was a 5x7 card + envelope. click link below for close-ups.



( Read more... )

incautious media-intake has curious effects on my sketchbook.

for a change, sketches of live animals, rather than live music. from hanging around this weekend at the Music City Futurity, my mother's annual charity horse show.



( 9 scans under here )

a couple pages from my sketchbook-- blind contour drawings of crosby stills and nash, drawn in the dark during a concert.




( two scans under here )

this past month has been pretty heavy with graphic-design, which is sort of novel for me. i don't see myself as a graphic designer per se, but i'll take a stab at anything visual if it offers me billable hours! everything's a learning opportunity, and logos are nice because they're sort of like design candy: concise little nuggets of aesthetic sugar. =)

these are a few logos i've recently designed for music-related ventures around nashville. (most ventures around nashville are music-related. it's fun!). i'm also including some samples from the sketch process on each. since i'm not a proper designer with a vector-based brain, it usually takes me at least three rounds of sketches before i can muster the courage to move into adobe illustrator-- until then it's rapidograph and marker all the way.

( read more )

i made my first pop up book! it was something of an adventure (bc i had zero idea what i was doing) but i'm actually kind of pleased with the way it turned out! i've found that it's easier to motivate myself into semi-scary learning experiences like this when i have some sort of concrete deadline or goal, so i've been finding calls-for-entries to make new work for. last month's masks and naked women tangle is another example of me doing this sort of thing to myself.


(links to the project at my website gallery)

this is a picture book of pen-and-ink drawings with two pop up spreads, three cutouts, and a central 3D box structure with moving layers. it tells the story of a little girl who gets kidnapped by rats after her father's death. the concept of the Rattenkönig (a group of rats who get knotted together at the tail while burrowed together underground) is used as a visual metaphor for the grief experience and the search for connectedness out of absence.

keen observers will notice i'm still attempting to use pink as a "gloomy" color, with questionable effectiveness. but this project marks the most ambitious palette i've attempted yet (four whole colors! and none of them black!) so maybe i can be forgiven for keeping my favorite around as a security blanket as i tiptoe out of monochrome.

...and just in case i tricked anyone for a second into thinking i know what i'm doing, i'm including some sketchbook scans to show my design process in all its baffled panic. the first half is me thinking way too deeply into the conceptual structure of the narrative, and the second half is mostly me realizing i haven't the first clue how to build the thing i've just designed. i learned so much in the last 48hrs of this project.

( 9 sketchbok spreads under here )

i made this book a while ago as a present for a friend, but only got around to making the box and actually giving it to her last week.

it's a bilingual (English/German) editon of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis/Die Verwandlung (spellchecking a language i don't speak was hilarious, btw), with a double-spine variation on the tape binding from the massive tutorial i recently posted. each bookblock is illustrated with six beetles (under the cut) printed onto fiber paper. it's technically part of an edition of three, but so far this is the only copy that actually exists.

thumbnail links to the project at my website gallery.



( beetles under here )

a few people expressed an interest in getting a photo-tutorial for the binding technique i used on this project, so i thought i’d give it a shot!

(thumbnail above links to the tutorial at my website)

the technique is an open-spine tape binding with each tape mounted into both boards. i learned it at school in honest-to-god bookbinding 101, and it's my favorite. it's a bit more labor-intensive than coptic, but not much more difficult, and quite a bit sturdier. it's less likely to fray with heavy use, but it still gives you the flexibility at the spine that you get with coptic and other exposed spine bindings, so it will lie flat and close around a pen and double over itself like a legal pad and pretty much put up with all the abuse a coptic will, with even less risk of falling apart.

---

i didn't invent any of the techniques pictured here, and i'm certainly no bookbinding expert or teacher, but i hope i've managed to describe the process in a way that makes sense to someone who hasn't encountered it before. it's the first time i've ever attempted a tutorial, so i'd appreciate feedback on its quality!

just a few sketches from a songwriters' circle i went to last night, to benefit nashville flood relief.



( guys with guitars under here )

series of four ink drawings i made for an event a couple months ago, but just got around to scanning. they're supposed to be sad, but somehow in the (frantic, last minute) process they ended up bright pink, which i realize sort of undermines the haunting, mournful mood i was going for. oh well. i really like pink a lot. =)

thumbnail links to the images (and accompanying emo-poem about the conflict between origin and destination) at my website gallery.