My Life as Superman, Illustrated

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Magic

I have been wanting, and meaning, to write this post for a few weeks, and in part due to the subject at hand, time has been in short supply.  I would be remiss, however, if I did not make the time to put down my thoughts about what Abigail has catalyzed for me.  I’m writing this off the cuff; I don’t want to edit my emotions or rework them.  This is from the heart.

For those of you who don’t know, Abigail is a rock opera about the Salem witch trials; it is a completely original work, created by Michael Xavier, Daniel Knop and Kurt Brown.  This marks their first original rock opera after producing a number of successful rock opera “covers”, i.e. The Rocky Horror Show, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar.  Few debuts are masterworks, but in my estimation, this one is.  Aside from being an outstanding work of art and music, it has also been the catalyst for several momentous milestones in my life, all of which revolve around my return, in earnest, to the joy of music I thought I’d had to leave behind.

Some of you who will read this know my story; most probably don’t.  Very briefly, I have been singing and performing onstage since I was six years old.  I was active in competitive choir for my elementary, intermediate and high school years.  After high school, I joined a band called The Mimsies, which would eventually make something of a splash in Hollywood and tour North America.  I left the band under tragic circumstance in 2003, after ten years of nonstop gigging and recording.  At that point, in the words of one of my new songs, “I put down the microphone and called it a day.”  Read the rest of this page »

Carnal

Trumpet vines overhang aging stucco doorways, creating some cool respite for the bees seeking sweetness in the stamina of the afternoon.  Ruby-throated birds, like mosquitoes, sip a Coca-Cola that has spilled and lies evaporating in a sticky pool on the street.  Somewhere, children are yelling after a football.

In the shadows, intentions are made.  Intentions wrapped in paper and string.  Colognes are opened after baths and caramel skin is anointed in Tres Fleurs and Saint Teresa water.  An effusion of Bay Rhum and roses floats out a window on an upper floor, and down to the passers-by, acknowledgment that even in this soporific heat, someone stirs.

Cigars, dry, their outer wrappings peeling, are lit and left to smolder as long as they will.  Cones of brown sugar are placed on floors, surrounded by feathers and photos.  Veves are drawn in chalk and housepaint.  Shirts are swapped for beads.  Flames flicker in a hundred glass cylinders, making tiny church windows from images of saints and orisha.

In the heat of the afternoon, someone will be uncrossed.

More Joy of Creative Limitation

As with the last set of Perilous flyers, I love these.  Since the client supplies the artwork, culled from vintage pulp fiction covers, I am charged with the tasks of layout and design.  Not having to focus on illustrating the main image myself leaves me free to experiment with colors, fonts and layout tricks.  The reverse side of the This Charming Band flyer proved to be an insufficient amount of eighties’ art-school inspiration for me, so I carried over that sensibility to the Perilous job.

The older I get, the more I appreciate being made to work within limitations.  Though it would take years to gel in me, I was introduced to this appreciation by noted watercolor artist Doug Walton, when I was sixteen.  During my junior year of high school in Honolulu, I was blessed with the opportunity to attend one of his watercolor workshops.  My mother pulled me out of school for the duration (one of the best things she’s ever done for me, and she’s done a lot of great things), and I spent five, eight-hour days being taught by a master.  Read the rest of this page »

Wild Boys Always Shine!

To all The Hubbs, congratulations on another boffo show last night.  I wish I could have been there, but I look forward to seeing the photos!  Another one down, another one coming, this time, in leopard spots and zebra stripes.

I’ve been using the Hubba flyers as a personal forum for artistic growth and experimentation, and with this Wild Animals! edition flyer, I attempted to tighten up a few things that had been bothering me about my previous Hubba offerings to this point.  Happily, I think I succeeded.

First, this was a fun theme to tackle; the theme of Wild Animals! calls a number of visuals immediately to mind, and lends itself to lots of light and color, two things I find myself increasingly craving.  Creating a double-sided flyer for a new theme each month is a definite challenge.  Some themes are easy to illustrate and practically form themselves (Soviet Union!), while others require some serious research, and a good bit of trial-and-error before hitting on the right look or being able to condense the possibilities into something that will fit onto a 4″x6″ piece of card (Caveman Show! Around the World in 80 Girls!).

Further adding to the challenge are the strictures of 1) conveying the pertinent textual information in a clear, legible manner, 2) finding a clear and obvious way to carry the theme over to Side 2, 3) keeping the overall look similar enough to “family” this flyer in with all the others that came before, 4) do justice to that month’s Flyer Girl and 5) not do anything that looks like I’m ripping off R. Black.  Throw all those challenges together with one of the more general themes like Awards Show!, and I’ve got myself a real brain-scratcher.  Thankfully, Wild Animals! only presented a couple of those challenges and I was able to go from conception to execution relatively quickly.

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Dear Hero Imprisoned…

When I was a teenager, I spent hours drawing pictures of Robert Smith, Martin Gore, Alan Wilder, Dave Gahan, Andrew Fletcher (Fletch), Simon LeBon, Nick Rhodes and Morrissey.  I wish I still had those; they were some of my best early work.

When This Charming Band hired me to illustrate and design the posters for their annual show celebrating Morrissey’s birthday, I jumped at the opportunity to take a jaunt down memory lane and pay tribute to three bands I’ve loved since childhood.

It was a kick to translate my teenage-daydreaming into a legitimate career skill with this job.

These are the moments I feel I live a charmed life. Even with all the hell my body has put me through (and it’s been a full inferno), overall, my life has been blessed.  Blessed with opportunity, blessed with good clients, blessed with the chance to earn my keep doing what comes naturally to, and satisfies, me.  I’m very grateful for that.  (Although, given the subject of the poster, I feel like I should be mincing about something instead of waxing optimistic.)  I’m pleased with the way this turned out, generally, but I get a tickle every time I look at it and realize Moz is glaring at his birthday celebration with disdain.  Really, how could it be otherwise?

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The Spring Smells of Emeraude

I love these.

They were quick and dirty, but for featuring lo-res, vintage pulp art nicked from the ether, I think they shine.  I credit their effectiveness to the color palette, as much as to the original images.

Inspiration comes from far and wide, and the inspiration for the colors used here came from an anecdote the client, Jim “Poogie” Sweeney, shared, about recently standing in line behind someone wearing cloying “old lady perfume”.  In my gray matter, the words “old lady perfume” immediately dial up one word — Emeraude.

Someone, somewhere, far back in the annals of my existence, gave me a fragrance sampler for an adolescent birthday.  I was thrilled, until I began removing the bottle tops and discovered all four perfumes to be nothing more than four unwearable, escalating levels of “cloying”; the type of cloying that appears to have been favored by perfumiers and women everywhere until about 1960.  Either our olfactory receptors have mutated, or tastes really do evolve that much.  I can’t imagine a woman wearing any of those fragrances now, without someone nearby calling the CDC.  One drop would shut down a yoga class faster than you can say “fragrance-free studio”.  While I can’t recall the names of the other three levels of cloying contained (barely) in those bottles, I know the fourth-and-utmost of them was Emeraude.

The word cloying, Virginia, was coined for Emeraude. Read the rest of this page »

The Satisfaction of Typefitting

 

Kellita, San Francisco’s own Queen of Carnaval, recently paid me the kind of compliment you want to bronze and display on a mantle:

“You ROCK at including a lot of info but maintaining clarity, beauty and cohesion.”

Reading that was a “Wow!” moment for me.  Maintaining clarity, beauty and cohesion when including a lot of information on a poster is a skill at which I was not quite adept until recently.  Typefitting is very much a skill unto itself, and a skill I actively work at improving with every job I earn.

I freely admit, I’m a font nerd.  I love letterforms.  I really don’t care for much of what the art world considers “Art”; my heart lies with what the museums and cognoscenti tend to dismiss as illustration, advertising art and/or popular art. There are several reasons my tastes run that way, but the most consistent of these is the inclusion of letterforms in those art modes.

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He is Always There

Mucha.

For illustrators and poster artists, he set the bar.  His architectural drawing style, his unequaled attention to detail, his ability to strike a balance between realism and graphic design, all with magnificent results, merit him the illustrator’s gold standard.  Even when we don’t try to emulate his style, he has a way of sneaking in a cameo appearance.  This “Caravan of Boom” image is an excellent example.  When I conceptualized the visual from the client’s brief, I wasn’t thinking “Mucha” at all; I had an entirely different direction in mind.  Clearly, Alphonse is still working and he slides into illustrators’ brains when we are unaware.  He’s there in the color palette, he’s there in the curves and circles of the hair, and he’s there in the ornamentation.  Now, let it be known I am not comparing my work to his — I have many years to go before I come close — but his voice guides me, even when I don’t hear it. Read the rest of this page »

Trash and Rock & Roll, The Sequel.

Photo by Jonah Celebrado

You want an illustration to accompany this post, but you’ve got too much to write to wait; too much to purge to make it through the few hours it would take to create an appropriate visual.  It doesn’t matter.  You’ve held this in so long; you tried so hard to push It away — to find every avenue that might circumnavigate It, but here It is, back in your life as though it never left. Read the rest of this page »

Coming Up — 120 Minutes at Hubba Hubba Revue: The 90′s!

Blatant Promo:  Friday, March 25th at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, I’ll be performing with 120 Minutes, a 90′s cover band I put together specifically for this 90′s “episode” of the Hubba Hubba Revue.  This is something I’ve wanted to do for five or six years, and I’m very pleased to have the opportunity.  As for the rest of the band, I am both honored and tickled to be sharing the stage with some of the best musicians the Bay Area has to offer:  Bones Padilla from Scission on drums, Marcus Ramsey and Erik Frykman from GravyBoat on bass and guitar, respectively.  These guys are real pros, and it’s been a treat to work with them.   Read the rest of this page »