GREAT. Now I have to send Slenderman a wedding invitation too.

Looks like we’ve got ourselves a series!

The long-anticipated sequel to my Visit Edmonton poster is finished and will be available for purchase at the 12 bi-annual Royal Bison Craft & Art Fair. If you live in Edmonton and pretend to hate the city by purchasing cheeky posters even though you secretly love living here, you should stop by and pick up a copy!

Andy and I met to discuss his initial concepts. He had a lot of great ideas on the kind of aesthetic he wanted the piece to evoke, with plenty of potential directions. Initially, he had envisioned “a crest of an owl along with some Latin and other features.” Specifically,  a “Bohemian owl.” He asked that the crest include the Latin phrase “Ars Et Lusus” — literally, “Art and Play” — as a personal mantra. We did a bit of brainstorming and word association to come up with a number of ideas and concepts for me to work with. “Playful”, “Wisdom”, “Knowledge” led the emotional charge, while specifics like a monocole, bowler, pipe, tie, and baseball bat were suggested as possible items to include. Through this process, Andy also threw out the idea of a monster as an alternative to an owl, which I was sure to capture — in the brainstorming process, it’s those kinds of outliers that can provide the best paths of exploration.

With a notebook full of ideas, I got to work on the research. Before I even put pencil to paper, I like to spend some time getting as familiar as I can with the subject of an illustration. Birds have not been an area of focus for me, so I started by browsing through as many different owl photos as I could in order to get a feel for commonalities between each species, as well as individual traits that make each owl unique. While researching, I would sketch out different kinds of owls in different styles, trying to find the right combination of subject and style that would best suit Andy’s requests.

A more abstract style from the early concept phase.

These geometric owls were some of the first that I felt could gain some traction, so I adopted them into the first official concept:

This was probably the most literal approach to most of the concepts Andy provided. It’s a more modern style of crest, incorporating as many of the ideas as possible.

For the second concept, I wanted to try a completely different style with a more traditional and realistic approach. Downplaying some factors and emphasizing others, I arrived at the second idea:

A bit of a difference, no? While creating these two concepts, I was constantly keeping in mind how the finished products would look. The first concept I envisioned as a clean, polished, geometric look that could be easily adapted into both web and print styles. The second would take on a much more illustrative, hand-crafted appearance, skewing heavily toward tradition over modernity.

But that wasn’t the end of the process. I still had this idea of a monster to explore, and I wanted to do something radically different with the third concept, while still maintaining some of the essential elements. Throughout the creative process, Andy kept focusing on ideas like “Bohemian” and “Dandy”, leading me to explore the underlying styles in these movements, wanting to instill both tradition and progressive self-awareness within them. I thumbed through some old sketches of monsters — a subject that I’m much more accustomed to — and developed something that was more character than logo, but still kept the spirit of the overall project scope.

When I delivered all three concepts, I was thrilled to find that Andy loved all of them. We met again to review the concepts and refine the ideas. I was actually a little surprised to learn that he liked the third concept so much, considering that it was such a radical departure from the initial concept. It goes to show that in the creative process, sometimes you can deviate from the client’s initial concept and still surprise them with an idea that they hadn’t even thought of, but immediately love. Andy made one final request for revision: this concept didn’t incorporate the monogram as the others had, and he felt that it would serve as an essential finishing touch. I had kept this possibility in mind while creating this concept, but wasn’t sure how it would be incorporated into this composition. This would be a problem to solve in the home stretch.

I started by inking the original sketch. Sometimes I do prefer to create a duplicate to work from, but the concept was large enough and close enough to my final idea that I felt there was no turning back. In doing so, I explored a few different possibilities for the inclusion of the monogram. At first, I attempted to incorporate it as a stylized vignette, in a circular form in the top right, behind the character’s face. However, this was too much — it drew attention away from the central point of interest and imbalanced the composition. The more I stared at the piece, the more I saw a connection to a very specific period of fashion: the late-19th Century North American gentleman as an offshoot from Dandy or Bohemian cultures. This character is a product of his time, in a period where the frontier is a dying romanticized concept, but where a civilized individual like himself is still rough around the edges. He’s the kind of guy who will fit right in at sophisticated shindig, but isn’t afraid to roll up his sleeves and get dirty when he needs to. A gentleman and a goon, he’s a smoker, a drinker…and a gambler. When I hit that note, I immediately sent Andy a cryptic email:

Random question: which playing card suit do you think best represents you?

Within minutes, he replied:

Heart, for sure.

Super intrigued.

Phew. It’s been a busy month. I started this one right after finishing the last one, but have barely found time to work on it in the past few weeks. This one was a bit tougher too, since the original was a little more … abstract.

Previously: Sword-Leg, Big-Mouth

Previously: Sword-Leg

Of course, I should offer credit where it’s due — this project is heavily inspired by The Monster Engine, a brilliant art project where the artist reinterprets’ other children’s drawings. The key difference, of course, is that I’ve got the luxury of using my own old art. Score!

Since 2005, a man named Joe from Saskatchewan has been digging out his basement using nothing more than a fleet of radio-controlled construction vehicles.

He starts by transporting the excavator on an RC truck to the basement, unloads it, digs and uses other trucks to transfer the dirt up to the ground through a spiral ramp! He even has a miniature rock crusher!

This is the sort of thing I dreamed of doing as a kid. I only wish I had that much free time these days.

Source: CarScoop via Neatorama

I did a comic! It’s about a dinosaur who cooks.

Also, I’ve migrated some of my internetting activity over to Tumblr. For now, at least, this-here blog will be where I post more “finished” pieces, whereas Tumblr will serve as a pasture for all of my wild artistic antics. Give me some Tumblr love, please.

For the past two weeks, redditor Vidzilla has been creating a series of fictional posts about the apocalypse, as told through the internet. Unlike a lot of overblown apocalypse stories, this series is well-considered and very grounded in the way that information is communicated today. As a sucker for good apocalypse tales, I’m eating this up. Check it out here.

via Neatorama