Life's a Drag- the failed attempt at the beginning of something beautiful

Alright, kiddies, where to begin? My project is very much unfinished. What I have down are the final layouts and pencils for the first two pages and a half-way complete final page showing my drag queen super-heroine, the Disastrous Darlene Dynamite (she'll blow your mind), in all of her explosive glory. This thing started out troubled. As I stated in my first update, It took me a while to come up with an idea I wanted to stick with and once I finally did, it was a little late in the game. I then spent more time than I should have coming up with Miss Dynamite. You see, I thoroughly enjoy character development, thus I didn't really start drawing until I had a good idea of this character's look and what she is about. So, once I had that firmly in mind, I barricaded myself within the world of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Mermaid, The Crow, the fantastic shows Invader Zim and Aeon Flux (Darlene's costume is directly influenced) and even the Silence of the Lambs- all of which influenced this terrible creations...um...creation.

In the end, I never recovered from the time it took for the character development, and I was plagued with behinded-ness for the rest of the given time as the end of semester goodness started to pile up. I also spent a very large amount of time on the last page, the crown jewel of the comic I attempted, and I am happy with where it's heading. SO I TRIED DAMMIT! Don't get me wrong, dearest reader, this is by no means an excuse for my project's unfinished state, just me contemplating my *sigh* inability to finish. From what I did complete, I tried to use the design elements picked up in class. For example, Darlene's suit is made of complementary colors. I do plan on completing this thing, especially the last page. There are some color combinations I want to experiment with, and am very excited to see where Darlene Dynamite goes.

update

Finally an update! Yes, I’m still pretty behind, but progress is being made. It’s taken me a while really decide what I want to do and how to lay it out, but after looking at more comics and watching these some movies, things began to click. Here's two clips from The Crow and The Little Mermaid that really helped me out with layout.

The first page is sketches and a thumbnail version of the first page, the second and third are the drawings for a few panels, and the last is the final drawing, sans color and inks. Honestly the last drawing is what I started out doing first. It began as a character sketch for the short, short strips protagonist, but I loved the little drawing so much that I decided to make it into something much bigger.

So I finished that part, which took a long while, as I love to nitpick and make sure proportions are relatively…well…proportional and spend a lot of time making sure it carries a certain style. Then I began work with thumbnails and sketches in general. The little thumbnail layout you see below is what the finished first page will look like, albeit much more fleshed out. All that’s left to do with the finished drawings is import them into photoshop or illustrator and add color and text bubbles. The layout for the second page is working it’s way out of my head, but it still needs some more time devoted to thinking. I have the rest of the week off after today, so I plan to kick this thing’s ass right out of the water. Until we meet again, I bid you sweet adieu.

yargh here be a blog post!

This week’s terribly awesome image comes from a promotional poster for wonderfully gritty, raw, and yet fanciful film, Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto Del Fauno). Unlike the rest of the posters for this film, the art is quite minimalist. Ceated by famed Hellboy creator and artist Mike Mignola, the design carries his signature style of simplicity and geometric forms. Like the rest of Mignola’s work, the color is very simplistic as well, relying on mostly black and a lovely shade of burnt sienna, with two flashes of a glowering yellow to make up the image of the Faun, one of the film’s main protagonists.

The use of shadowing is the main thing that caught my eye for this beautiful poster. Heavy contrast is one of my favorite design tools, and the way it is used in such a manner as to make the highlights of a dramatically shadowy mysterious faun is very effective. Of course, the poster wouldn’t be as nearly intriguing if it weren’t for the two-tone shadowing. If there were a full scale of brown and black shades, the image would lose its teeth.

The classic labyrinth insignia at the bottom of the poster is a very nice balance along with the text to the image of the faun. Likewise, the style it is in matches the faun’s. Had it been any more or less ornate, it would have thrown the look off a bit. I like the font used for the text, however, I can’t help but wonder how it would look if it were the same smoldering-ember-yellow of the faun’s eyes. Right now, the sterile white stands way out of everything else on the poster. However, this is probably the designer’s intent- to make this one bit of information more noticeable than the rest. I also wish that the “Winter 2006” weren’t there. In the same white as the film’s title, it detracts from the more important website title, which houses all information about the film. All in all, the poster is a success, looking more like the cover of an ancient tome of fairy tales than anything else, and the fans of the film would have it no other way.

been a little while in coming

Okay, so this blog post is a wee bit late. I started off on this project with NO idea of what to do. So after running the full gamut of ideas, from animation to puppet-making, I came up with the plan to make a three page webcomic thing. Of course, then the problem was coming up with something to actually make the comic on. Well, unfortunately for me, the end of the semester has brought about a massive creative slump/artists' block due to every other project colliding and a massive amount of stress. So once this project was taken off the back-burner the ideas began to flow again.

Late last week I began leafing through some of my favorite comics, and looking into my DVD collection to get some ideas for what I wanted to do.








The first three images are from the gender-bending musicals, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, respectivly. Next is an image of unused DVD art from one of my favorite cancelled shows, Invader Zim. Lastly are two covers from the wonderfully violent and darkly comedic comic, The Mask. So, what do all these delightful images mean? Well, thus far I have come up with the idea to do a story about a drag queen with superhero connotations and really wild art stylings (a la Invader Zim). You know, mild mannered John Doe during the day, but come night and Fiesty Wrigglesworth, Glam-Queen Rocker-Extraordinaire is unleashed upon the city. Something like that. Sketches and layout to come soon.

blog post thing-a-maroo

This week's wonderful ad for the children comes from something horrible called Laughing Squid, apparently an art, culture, and technology collective blog for San Francisco. I randomly came across this wonderful little ad, by searching for "squid ads" in google. The first thing that stood out to me is the design for the squid itself. Standing out in neon, the technological squid is perfectly symmetrical, almost emulating something Hindu inspired, with it's all-seeing eye, carefully arranged tentacles in a Vishnu-inspired position, and ending in electrical components and sockets. Right under that the Laughing Squid information can be found keeping the same confines as the squid itself. All the font used matches up very well with technologic squid, even evoking images of neon signs. The background, for the most part, is simply black- efficiently providing a high contrast to the squid image and looking like a very simplified ocean. At the very top rises a Japanese sun, casting it's orange rays over the silhouettes of two ships, some UFO's, and Godzilla. The green and orange both go together very well, seeing as they are analogous colors on the color wheel, and the black provides enough contrast to make most of the text pop. The dark grey text gets a little lost, but that can easily be fixed by lightening it up a few tones. I also feel that the Godzilla, UFO's, and ships are somewhat unnecesary and so small that they are more of a distraction or annoyance. I think that if they were taken out, or made bigger it would improve greatly upon the balance and symmetry of the otherwise wicked piece.

critique

Breaking away from monotony, this image has nothing to do with movies or music. Instead, a safety for helmets was chosen/randomly stumbled upon and deemed worthy to be written about in my weekly critique. The ad is primarily separated into three parts- x-ray, text, then black space/small text. The x-ray of a skull smashing against pavement is particularity effective and jarring. The whites and blues that make up the x-ray contrast very well with the black background and make it all the more easy to see and eye-catching. The cropping chosen for the skeleton is a little odd, leading leading the eye off the page and the viewer wanting to see more of something that isn’t there.

The text below the image is simple and easy to read, as it should be for such an add, but it looks a little too boring. The plain white sort of matches the x-ray, but not enough. It might work better if it was done in the same shades of white and blue, like the words screened through an x-ray. The face that the text is centered is also quite annoying. It would work better if the text were justified and resized into a solid block. A right or left justification would also make it a little more…design chic.

The format of the ad is a little weird. The main image and text are competing for the viewer’s attention. I think it would work better in a movie poster format- e.g. making the main image larger, taking up most of the ad. Then a smaller block of text could be placed right under it with either a left or right justification Lastly, the smaller text could be kept as is, complementing the format and providing information in a much more engaging manner.

html hell II: electric boogaloo

OH GOD HOW DID I GET HERE I JUST WANT TO GOOGLE


this is an example of moldy schmext.






ARGH i feel like two porcupines are making passionate, scratchy love in my throat.




go here because it's good for your brains.

gawd, i'm scared of taking sculpture 211	hey look, another column
dear god another column, get the camera, honey!	MERCIFUL CHRIST, WHEN WILL THE COLUMNS END!?

Paradise

The above image come courtesy of one of my favorite bands, the Dresden Dolls. Painted in 2005 by Barnaby Whitfield, the image was used for the band's live concert DVD, The Dresden Dolls: Paradise. The cover does a marvelous job conveying the flamboyant, dramatic stylings of the artsy, "punk-cabaret" duo. The colors used are also fairly effective- all white, rouge, and smoky orange. The palatte is very suggestive of the fire burnings of Dresden, Germany (from which the band takes their name) and the Weimer era cabaret (conveyed by the circus tent and mime- makeup adorning the band members). The placement of the bandmembers serves well too, with both singing to eachother, or about to kiss, in a theatrical fashion.

The rule of thirds is used nicely in a horizontal manner, with the band member and their circus sandwiched and framed by an upper and lower dark space. I thought that this added to the thematic quality of the cover, along with the other elements, making almost look like a poster for a movie or play, not like most concert videos; there looks like there is a story and plot hidden behind all the pancake makeup and rouge.

I liked the placement and font of the text on top for the fact that it placed the names of the duo above their respective images and the band name, making it look even more like a film poster. I thought the text at the very bottom was effective in grounding the image and balancing out the top. The color of the text worked really nicely with the black border, however the text that intersects with the white figure in the center starts to get hard to read because of the similar colors.

html hell

OH GOD HOW DID I GET HERE I JUST WANT TO GOOGLE


this is an example of moldy schmext.






ARGH i feel like two porcupines are making passionate, scratchy love in my throat.




go here because it's good for your brains.

Further proof of my geekiness

Keeping with my usual deluge of upbeat blog analysis pictures- sarcasm crammed into each syllable of the last statement- this lovely/creepy image is of the cover of Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave Mckean. On close inspection, one will notice that this is a Batman graphic novel, and one of the darker ones at that- graced with a somewhat terrifying story and disturbing yet ornate and dazzling illustrations. Diviner of all these dark images is Dave Mckean- one of my all time favorite artists, known for his work on the covers of acclaimed comic series The Sandman, illustrating the novel Coraline, and directing/designing the film Mirrormask. His unique method and style of creating art usually combines drawing, painting, photography, collage, found objects, digital art, and sculpture.

The cover itself is primarily void of color, save for the ghastly image of a demonic Joker superimposed over the grim exterior of a gothic-looking building. The colors chosen for the face are intentionally sickly and poisonous looking, they are angry and infected colors hinting at the madness behind them. Directly below the face of the monstrous Joker, is the silhouette of Batman, walking into the lions maw- Arkham Asylum. Of course, the placement of the skull-like visage of the Joker over Batman, seemingly swallowing him, is very much intentional. It signals the tone of the novel- the nuts are running the nuthouse, and the protagonist is walking into a hornet's nest of insanity (queue dramatic music). Overtop of the base illustration are white diagrams of roman numerals and gothic designs, which match the similar styled art inside; however, one wouldn't know this from just looking at the cover, and the designs may just prove to be confusing. They are unneeded, but I enjoy the ornate stylization they bring.

The text on top of the illustration is a bit of a mess. First of all, it has way too many fonts going on. I'm sure this was meant to symbolize chaos and madness, however it just ends up looking clustered and unfocused, instead of unifyingly ununified. The text also needs to be bigger. It is in danger of being lost in the whisps of ornaments and diagrams. However, as a whole and not looked at as an ad, this cover does a fine job of illustrating the fact that madness and mayhem hide inside the glossy pages of this graphic novel, and that this isn't your parents' Batman.