Last Projects

It seems like I haven't posted in so long...but I've been working on these last three projects: the album cover, book jacket, and cheesy airbrush.

I'm not proud to say I'm the happiest with the third.

Anyway, here they are:

Cheesy airbrush: I didn't want to do a cartoon. I started off looking for pictures of dolphins, thinking I could maybe illustrate a porpoise with flames behind its tail or something, but then I stumbled across some pictures of sea turtles. I figured the subject matter was cheesy enough, even sans flames, so I went with it. I actually had fun with the airbrush this time around! I'm pleased with how the light yellow bits turned out, but I think I could have done better on the turtle's shell and the definition of the fish in the background. Perhaps the most redeeming thing about this project was that I didn't have to incorporate it into a design.

Book jacket: How do you illustrate The Great Gatsby? I had all sorts of ideas that combined the characters and the green light and the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, but unfortunately that turned out to be a whole lot to fit into one illustration. I settled on a simple line drawing against a separate color wash (meant to evoke the colors of Long Island at sunset), but I definitely think I could have done much better with the layout. I mean, ew, it's too boring. I should have blown up the illustration and bled it onto the sides...here's the front cover:

Anyway. You see what I mean.

Album cover: Originally I was going to do an album by The Mountain Goats, but then Carole King popped up in my iTunes shuffle and I thought I could do something cool and graphic-y with Tapestry. It helped that the original cover art is terrible, too - it's just a picture of Carole King in a windowsill holding a piece of cloth. Well, there's a cat in the foreground too. Anyway, I painted a seventies tapestry-like pattern, then struggled with what to do with it for two weeks until I finally decided to draw a hand holding the tapestry. And this is what I came up with. It might look a little bit like the opening credits of Monty Python, but it's better than looking like your grandma's couch, that's what I always say.