Check it out, peoples! I scanned the pirate tugboat in and here ya go. Finished. Hooray and yay.
Archive for the ‘My Art/Design/Business’ Category
The pirate tugboat in all its glory.
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011Pirate tugboat reborn – Part FINISHED!
Monday, April 25th, 2011Okay, I finished the pirate tugboat part (aaaarrr) and I took a picture of it. And then I finished the sky and I forgot to take a picture of it. So you’ll have to take my word for it that the sky is very nice – pleasant horizontal lines representing pale clouds. In the meantime, tugboat!
Pirate tugboard reborn – part 2.
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011Booyah! I have drawn a sea creature! So cute.
I’d like you to notice that this is an octopus, but you can only see six legs. That is because two are in the back, and are therefore blocked from view. Please don’t send me grumpy emails defining the word “octo”.
Now, I must attack the pirate tugboat. We’re gonna get there, team. We’re gonna get there.
Pirate tugboard – reborn.
Thursday, April 14th, 2011Remember the pirate tugboat drawing I was working on back in the day? This one?
http://design-newyork.com/blog/2009/07/08/pirate-tugboat-part-3-were-getting-there/
I’ve decided to give it another shot. I found a different board that’s a lot smoother, so my pen shouldn’t get snagged on the tiny ridges anymore, meaning a more controlled line. So far I’ve done the seaweed outline and the corner crabs.
In order to get the waves as perfect as I want them to be, I’m going to have to cut stencils for each size of wave. A ton of work, I hope it pays off.
I made a thing.
Monday, March 14th, 2011We here at Publicis New York have a window case that is two feet high and nineteen feet long, and living in it presently is a timeline of the company. It’s been the same timeline in the same design for at least three years now, and my boss (the CMO) has grown weary of it. He asked me to redesign it, so I promptly starting rummaging through my research books. A while back I saw an article called “Cutthroat Capitalism” in Wired Magazine and I thought it was a terrific marriage of positive and negative space, so I cut it out and put it in my book.
I wanted little ornate headers and footers to incorporate into the document. I remembered B. had recently sent me a link to the calligraphy on the bottoms of maps that was fascinating, so I looked at that as well.
So, combining some of the elements from both of those documents, I spent three days redesigning the timeline. The beginning part looks like this:
Here are some details where you can really see the things I pulled from my research.
Some of the pictures given to me were really low-res and pixelated, so I converted them into art. Like the radio announcer guy, I made him into stripes where the thickness depended on the amount of light and dark, and then for the bus, I traced it in Illustrator and made decisions about what I wanted knocked out and what I wanted solid. See, solutions to problems. When God gives you lemons (or low-res images), you make lemonade (or graphic icons). We’ll see if my boss likes it and I can continue on in this style.
Addendum: Alas, it was shot down. Too “wacky and dark”. But I don’t care. After shrieking into a pillow, I decided I’m going to keep working on it and add it into my portfolio. Always with the lemons / lemonade thing, I am.
Addendum to the previous addendum: It’s back! The head person likes it! She wants a deep red background, but other than that, I’m good! Hurrah!
Completed Beetle and Cicada. Booyah!
Friday, March 4th, 2011I’m done! The complex background is done. The beasties are done. They have come together in a beautiful medley of weird art that makes me so happy. Gaze upon on the gloriousness.
I spray-painted the pattern after I weeded out the vinyl stencil. Then I painted highlights with some sparkles on some of the thicker areas of the lines. The spray-paint bled a little into the wood grain on the beetle board, but I think it looks cool, so I ain’t sweatin’ it.
Then I drilled a hole in the center of the board and affixed the insects into place. And voila! Months of toil comes to an end. I am super-pleased with how they turned out.
Beetle. The companion to the cicada.
Sunday, January 30th, 2011You remember the cicada I made?
Well, I made him a beetle friend. Now he has someone to talk to during the day when I’m at work.
I need to make his head less shiny, but other than that, he’s a completed beetle. I’m going to use my laser stencil designs and combine the whole process into a really cool set of pieces.
Scrapbook.
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011One of the things I learned in college was keeping folders of inspiration. Before the Internet, during the dark ages when you couldn’t find anything you wanted at your fingertips in a split second, I kept a filing cabinet of inspiration. Everything I ever saw in a magazine that was of interest to me, I pulled out, labeled and shoved in its corresponding folder. Now with the beloved ‘net, I still do that, but on a much smaller scale. I now keep three-ring-binders of inspiration. Anything design-wise that strikes my fancy, I drop into a folder on my desktop labeled “scrapbook” and every month or so, I assemble them on pages, print them out and put them in my binder.
You’ll notice that just on these pages, we have: a book cover, a soccer ball, a wreath made of wire, logos, illustrations, a beer ad, graffiti, music posters, a pair of shoes, a web banner, etc., etc. Sometimes I’ll forget I liked something and I put it in there already, so I’ll have duplicates. I don’t berate myself. I like to that I liked it so much I put it in there twice. Like this crazy-ornate calligraphic letter (I think it’s an F).
Or this delightful Coca-Cola ad.
And even that freakin’ wallpaper I keep complaining about in commercials and music videos.
Now, if anybody thinks I use this for plagiarism, they aren’t really correct. What I do is when I am asked to create a design project and I’m not quite sure how to approach it, I ask myself, “Well, what am I trying to evoke in the viewer? Do I want them to feel a charming whimsy, or do I want it to feel like strong and powerful, or mystical and underwater, or bleak and sparse…?” Then I go through my scrapbooks and Post-It tag all the pictures that make me feel that way, and I assess why. I take those elements and incorporate it into my own project and hopefully I get the response I want. I use it as a starting-off point when I’m a bit stumped. And if you do anything like me, whether it is drawing or painting or designing or collage or embroidery or whatever, I highly recommend creating one of these for yourself. It takes that stress out of the beginning of the project.
Doily pattern of death, Part 2.
Thursday, November 18th, 2010I showed my co-worker my design and he said he found the leafy parts distracting, so I deleted them and whaddya know, it’s better. Now it looks like this:
I need to keep remembering that white space is not the devil. I know nature abhors a vacuum (and so do I – my dust bunnies are now dust rhinos! booyah!), but there can be empty space in my work and the earth will not collapse into itself. All kinds of pleased with myself, I immediately started to work on a second complicated doily. And after investing six hours in that one, I realized it was waaaay way too complicated.
SO MANY SQUIGGLES. And the lines are too thin. So, sadly, I broke it all apart and culled the ornateness down. After another four hours of fussin’, I got it down to this:
Good. Better. Less stuff all over the place.
I found a place that would cut out my stencil for me. Expect to see exciting things pertaining to this in the near future.
Doily pattern…of death!
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010I’m in a flurry of creativity over here at Casa Rothmanpants, and I just spent a good six hours designing this really complicated pattern. I’m going to have it professionally cut out to be a stencil because there’s no way in hell I can cut it out by hand, not if I want it done in my lifetime. Ignore the leaves, those are there for my reference. The black part is the part getting cut out. The leaves I will be handpainting in later.
Now I have to see if I can find a place in the city that will cut this out for me without charging me all the money in the world ever. The hunt begins…
