Repeal Day

Those of you who are fans of my webcomic Jazz Age -- and those of you who aren't -- might find this interesting.

This Wednesday -- December 5 -- is Repeal Day, the anniversary of the ratification of the 21st Amendment here in the U.S., which repealed the 18th Amendment which had prohibited the sale, transportation and manufacturing of alcohol. We just called it Prohibition. And the makers of Dewars scotch have a web site up called RepealDay.com.

I was surprised by the depth of research that went into the site. There's one section that talks about the way Repeal Day used to be observed. For instance, to celebrate the 21st Amendment, festivities usually commenced at 21:00 hours, or 9:00 PM; the first drink of the night was usually non-alcoholic, to remind the guests of life under prohibition; and at midnight the host usually has a toast to reflect on what repeal has meant to them. This isn't just drunken abandon here.

They've also put together a station on Pandora.com called "Underground & Cutting Edge: 1920's" that plays music of the era. There's a lot of good ragtime and old jazz -- it sometimes veers way off course in time period, giving us much more recent blues and whatnot, but what can ya do?

Prohibition plays a pretty big part in Jazz Age, as it played a large part of everyday lives back in the 1920s. Those of us who want to harken back to those days and pay tribute to our grandfathers' time might want to host a Repeal Day party -- if nothing else, it's an excuse to get together and celebrate. And you don't have to drink Dewar's -- I'm a Jack & Coke man myself.

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Monday Morning Marty -- Marty Deco!

This week's Monday Morning Marty is an Art Deco-inspired poster of our favorite pup. I wanted to get in some practice of my Pueblo Deco style, and I wanted specifically to recreate the look of the WPA posters of the thirties for our beautiful National Parks. Those posters are characterized by colorful, simple backgrounds, solid blocks of color making stylized subject imagery of animals or whatever.

I'm not sure of these colors for the final piece -- I just made this Sunday night, and may want to look at it again in a couple of days and refine it. And I'm not entirely sure of the drawing itself -- a couple of the legs are worrying me. But it's a good, solid start, and with a little tweaking should make a fine addition to my portfolio.

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Another Key to Success: Ideas!

Last week I saw an item online about a certain historic theater here in New Mexico celebrating its 80th anniversary. (I'm leaving out the theater's name, because no deals have been signed, but anyone in Albuquerque can probably guess the theater in question.) I immediately thought of the Pueblo Deco, World's-Fair-style tricentennial posters I did for the City of Albuquerque last year, and realized that this theater -- a Pueblo Deco landmark -- needed a poster like them for its own. (Now the rest of you in New Mexico have figured out the theater.)

So I emailed the theater manager and told him that if we worked quickly, we could have Anniversary posters printed up in time for the Holiday shopping season. He wrote back saying they weren't interested in anniversary posters, since they'd become dated quickly, but were interested in putting together a new poster for the theater. We're now in the midst of working out the details.

See how easy that was? This could be a big project for me, and all it took was for me to see an opportunity and make an inquiring email. Email! I didn't even have to send a letter or -- yikes! -- make a phone call!

In a profession like mine, it's easy to get passive, to wait for the work to come to you and then get it done. Even with aggressive self-promotion, the focus is usually that I'm available, that I can do what you need getting done. I sit back and hope for a big break. And big breaks do come -- occasionally. But in order to get further in your career you have to make those breaks. You have to go out and do more than say "I can do whatever you want." You have to say "This is what you want."

The biggest break in my career was probably the Albuquerque Tricentennial posters, but that didn't exactly fall in my lap. I was hired by Rick Johnson & Company to draw up sketches of what the posters would look like, to sell the concept to the Tricentennial Committee. They hadn't picked an artist for the final work yet, but were looking at some guy in Toronto, I think. I told them I could do the job, and they were wary. I hadn't done anything of that scale before. So when I did the sketch, I made it very, very tight, to show them I could do this. That, my enthusiasm, plus the good PR they'd get for hiring a local boy (doesn't hurt!) got me the job.

That's a great story, but the fact is I should have been pitching ideas to companies for years now. I'm very slow at learning this business, but I am learning. I need to do this more often -- go out and look for possibilities. Since that theater anecdote, I've sent similar proposals to two other organizations -- this time by mail, to make things a little more formal. That and I couldn't find an email address for one of them.

Whatever your field, if you're not where you want to be, you need to go out and make it happen. You can't wait for a big break to fall in your lap. If you want to work on more important projects at your job, tell your boss that. If you want your writing hobby to become a business, find someone who could hire you to write and then convince them. You can't afford to be passive, to hope that someone else can see how you could help them in some way. You need to come up with the ideas, and then show them. Sometimes that's all it takes. Even if they don't like the idea you're pitching, they'll see that you do have ideas.

Just don't be pushy. People hate that.

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Monday Morning Marty -- Woodcut

I'm very happy with this week's Monday Morning Marty.

Years ago, in art school, my illustration teacher Stan Zagorski taught be a great faux woodcut technique. You painted on the illustration board with white gouache, where you want the image to be white. You wait 'til the gouache dries, then cover the surface with India ink. When that dries, you rinse the board in running water; the gouache dissolves, taking the ink on top of it with it, leaving the surrounding ink. It's a great technique; my Storyteller's Workshop logo, above, was done that way -- with a lot of retouching.

Retouching is always a big part of the process, because you never know how well the gouache will dissolve, or how well the surface of the board will handle the water. It's touch and go there.

Well, last week I was working on a logo proposal for Santa Fe's 400th anniversary, and I came up with this new technique. I designed the logo the way I wanted it, then created a negative of it, so everything white was now black and vice versa. I then turned the image into a very, very light blue and printed it out onto card stock. I got out my brush and inked in everything that was black -- or rather blue -- adding lots of stray strokes that resemble woodcut marks. I scanned in the artwork -- the light blue was light enough not to show up -- reversed the image again, and got the woodcut look.

For this Marty picture, I started with a photo that I turned grayscale, then followed the process listed above. The final image wasn't too easy to make out -- I also printed out the photo untouched to help me make sense of it. I had to constantly remind myself that the ink strokes I was putting down would be white, and that the darkest shaded areas would be the lightest in the final piece.

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Inspiration: Joseph Lorusso

Yesterday I went up to Santa Fe -- about an hour or so's drive from Albuquerque -- to visit with some agencies there and show my work. While up there I sent some time with my lovely wife Jennifer. In addition to her Daily Mammal and Atkins Institute blogs, she also works full-time with a museum exhibit design firm up there.

While up there, Maggie -- our friend and Jennifer's coworker -- told us about her brother-in-law painter. His name is Joseph Lorusso, and he's having an opening this Friday in Santa Fe.

I was floored by his work. Here's a guy who can paint. His work really hearkens back to the Golden Age of illustrators -- few painters today have that style or, frankly, the ability. But Joseph Lorusso's got it!

Check out his work, and if you're in the Santa Fe area on Friday, come out to the opening. He's showing in other galleries across the country, for the rest of you.

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Inspiration: Otto Soglow

Goofbutton.com has posted a great collection of single-panel cartoons and sequences of Otto Soglow.

Soglow's one of those artists whose work you've probably seen, but didn't know who did it. I've seen his work in countless old books and magazines growing up. His little king character might seem familiar. Enjoy!

Thanks to Drawn: The Illustration and Cartooning Blog for letting me know about this post.

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Frank E. Schoonover

Yet another link to Golden Age Comics Book Stories. But this one is a good'n. It's a look at the beautiful work of Frank E. Schoonover. Notice how his paintings look so polished and refined from a distance, but when you click on the image and get up close, you see the individual brush strokes and Impressionistic approach. Really nice.

We're in the midst of our big move to New Mexico, so there's been no time to sketch or anything. I want to make sketching Marty a regular feature here -- after we settle in.

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ANOTHER Great Vintage Illustration -- and One of Mine

I know, I know -- another link to Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog. Maybe you should all just subscribe to them instead. (Or better yet, subscribe to us both!) But I can't get enough of these beautiful illustrations. And this first picture -- by Mead Schaeffer for The Black Buccaneer (1920) was just too gorgeous for me not to pass along. And it's by no means the only amazing painting that Door Tree (what can I do -- that's what he calls himself) just posted tonight.

I'm going to have to try and recreate this style digitally. I've done some acrylic painting in this vein, though nothing close to this kind of quality. But I've done some digital work for a real estate developer where I took photographs and altered them in Photoshop to look like paintings around this vintage. (See second picture.) I think I could push that style further and maybe do something in this spirit.

Of course, even if I could recreate the brushwork and the texture of these classic illustrations, that'll still leave the composition, lighting, pace, mood, period detail -- there will be loads of challenges in trying to match the impact and the flavor of these amazing paintings.

Sounds like fun, huh?

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More Gorgeous Old Covers

Golden Age Comic Book Stories is fast becoming my favorite blog. They've got another winner posted on there -- more beautiful pulp magazine and book covers, like this cover for Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back. Not only does it use color beautifully and have a dynamic composition, but I'm a sucker for a good detective story! There's also a great cover for an issue of The Virginian, which not only sports a great Old West image, but has a beautifully slick Art Deco style logotype. Check out these gorgeous covers!

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Old Pulp Covers -- Make Your Own!

If you haven't seen my previous post about the old N.C. Wyeth pulp cover, go take a quick look at it. In this post I'll briefly show how I took an old cover of my own -- the cover to Jazz Age Chronicles #1, which came out back in 1990 -- making it rather vintage in its own right.

What I wanted to do was make the cover look like it's 100 years old. I wanted it to look like a beat-up old book cover, so to do that I found a beat-up old book cover. (Specifically, it's an old book of Jennifer's about the Beatles. She wanted to make sure I included that.) It has a blank cover, which is essential here, so the only features on the cover are the wear and the tear:

Now, ideally an old pulp magazine cover would be best -- the wrinkles and tears in an old magazine cover are different from the ones in this hardback book -- but I couldn't find such an item, and pulp magazines with blank covers are a little hard to scare up. So this cover would have to do. And it did.

I sized the cover to fit the original cover perfectly. Then I started with the Photoshop hokus-pokus! My first step was put white in the foreground color palette and go to Select>Color Range, and make a selection of the white tears and peels in the surface of the cover. I played with the value until I was getting most of the white and none of the blue. Then I made a new layer and using Option-Delete, I filled in the selection with the white, making a nice opaque white layer of the tears and scraps over the cover art.

Then, going back to the layer with the book cover, I went to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation (or Apple-U -- get it? U? Hugh? Oh, that one cracks me up every time!) and played with the hugh, and the saturation, and the lightness, until the blue of the cover became a nice yellow-ochre of old, faded pulp paper:

This example shows the cover before I went into Image>Adjustments>Curves and played with the contrast until the outside edges were dark again. I don't have a picture of that, but you're visual people -- I'm sure you can see it in your mind.

Then I set that layer on Multiply, so the original cover art shows through underneath. I added a new layer over all of these others and filled it with more yellow-ochre color, and set it to multiply also. Then I just played with the opacity of all these layers, until I got the final look I wanted:

Ta-daah! Not bad, huh? Now, there are other effects I could have used on this, and have in previous work, such as adjusting the color saturation of the artwork, adding some noise texture to the top layer, "tearing" one of the corners by using the lasso to select it and turning it slightly, or even pushing one of the color layers -- cyan or magenta works best -- just a tad, to make it look like slightly out-of-register old-style printing. I never do the exact same effects every time, and that's the fun part -- improvising and finding different ways to make different effects. But these are some basic steps, one basic approach, and if nothing else, they should help you find your own way to go about it.

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Old Pulp Covers -- Look At These!

Another blog we recently subscribed to is Golden Age Comic Book Stories, which actually covers a lot more than just Golden Age comic book stories. For example, see this beautiful old N.C. Wyeth pulp cover from a 1912 issue of The Popular Magazine.

I love this old style -- if you haven't already noticed. I always have. It's hard for me, really, not to make my work lean towards an old-school flavor. So I've stopped trying.

In fact, I've been inspired by the tattered old look of this cover to take one of my own covers and give it a worn, distressed look. And I'll show you that in my next post!

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