Come gather ‘round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone If your time to you Is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’. - Bob Dylan In my life, the times I have grown or changed the most were usually the result of having no fear. Sometimes diving head first can seem a little crazy and unsettling, especially when people are depending on you, but that simply cannot deter you from making a radical choice to induce change and growth. - Laurent Hrybyk (ME)
3 years ago I took a leap of faith and offered my design and illustration services to a new online music journalism startup, Portals. I designed their logo and much of the imagery highlighting written features on the website.
That step brought a lot of unpaid work (getting paid now though!), but this work allowed me to experiment and redefine an illustration career that was otherwise dormant at that point. This work I produced led me to applying to and being accepted to the MICA MFA Illustration Practice program.
The first project at MFA_ILP was the IMAGE HARVEST!!! And what a harvest it was. About 13 years previous I often painted imagery that included figures who were the keepers of the sun and moon. I decided to ressurect this theme into a series of posters, websites, and finally a 5 panel 16�x20� graphic story. This page shows some initial concept sketches for those projects.
The posters were the last time I used my own personal photography in an illustration piece. I was commisioned to do the posters for Portals, Stadiums & Shrines, and Hype Machine. It was a duo of shows at NYC’s annual music event CMJ, so I thought it was fitting for the imagery I was creating.
The photograph in each piece is actually my eldest sun. They were completed using photoshop and the final size was 16�x20�.
The second phase of the project was creating a website to be a companion to the posters. Each event received a separate stand-alone website with similar imagery, but with a slight animation added.
The animation was in the clouds - they slowly and infinitely scroll across the screen. Mobile versions of the site were also developed, though they only featured the typography of the main sites. It is very interesting to “re-purpose� an illustration to make it work within a website.
Here are the first two panels of the graphic story entitled “Sunny & Lune”. These pages show the troubled life of Lune, the caretaker of the moon, who’s job it is to turn the moon on and off everyday.
Unfortunately for him the only way to reach the moon is through climbing the clouds with one very long ladder. The goal of these pages was the show the monotony and exertion of Lune’s daily routine.
The following pages show the life of Sunny, the caretaker of the sun, and how easy he has it - simply turning the sun on and off by way of a switch. Lune is deflated when he sees this and takes a much needed nap. Upon awakening he discovers that Sunny has made a switch for Lune to use - no more ladders! They embrace thus creating an eclipse.
In the first semester our class went through a series of workshops - Paper Engineering, Letterpress, Sewing, Book-making, and Lightroom. While finished portfolio work was not accomplished within these workshops, they did give me a good amount of knowledge that I either later used in the semester or will surely use at some point in my career.
Our pattern workshop was taught by perhaps the kindest person in the world, Rachel Taylor. This workshop was a welcome chance to try to push some personal ideas into the imagery. My initial 5 ideas were of things I had been doodling recently: Tall skinny dudes with long shadows, Monsters in the Forest, Fishing in the Clouds, Paper Airplanes with Eyes, and Fashionable Skeletons. To the right are my first rough sketches for those ideas. The following pages show my 3 final selections - Long Shadows, Monsters, and Paper Airplanes - in rough color sketch form and in final full color form. Besides allowing me to understand how patterning and liscensing could work for my illustrations, the workshop also opened my eyes to how much illustrative pattern was being used (or not being used in men’s fashion at least) in the world.
The purpose of the Reaction project was to utilize some of the previous workshops and combine them into one final piece. I chose to hand sew a book that used a pattern for the cover. The book, a format I was totally unfamiliar with, was to focus on the story of a Cyclops. To the right are my initial sketches and ideas where I was boiling down the ultimate plotline of the book. The final storyline was entitled “Monday� and told the tale of a Cyclops and his Monday morning getting ready for work.
I am not totally sure where my ideas for Art Market came from. Nonetheless I stumbled upon the idea of making pillows or pillowcases with images of faces on them. Through much deliberation I settled upon the name “Headcases”. To be economical, printing them through Spoonflower was out of the question. I decided to SCREENPRINT THEM! Problem was - I did not know how to screenprint. Also I wasn’t in a screenprinting class - so the facilities and supplies to screenprint were off limits. This led me to building my own screens out of cheap (literally the cheapest) Ikea frames and shear fabric bought from Joann Fabrics. Using screenfiller, I then painted the reverse image of the faces on my screens. Finally in my basement, I screened about 30 Ikea pillowcases of varying color and expressions. The result was mixed, but generally achieved a decent product. After confering with Jaime Zollars I decided to utilized the “uniqueness” of each case by giving them each a name and claiming that every single pillowcase was one of a kind.
In addition to the pillowcases, I decided to develop a companion set of pins aptly called “Pinheads� - pins with personality! The Art Market sale was pretty successful - I sold about 12 cases and 8 sets of pins!
The sketchbook project was a project that lasted through the entire semester. There were a series of sketchbooks that all of my classmates exchanged every week. Each one had a different theme or prompt to adhere to. Much like any sketchbook for me, some days my sketches looked great and flowed perfectly out of me; other days not so much. This project did, however, allow me to see how my other classmates sketched and take my own sketches a bit more seriously.
I was SUPER excited for our hand-lettering workshop with Whitney Sherman. My experience with hand-lettering was few and far between, often relying on computer fonts for text in designs and illustration. So the opportunity to explore, fail, and grow in this aspect of illustration was exhilirating. To the left is a blind contour sketch from the first workshop day. To the right is a hand written personal story about myself - the goal was to expand our use of hand-lettering when writing it - letting it aid in the storytelling.
The first project in the workshop was to create a Valentines Day card for someone we loved. My wife Judy was the first on my mind. At the time Judy, also an artist, had been painting and collaging quite a bit of imagery involving the human heart. I decided to use that imagery in my Valentine, but weaving it together with script a form of hand-lettering that I was completely unconfortable with. It was quite difficult to achieve the look I wanted because of this, but in the end I felt pretty accomplished with the final result.
The final project for the workshop was to create a full hand-lettered alphabet. One particular thing I had been drawing a lot at the time was space - planets, spaceships, aliens - so I decided to do a space themed alphabet.
Each letter is a small section of the galaxy containing hand drawn stars, planets, and the occasional alien, astronaut, spaceship or other hidden things. This alphabet was meant to be printed large due to the amount of detail packed into each letter.
The publishing workshop was hosted by Idiots Books and Ben of Atomic books. These guest critics made this project a blast. They gave a vast amount of their knowledge to our class to help us on our journey through the self-publishing world. My final idea was to create a cassette sized accordian comic about a tape cassette that allowed the user to travel through time. The accordian book was printed on both sides, and the story was cyclical. The reader could continue flipping it over and over and could start reading the story from either side.
The final was printed in two colors - with a specific purpose. The green represented the world of the human, while the blue represented the world of the alien. Neither could survive in each others world. At this point in the year something clicked while drawing this comic. Drawing the imagery of the future, spacecrafts, aliens, etc was completely addicting. It was the first moment of the year where I felt completely comfortable in my drawing/illustration style. So much was being tossed at my life in and out of school through those handful of months that I tended to lose or forget who I was as an illustrator. The second semester was like rediscovering who that person was. The publshing project was the exact moment I discovered it.
This image is some artwork for my screenprinting class intended to be a promotional poster for the TIME MIX comic.
This image is the final two color screenprint.
The publishing project may have been where I rediscovered my illustrator-self, but the editorial workshop with the heavenly John Hendrix really set that self in motion. Beginning with his “100 Things You Like To Draw”, then to his ideas on how to break down an article - everything seemed to resonate and make sense. One notable was his truthful and inspiring statement of: “When someone hires you to do an illustration - You are NOT THEIR CLIENT, THEY are YOUR Client” BOOM These excercises were seemingly so simple but made so much sense. The bulk of the workshop was centered around a boring article from Plansponsor and Art Director SooJin Buzelli. She gives concise prompts to her illustrators so the imagery ends up being fresh. The prompt we had was “Knowledge is Power”. We went through a series of sketches and voted on each students most successful idea. Mine was a series of monks on the path to enlightenment. All of them have their eyes closed except one who sees the right path to take.
Aptly following the editorial workshop, Words on Wheels. This project involved our class illustrating a series of poems written by students from Baltimore City Public Schools. The finals would then be displayed on MTA buses throughout the city. My first poem was entitled “Everest�, a poem about the daunting task climbing that looming mountain, but the climber is unafraid and accomplishes his goal. My initial thought was to display the reflection of the mountain in the climbers googles as he looks on to the task at hand. That ended up being the most successful and the one I pushed to final.
The second poem was entitled “Animotion”, a poem about a child being moved from one place to another, but she relates it to being a fish being moved from school to school. The imagery here was a bit tricky at first and all of my initial sketches were a bit lackluster. Then I came up with the idea to do a fish tank version of Edward Hopper’s famous lonely painting “Nighthawks”.
Over the spring break I had started sketching imagery revolving around aliens. One particular sketch (to the far right) was of an alien picking a flower. This struck a cord! I decided to use it for the workshop following the break, STOP MOTION! The folowing pages show the paper cut-outs I made using pencil and pen. After creating those I shot the entire animation on Dragonframe non-stop in one day. The music in the website was by an electronic artist, Sophie, that I had seen perform just a week earlier. View the full 1 minute animation here: http://vimeo.com/90662334
For the personal project to end the year I decided to continue the story of SAM the alien, but this time create a 10 page comic about his collection of a telephone booth. The goal or catch of the book was to lead the reader into believing that SAM was abducting the human in the phone booth, but in reality, as the last splash page reveals, he was really after the phonebooth which he then turns into his personal jacuzzi back on his homeworld. Like the TIME MIX book, I loved sewing a large amount of details into the drawings that could either be referenced in later stories or just serve as imagination topics for the reader.
The format was originally going to be in pencil and ink, but due to the time constraint and the slowness of my abilities with that medium, I switched to digital in the end.
In addition I did this large promotional screen print for the comic.
The final piece was printed full color on a laser printer with a screenprinted three color cover.
Here’s some examples of some outside work copleted during the school year. Much of the work was illustrations for Portals’ Fiction column as well as the cover art for the monthly mix.
This poster for Those Darlins was a favorite flyer of the City Paper!
Here’s a smattering of colorful work done for Portals’ various outputs.
I also created these illustrative stand alone websites for Portals featuring animated GIF landscapes in the background.
View the site here: http://www.portalsmusic.com/Reflection-2013/
Like the CMJ posters done for Portals mush last year, I developed a poster and website for Portals’ SXSW showcase as well. The poster was a 12”x18” two color screen print. The website was a simple but slightly interactive. View it here: http://www.portalsmusic.com/portalsxsw14/#home
This is a personal concept that I illustrated and executed the first of for my screenprinting class. The theme was “Priests Reciting Drake Lyrics” or “Church of Drizzy”. I would most likely continue this on in a more of a sketch blog.
This final piece is a split-fountain screenprint of an assortment of things I love to draw which I then used as the back of my newly designed and screenprinted business cards. Hopefully I will be handing millions of these out in the coming months!