Valentine's Day Card series

I know its a little late to post these since Vday has passed but they're still cool regardless. I got great feedback from people ^_^

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)

In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2003)

Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)

Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)

Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch, 1989)

Currently: Valentine's Day Cards

I'm making some Valentine's Day cards for dear friends of mine, and the theme is cinema. I've chosen some films and looked for select moments from each film to draw out and include a pseudo-romantic/sappy quote. Here's just a few as the rest of them are in progress:

The process isn't really a big deal so far, as I've just been drawing everything on graph paper with pencil, then traced over in pen/ink. I erase the pencil marks and take out the grid in Photoshop. Then a few touch ups here and there.

Los Angeles Art Book Fair

This weekend I traveled down to the Geffen Contemporary in LA for the Los Angeles Art Book Fair. Words cannot describe how overwhelmed (in a good way) I was by all the awesome independent publishers, major publishers, book dealers, artists, and zinesters there. I even ran into an old college professor of mine from UCI and he gave me one of his books. The only thing that would have made it better is if I had gotten there earlier and eaten something at one of the food trucks, but damn there was so much stuff to see I sacrificed a meal in order to see it all before closing time.

I don't really know what I'd call my favorite part, but it was just really great and inspiring to see all of these cool artists publish their own books, zines, own their own bookstores, and just do things they think is cool for other people and for themselves. I'm totally looking forward to making my own zine or book in the near future (!), so this was a great thing to witness and feel motivation for my own creative endeavors.

I took some photos with my Nikon, and I haven't practiced digital in a while so I was pretty shaky at first. Take a gander at some crappy photos I took. There would be more photos here if I had more time to take in everything I saw, and if I didn't forget the obvious settings like ISO and aperture mode. I'll be practicing more digital in the future.
-X

NIKON D60

Flyer- Things That Are Square

Sorry so sorry I haven't updated in forever.

In between looking for jobs and driving back and forth to Santa Monica I've been trying to draw and make more stuff. And I finally succeeded in finishing something cool~

I made a flyer for my friend's radio show called "Things That Are Square" that airs every week on KUCI, my college radio station. His show features a mix of indie, post-punk, punk, garage, independent artists and musicians, etc. This concept I had in my head for a while and I thought it was perfect, to create a classic 1950's comic style cartoon advertisement. Kyle has a zany sense of humor so I knew he'd get a kick out of it.

For inspiration, and to get the accuracy of the style of the cartoon of the time, I Google image searched 'old Bazooka Joe comics' 'classic comic book kid advertisements' etc. Even though I roughly imagined what it looked like, I needed to study closely how much detail goes into faces and shapes so it would be accurate and evoke the look and feel of classic '50s advertisements that I desired.

First I drew the cartoon out on graph paper. I drew it out in pen without pencil... I made a couple of mistakes, but I used white charcoal to cover them up and drew over them with pen again. If you don't have white charcoal maybe consider using pencil to erase mistakes... unless using your mistakes in your work is your thing. After I was done I scanned the image to my computer to edit.

Cropped the image to just the drawing

TIP: Scan your images in photo mode, so the scanner pics up small details and the full range of colors (scan in color mode, not black and white)

I removed the grid in Photoshop:
Make sure you're in RGB Mode
Adjustment Layer> Black and White
Adjust the Cyan to white moving the small slider pointer all the way to the right.
You can also do the same for the Blue slider.
Doing this tells Photoshop that you want all the Cyans and Blues to turn to white, this way the grid disappears into white. I also boosted the blacks and whites with the Levels adjustment layer.

Now it looks like this:

Next, I had to remove all the other pen marks I didn't want in the picture. You can do this a number of ways but I just used the Clone tool on a new layer and blended the pen marks in with the white background. I also have to zoom in where I used the white charcoal and blend those too. There were also some pen mistakes I didn't erase and I blended those in white too.

I decided next to use the Channel Mixer to blend the background into something that wasn't white. I'm not really a fan of painting in Photoshop so I decided to forgo painting the kids and fleshing them out in color. This works fine for me, and it's more comic book-y.

So the Channel Mixer takes just a bit of time, to get it into the shade of blue of whatever color you'd like. You'd probably have to play around with the output channels and the different sliders. The end result gave me this cool looking aqua color that I actually wanted. Save it to a place you know will be easy to find (I always save things to Desktop on my Mac).

Next, I created a new Photoshop document with the dimensions for a flyer. I made the background transparent, and then File> Place the saved image. Using the Eyedropper tool I grabbed a sample the color of the drawing background, then used the Paint Bucket Tool to splash the aqua color on the rest of the transparent background. You should see a pop up window that says you need to rasterize the image to proceed with the Paint Bucket; that just merges the image and background layer together. Click "OK" to proceed. The background around the image should now be the same color as the background of the image.

Next I added all the surrounding text, choosing the right font and spacing of the text. Definitely have the Character box open so you can have control over the spacing of lines and the thickness.

AND VOILA.

Check out Things That Are Square every Thursday from 6-8 pm PST on KUCI.org, or thru the radio if you live in Orange County at 88.9 fm