baldspot waddle

Scratch that, lets make it a website!

2010-08-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

So I finished up my website, formthehead.com, and it's all been splendid.

The site is built around a late 19th-century orientalist-ish theme, which is a subject I'm pretty fascinated by because of its post-colonial implications, and also from how often I encounter "Empire of Signs" by Roland Barthes.

I wanted to reference engravings from that period and earlier, as it gives it a sense of place, but the trouble is rendering it so it looks like an engraving. I'm not confident enough in my penmanship to make the perfectly parallel curves that are necessary, like the ones here:

So I decided to use scratchboard, since it seemed similar to engraving. I hadn't touched scratchboard since high school, but one trick I learned from painting and drawing is that if you can't get the edge of the positive space perfect, then draw using the negative space. Kinda works in Photoshop too...

Scratchboard is ink that is applied in a relatively even layer over a piece of paper (or board) that has a coating to prevent the ink from soaking in. Just a bit of scratching and the ink scrapes right off. The problem is having the correct tool to do that. Just about any tool would make a scratch, but most of them don't do smooth and substantial lines.

The main issue is that if you scratch too hard and manage to damage the coating, the white fibers of the paper would soak up any ink or dirt residue nearby (which is very likely since you had to produce a lot of ink residue just scratching it to expose the fibers). Also, the ink isn't perfectly even throughout, and sometimes it sticks to the paper more than it should. It'll still scratch off, but the lines that run over that rough spot would look inconsistent.

With all these concerns, I bought myself a pair of scratchboard nibs for my pen. They don't work, don't ever buy them. They are designed to dig deep instead of scratching a wide path, so considering how fragile the coat is underneath you'd be better off using your fingernails.

So I assembled an array of improvised tools *cue A-Team music*

From left to right: ball-tip pen, regular ink pen, #16 x-acto blade, etching scraper, etching needle, brush, and two improvised wire scrubber pens.

First, the #16 x-acto blade, which was the main tool used. I heard about its utility through google, and it is quite good. The regular x-acto blade has too sharp a tip, and the rounder blades don't give clean enough of a line. Also, you can feel the resistance from the surface of the scratchboard, which is necessary because you need to feel for an exact angle on both the X and Y-axes on the blade in order to get a good line.

Then there are the two wire scrubber tools. It's impossible to get a patch of total white on a piece of scratchboard with a sharp scratch tool, because scratching creates enough of a groove in the paper that there will be spots that are impossible to scratch off (the knife will keep trying to follow the last groove that it made). The wire scrubber is good because it clears off a large flat section, leaving no dents on the paper, and will never damage the coating. I taped a piece to a pen and another to a toothpick.

Then there's the work setup. I killed my back trying to draw on my desk, so I got one of those alvin drawing boards with adjustable legs and a ruler. One of the best purchases I've ever made, highly recommended.

First I did some trials with technique, testing all the tools and whatnot. The drafts didn't turn out that well. Obviously I drew them freehand without any measurement or tracing, so the faces are warped to all hell, but the "look" wasn't there, they just looked like scratchboard drawings.

I tried different techniques and I eventually just relied on being able to disguise double-stroking on the whites, so I can methodically fill the lines in as opposed to getting them with a consistent motion. Here's a comparison:

The final technique involved first composing the elements I wanted in photoshop, very roughly, and then printing them at the exact size.

Then I tape it down with the scratchboard underneath and then trace everything with a ballpoint pen. The pen applies enough pressure through the paper that it leaves an impression on the scratchboard. It's much easier than using transfer paper and the blunt tip of the pen makes sure that you don't accidentally scratch while tracing

These are some versions that I didn't think were entirely appropriate. A couple of them had inconsistent line density which looked completely bizarre (not really that obvious in these pictures), and some of them didn't have enough visual interest.

I'll link to the final images at my website, since this post is already filled with enough pictures. In the end I don't think I captured that theme very well, and wasn't willing to be as sarcastic as maybe the project needed. I don't know if I'll do more scratchboard in the future, since this was a very specific task, but I definitely learned a lot and it was fun to figure out

formthehead.com

2010-08-20T20:53:00.001-07:00

my domain, formthehead.com, finally has content after sitting idle for a year

go and see for yourself!

In the End Summer

2010-06-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

An illustration I did for Devin Kenny's limited-run mixtape cassette. I hadn't seen a tape in years, so I couldn't remember how the inserts actually worked, embarrassingly.

The illustration is an elaborate Henry Darger reference, though maybe a bit too heavy on the sarcastic tone. I've previously shied away from using traced elements in my work because I've always felt that traced lines are inferior to freehanded lines, but actually the issue is just that you can never make a traced line look like it was drawn freehand, or vice-versa. If I keep it consistent and trace everything (like Darger did) then it works fine.

It also took a while to get the right color coordination, and I don't think people give Darger enough credit for the amount of design that went into his color combinations. I couldn't just directly copy his chords, since his drawings were more landscapes than anything else, and mine are more focused on the characters (the characters also take up more space since they don't have child proportions). My version was passable only because I used the sunflowers to obscure the pictorial space, so I didn't have to worry as much about color contrasts disturbing my composition.

SAK flyer

2010-05-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

a quickie flyer I designed for my mom. Once again tried to do too many things at once and the tone is closer to "new restaurant in williamsburg" than "company picnic". Overall I think it's cheerful without seeming too ridiculous, which I have a hard time doing.

Also, Gotham is a real work horse.

NYC Film Food Festival

2010-04-05T21:50:00.001-07:00

My submission to the poster contest for the NYC Film Food Festival. Pretty straightforward guidelines, and since it had to be over 24 x 36 and print-ready in an under-5MB pdf, I could only see it being a vector thing.

I've been watching Top Gear lately, and one adjective they repeatedly use to describe expensive cars is "vulgar". Not necessarily in a bad way, just as something that is shamelessly decadent and overdone, but through that it becomes an honest appreciation of what makes cars great. I tried to do that with both food and films, and just make the most erotic illustration of food and film with the typography that describes them.

It's actually not what the event is about at all, though. It's not the energetic and shameless cliche in the poster, but more a post-starbucks smugness (stuff like bacon fads). The poster's pretty unfeasible anyways, so I don't expect it to win, but I sorta like how it turned out.

clopen studios

2010-02-18T21:26:00.001-08:00

A flyer I designed for Devin KKenny's show on the 19th. Very close deadline on this one, so it's not as polished as I would like. Originally I just wanted to expand on the pun used in the show name, but it eventually got a bit too much into referencing prescription label design. I had some info graphic-ish colors originally but it became difficult to balance everything out, but I hope the contrast with the yellow and red highlighting provides enough visual interest.

Pure Fish Has No Water

2010-01-31T16:18:00.000-08:00

The paintings from my senior show, Pure Fish Has No Water

Ching Chong Chinaman

2010-01-31T16:10:00.001-08:00

the postcard for a new play coming to NYC, Ching Chong Chinaman. On this one I followed the client's exact instructions, so it wasn't as much about designing the postcard as illustrating it. I can't really explain how any of this works conceptually, because I don't really know, but I tried to make it look nice. It's loony enough to work, I think.

New York Korean Parade

2010-01-31T15:58:00.000-08:00

Another sketch that went nowhere, this time for the Korean Day Parade, but it was ignored (therefore rejected) without any reaction at all. That ticked me off more than I thought it would, because working for free is okay if I get some kind of work experience out of it, but without client feedback a day's work more or less evaporated.

I tried to reference the Korean fan dance, which I thought was culturally representative without being stereotypical or trite.

Manhattan Cardiovascular

2010-01-31T15:46:00.000-08:00

these are the initial sketches I did for a new logo for Manhattan Cardiovascular. The issue here is that I couldn't think of a way to make them a logo without using a cartoon heart, but I still felt like a logo for a heart practice needed a heart in it. So these were exercises at making abstractions of hearts that don't look like the typical cartoon hearts.

Children's Athletic Training School

2010-01-31T15:41:00.000-08:00

These were some logos I sketched out for the Children's Athletic Training School's website redesign the firm was doing. This was one of the first projects I did there and I think I learned a bit about how to make logos people would actually use. These, while visually appealing, were too busy and conspicuous to make good logos for a child sports gym.

One Hundred Black Men

2010-01-31T15:34:00.000-08:00

These were two drafts of a folded postcard I designed for One Hundred Black Men Inc. while I was interning at Fresh Concentrate. I designed them with no info about the event and very vague direction from the client, so I think I instinctively tried to make them challenging by trying not to make them racist or stereotypical. Ultimately it didn't really matter and I never worked on the final design, but it was interesting to figure out.

Inevitable Duh

2010-01-31T15:25:00.000-08:00

Wow, I really haven't been taking good care of the blog.

Inevitable Duh, Devin KKenny's show on February 5th.

Maybe I tried doing too many things here, and I think I should've put all the show info underneath everything else like the credits on a movie poster or something, instead of trying to go for pictorial consistency. Having that be legible is probably more important than demonstrating that it's about fertilization.

Drawings, 2007.

2009-08-18T09:33:00.000-07:00

Some drawings I did in the fall of 2007. Junior year had just started and I had no idea what to do for my own work now that it came down to it. I just started doing super-detailed but unfinished drawings of stuff lying around in my studio, probably a sign that my own frustration was eating me alive. These are pretty tiny, about 2-3 inches across. I decided to get rid of the grain and color of the paper upon scanning them because I wanted them to function on the computer screen the same way they do physically. Not sure if that was the best decision.

Old Photos, part 2

2009-08-18T00:42:00.001-07:00

This is a series of b/w medium format photos I did. I took advantage of b/w film's general lenience towards proper exposure and used the flat plane of the front of the medium format camera in order to press it against the glass of storefronts at night. Being able to take photos at night while doing painting and design work during the day allowed me to crank out alot of work for every class once finals came around (didn't leave time for sleep, unfortunately). I like these because I like work in series and because there was at least some cohesion.

Old Photos, part 1

2009-08-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

These are some old photos I did for Photo I. I'm pretty terrible at photography, as what I did in that class was basically take tourist photos with super expensive equipment borrowed from the photo department. I didn't continue with photo because what I enjoyed about the photographic process was the darkroom, not the actual taking of photos or the theories/critiques. It's pretty apparent that I won't be able to have free access to a darkroom after graduation, so I figured it wasn't meant to be.

This the first set of stuff that I shot. I shot quite a few rolls of film, but only these came out usable. The rest were either boring or out-of-focus.

Mütter Museum Identity Manual

2009-08-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

This is the second large project in Visual Identities, where the assignment was to create an entire identity manual for a Museum of some sort. I chose the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia as my institution. Originally I wanted to make something that referenced the Caduceus but in an altered and perverted form to show both the science, grotesqueness, and downright badassery of the museum. This was a bit too hard and too abstract, so therefore I just chose a recognizable object from the museum and made it into a logo.

These pages are excerpts from the completed identity manual:

The logo with clearspace

Logo variations and colors. Had alot of fun with the variations, not so much with the color data.
A common errors page.

And a Business card template. These aren't particularly clever or poetic, I feel, as I tried to encapsulate the creative direction of the identity through brute force.

I designed stationary and envelopes as well, but they weren't particularly interesting.

topsy the elephant

2009-08-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

This is the first large project for Visual Identities, where the assignment was to design a visual identity for a roadside attraction. I chose the museum to Topsy the Elephant in Coney Island (I chose something in NYC just in case I had to go in person to take photographs, which turned out to be unnecessary).

First was the logo, which was a disaster
Apparently it doesn't look like an elephant but a fist with a lightning bolt. I was very sad because I couldn't see anything but an elephant. I eventually stuck to this one because I liked it way too much, and made some other versions just in case:
And the postcard:
Two variations of the front and the same design for the back on both. Had to cut out the punchline for the first card ("Edison > Hannibal"), which is why it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in hindsight

type updates

2009-08-11T13:24:00.001-07:00

First update in a loooooooooong time. Honestly I forgot I had this and didn't make much work worth posting that wasn't schoolwork, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to post schoolwork. Anyhow, I've been working on some type design over the summer because it fits well with my pace, and it's the kind of thing that can never really needs to be completed so I can spend as much or as little time on it as I'd like to.

First is a typeface that I started for the type design class a couple of years back (can't find the copy of it at the moment). It came from looking at black letter samples and how they were especially great for papercuts because of how well the letters interlaced with each other. I've seen stencil fonts but not papercut fonts, so this was an interesting jumping-off point for me. I didn't particularly like how the first one looked overwhelmingly digital, as because of time constraints in class I had no time to do proper sketches. I decided to redraw the font completely in my spare time, using the calligraphic pen as the model.only lowercase characters at the moment, and I feel that it's a bit too constrasting and bold. I enjoy the variety of negative spaces but loathe the amount of kerning and ligatures I'd need to make this work. The space is actually a vertical bar that ensures the thing can stay connected without ascenders, descenders, and caps, but somehow neither photoshop nor illustrator renders it properly.

Second is a sans-serif I started because I had no experience making one (I don't particularly like using them). I tend not to like the lowercase g and capitals in sans-serif fonts, as the italic G is awkward to me. It wasn't made apparent to me how difficult a roman G is to fit with proper negative space into a sans-serif because of how simple the other characters were, so to avoid having a sideways pair of glasses or a circle with a fish hook I had to do alot of sketching to eventually settle on this version. It's kind of a hiccup in terms of legibility but I don't think this font is polished enough to be a text face anyways.

and other stuff

2009-01-30T13:33:00.001-08:00

Some stuff I did for visual identities.

Didn't realize I was supposed to make symbols instead of illustrations for the pros and cons of a certain issue. The Nick Nolte goat took way longer than I would've liked

third flyer for DKK

2009-01-30T13:16:00.001-08:00

Last-minute band poster I did for Devin Kenny's performance on the 31st

wanted to post it before I went and took a nap

Finished posterizerationals

2008-12-06T16:01:00.000-08:00

I finally finished the poster for yeah sure okay last night, because I got the kind of look I was trying for after a few drinks. The secret was in tiny highlights. It makes it look drawn instead of photographic while still edging on the side of representation rather than reinterpretation. I took more liberties with rendering the characters as well, something I was kind of unsure about at first because I've never met any of these people and I can only gather their likeness from blurry interlaced DVD captures. I figured after many drafts that making sure that everyone was happy with how they looked shouldn't be first priority.

The fluorescent lips were not intentional, it's just a combination of display settings on the macbook and illustrator shitting out random colors.

Poster layout was based on Street Fighter posters from back in the day, as well as the cover to the street fighter eternal challenge artbook. The font was once again horus heavy -- the font I made a while back which surprisingly looks decent at such small sizes. The poster feels better without the credits but that's kind of defeating the point of making a movie poster I suppose.

I might post more later but that's all I could scrape off the top of my head

2008-11-04T08:44:00.000-08:00

A flyer I did yesterday for Devin Kenny and Daniel Oh's show on the 7th. Devin wanted elements that referenced current events. The economic meltdown and the election of 2008 are the big events I tried to incorporate both of them here, along with global warming and the decline of the American Empire. I tried to make the red stripes both the stripes of the flag, the declining line of a graph, and a tidal wave. With the names and times I tried to reference both a bar graph and skyscrapers. The blue was kind of a last-minute thing, because I wanted to get all the colors of the flag. It made this look too much like the comedy central logo, but I think it's a reasonable tradeoff.

Also, anyone know good uses for the envelope distort in illustrator? I had to use it alot in this and it was a gigantic pain in the ass.

MIIIIIIIDGET miiiiidget midget midget

2008-10-21T20:01:00.000-07:00

This is a poster I made for the information design class of fall '07, that I re-did for the End of the Year show of summer '08. I'm only posting it just now because I couldn't get a hold of a certain font that I needed to show it properly (thanks Devin Kenny for being my accomplice in my font-robbing schemes).

Anyways, the assignment was to map a work of fiction, and I chose Trapped in the Closet. However, mapping it proved somewhat tricky because a normal character map in itself would already be thoroughly complex, nevermind a more, uh, philosophical approach. Simply mapping the interactions within Trapped in the Closet is completely uninteresting to me because it does nothing to show the absurd genius of the work. There's no way you can convey Trapped in the Closet better than it can convey itself, and this became the core problem for this project.

This is the same solution by Alex Kuo that I came across while teaching my summer class in California, 8 months after I made my poster. It's basically everything I didn't want to do in my project because it can only be a lesser imitation of the real thing, and I guess it's what hipster culture is all about. This is why Plato hates art.

This is my solution, which markets an as-of-yet fictional product based on Trapped in the Closet: the Trapped in the Closet Pinball Game. Instead of being a map of the actual movie/music video, its a map of R. Kelly's mind as he is making trapped in the closet, and it essentializes the rules within the storytelling rather than the actual story being told. Honestly, it's not the story itself that matters in Trapped, but rather the absurdity through which it is told. This project is both a representation and an extention of that. The abstract idea of physics relating to the broader idea of cause-and-effect is what gives rise to the mechanics of both Trapped in the closet as well as the pinball game.

Digital painting explorations

2008-10-19T02:43:00.000-07:00

So I've been working on a poster for Yeah Sure Okay, and I imagined a throwback to old illustrated movie posters from the 70s or 80s. Something like this:

I meant to do it on the computer so I could get good integration with typographic and vector elements in illustrator, and also because I don't have a scanner to conveniently put hand-drawn images into the computer. However, even with a tablet, painting on the computer is total bullshit.

Now, I thought this was because I was unfamiliar with the medium, and this is true. I went to the book store and then the comic book store to look at collections of digital paintings by professionals. They look like total ass too. Even with a tablet most painting techniques don't work, and it never gives the degree of control and subtlety that I imagined I'd have. On the plus side it's really easy to trace stuff, and that actually does save time

Moreover, the images I had to work with were awkwardly-lit DVD captures that were badly interlaced/compressed. So to start off I did a brute-force approach which didn't work great.
Then, I did a more comic-book approach by making the highlights sharper and reducing the number of colors. It worked fine and I'll probably use what I made. Both were from the same video frame and both of them get cut off at the waist. I didn't want such an arbitrary edge on the picture so I did some clever shit and tried to extend it.

Then I combined a sharp brush with opacity and size jitter with a large transparent airbrush in order to smooth out the inconsistent edges and contours in the previous renditions

However, it's a bit TOO perfect now, and it looks nothing like what I intended for it to look in the beginning.

In conclusion, Digital painting is really quick, somewhat convenient, completely unfulfilling, stupid, and unfortunately necessary. More updates later.

Graphic Design Update

2008-10-19T02:32:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd do a massive update on the current project I'm doing when I'm done with it, but it's 5 am and I don't think I can sleep anytime soon so I'll do a quick update of what's going on so far. I set the "four updates a week" mandate so I'll spend time working, and it actually kinda worked since I have been keeping myself pretty busy. However, even though I have plenty of stuff to update the blog with I keep forgetting to actually get around to doing it.

Here's the latest draft of the business card that I did two weeks ago, with corrected contact info and a re-done image that does not make Larry look like a "down-syndrome ogre". I didn't bother designing the back because I was tired, but I might get around to it later. The black and white are just placeholder colors, meant to show contrast and transparency.

This is the logo for YSO. Originally I meant to make a normal version and a stencil version, but I ran into problems composing an interesting logo, which somehow resolved itself quite well when I made it into a stencil. So the stencil ended up being the regular logo.

I'll make another update later tonight about progress on the movie poster, which was much more troublesome than I expected.

Cards are serious Business

2008-09-21T21:44:00.001-07:00

As a continuation of last post, here's a rough sketch of a business card that I designed using the typeface I just made. I'll probably do different color combinations, which is why the hair is just pain gray right now (I plan to have a halftone but photoshop/illustrator combinations aren't going as well as I'd hoped, so I'll leave it gray til I figure out what to do.

I think it's kinda nice

Type protoTYPEs

2008-09-19T09:10:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a typeface for a new project. I offered to design a bunch of stuff for a friend of mine's big new thing. This is a typeface that I'd probably use for the logo along with other materials. It's a display face that is more rounded than the kind of geometric slab serifs like Memphis but not as calligraphic as something like Century. All I have so far are the small caps, since those are what I'd be making the logo from.

I present: Horus Heavy
Of note are:

Slightly slanted As with a hat on top!
Descending calligraphic tails on the Qs (I didn't like the usual slab serif Qs, even if this does look a bit out of place)
And concave verticals, along with jutting serifs for the E, F, L, and T letters.

This was surprisingly quick to do. I started Saturday night and put less than 12 hours into this thing. I even got most of the kearning done. I need to go back and make another pass at it, but since it's a display font I'm not too worried about it looking perfect since I'll probably be adjusting the proportions in the logos anyways.

Cheers

Two of Three

2008-08-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

So this is the last one I started for the series, this time using color with black and white throughout the entire process. I guess I don't particularly care for colors, and I had a lot of trouble integrating it into the composition in a way that didn't feel so heavy-handed. The part at the top is where the woodblock didn't manage to cover the entire paper, but I thought it was nice so I kept it. For the part where the woodgrain meets the drawn elements I wanted to make the depth ambiguous, but because I used the same ghetto registration technique it ended up being a bit off and now it just looks like something peeling up.

I like the first two much more than this one, because for this I felt a bit too desperate to add new elements that I really misused what I already had. It feels like a really stupid collage rather than the drawing I envisioned, so I took half a step forward and ten steps back, really.

One of Three

2008-08-12T18:38:00.000-07:00

This is one of a series of drawings I did at the end of last semester. It's a combination of drawn elements as well as printed woodblock and monoprint. Originally I just started by "collaging" photographic elements by drawing them into configurations on the page, but that plays into my weaknesses and usually makes stale work. I'm rather controlling with mediums like drawing, to the level that I lose interest in the drawing itself because of its predictability.

Therefore I started adding monoprinted elements as well as starting the drawing in a different orientation than I intended to finish it, both as means of introducing unexpected results. For the wood grain I cut a mylar stencil to fit the drawing, stuck it to a plank of plywood using water, inked up the exposed wood with sumi ink, and ran it through the press. It's a terrible way of registering a print but I intended it to be that way so that there would always be a chance I'd destroy the drawing. I don't mean to reference the process of nearly destroying the drawing, it's just a way of separating myself from it. I then did a watercolor monoprint with the blue, but the introduction of color was rather unsuccessful, so I drew an image around it, making it into "waves". It's the first drawing I started for this set and the last one I finished, as I had to do alot of tweaking to blend the different elements together.

Oh yeah, the drawing was done using water-soluble graphite, so that I can run water over a portion drawn with pencil and it would completely erase the texture of the paper. It gives it a more organic look than pencil drawing but also gives a lot more control than watercolor washes.

2008-07-31T15:55:00.000-07:00

This is a poster I designed in collaboration with Devin Kenny for a gig he is performing on the 8th of August. Devin wanted something that would 1). advertise a show about gameboy music without relying on the usual symbols, and 2). Make his name really prominent. I make pretty terrible graphic design, most of the time, and I feel like this plays to my strengths. Grids are boring and so are most "mainstream" fonts, so I just dug up a rather plain, classical font (Baskerville) and tried to destroy both my grid and the letter forms. Overall it's a lazy effort that turned out much better than most of my serious efforts.

Oh, and the image is from Volume 2 of the Akira manga. It's the room where all the telekinetic subjects live. We touched it up a bit and changed the colors around. We chose it because it was nondescript but from a very awesome source.

Baldspot Waddle Manifesto

2008-07-31T00:06:00.000-07:00

I'm starting this blog to make more work--as a diet that adds instead of subtracts--as the acceleration against my static friction. Four times a week, starting next week, I plan to update this blog with new work. All of this is fairly self-explanatory; and even though I'm doing the work "for myself" and "for art's sake", I'm sharing stuff on the internet for the first (maybe) time. And obviously I'm writing this blog post because I believe someone will read this blog and be impressed.

Even so, placebos are just as good as real medicine.

Edit: After a year and less than 2 dozen posts, I'm surprised I started so optimistically