"MESSAGE FROM THE COUNTRY" (April 1987)
Colored pencils. I think this was part of an "art history" class assignment. The idea was to take a particular style and use it to re-design an existing album cover. Maybe. In my case, I replaced Roy Wood's cover for this album with one based on Vincent Van Gogh (I think... if anyone out there can corrct me, please let me know! It's been awhile since I did this.) The faces in the clouds are, of course, Bev Bevan, Roy Wood, and Jeff Lynne!
Guache. I guess this was my 3rd-quarter follow-up to the "Science Fiction Weekend" poster. The assignment, if memory serves, was to do a book cover, with multiple images, but use limited color as a way to keep things organized. More or less. The central face also incorporated a rendering style I'd seen used by various Spanish illustrators who did work for Jim Warren's horror comics magazines in the 1970's. The only thing that's really "off" here is, the color of the book's author is almost unreadable. I've gotten much better with that sort of thing, designing many, many music CD covers for myself.
Guache. This was a simple assignment: doing a "posterized" image. That is, taking a photograph and simplifying it down as much as possible. Fun stuff.
Pen & ink. Another very simple assignment, an example of "art deco". (Or was that "art nouveau"?) This was based on my best friend I made at the school, who sadly dropped out only 8 weeks after I met her! As a result, nobody else in my class had any memory of who she was when they saw this piece. (They were all mostly a rather self-centered bunch as it was, anyway.)
Colored pencils. The design for a potential "set" of a TV show, this one dedicated to showing old sci-fi movies, and being hosted by a man dressed as an astronaut. I was inspired by "Captain Philadelphia" on Channel 48 in Philly, back in early 1966. Somewhere around the house, I have an actual table-top model I built based on this drawing, done to the scale of "MAJOR MATT MASON, Mattel's Man In Space". (Note, the various tools & weapons haning on the board are all actual MMM toy accessories!)
Airbrush class. Simple but fun. What I sometimes find maddening is, I never did buy a compressor so I could do this sort of work at home. But nowadays, Photoshop has made it redundant.
Markers. A typography class assignment. You would not believe how many thumbnails, roughs and semi-roughs I had to go through before this design was finally approved. Which means it was probably one of Carol Schwartz' classes. The idea was to come up with an advertisement that summed up a particular lettering font. A few years later, I'd have done this sort of thing in Corel Draw (or for most of you-all out there, Adobe Illustrator, which, regardless of what anybody says, is the same damn program).
"MRS. PEEL" (September 1987)
Another airbrush class assignment. A "companion" piece to my earlier "John Steed", and it fits that while I did his in "old-fashioned" pen-and-ink", the more modern Diana Rigg should be in the tool-of-the-day.
"CAROLINE MUNRO" (September 1987)More airbrush. I was in Munro's Fan Club for quite a few years in the 1980's. I regret never having a chance to meet her. The one convention I went to where she was scheduled to attend, she wound up cancelling at the last minute, and they got Ingrid Pitt to replace her. Which, I have to admit, I didn't mind! I'll always remember Munro most for THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD, which I saw in a theatre, twice, never once getting up from my seat on either occasions.
Pen & ink, finished with airbrush. My brother started this home-made fanzine tribute/take-off of Jack Kirby & Don Heck's IRON MAN way back in June 1971, and after 10 episodes, I wound up picking up the slack and "finishing" several stories he'd planned and never gotten around to. Years and years later, some of it was still unfinished, and I took a break between quarters at the school to polish them off. Finally, the last piece of work done on this "amateur" project was the cover for the the 16th issue, and I decided it would be fun to use this new-fangled tool I'd learned on it. Had I done this in Photoshop, I'm sure it would have been in color.
(Continued in Part 3)
More as I go!
All Artwork Copyright (C) Henry R. Kujawa
Phantom of the Opera, London After Midnight, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Mike Hammer, Major Matt Mason, Star Wars, and any other various movies depicted are all the properties of the various Copyright holders.
An interesting and varied group of images, Henry. Keep posting them. And a belated Happy New Year!
ReplyDeleteArtists "self-centered"?! I've never heard of such a thing!
ReplyDelete