One section of the story calls for “menacing Art Deco”. Still need to practice that. Atom looks mildly worried; that’s a good start.
I’m blowing through the watercolor paper pretty quickly these days— big piles of discards with half-painted panels or random daubs of color. Sometimes the daubs are more interesting than the panels. So I’m trying out some collage work with these leftover bits. The first one got a little out of hand, but this crop of it looks okay.
This was a wraparound cover idea for a theoretical Smithson book. You can see a detail of the painting in this post from last year. It’s gouache and ink on bristol board.
Here’s the version with logo and type:
The design is okay, but that logo needs some work. If I were to do this again I’d go for something more ragged-y and hand-drawn looking. (Or outsource it to somebody that knows what they’re doing.)
A colorful Smithson panel in gouache and ink. Looking at this new, vibrant scan, I’m startled to realize how terrible my old scanner was.
Here’s a panel from the first draft of the book, done in late 2008. Mostly watercolor with some touch-ups in gouache. For the new version I’m drawing at a larger size and have hopefully learned a few more things about watercolor.
Here’s a gouache painting of Micki from Smithson. The spiral shape was a recurring visual motif; it showed up as a big sculpture in the middle of campus (which all the students sat on, naturally) and on a pachinko machine in one episode.
Someday I might make a post featuring all the appearances of another visual motif, a guy with big sideburns that I would put into the foreground of crowd scenes to establish depth. (I called him Ray Poussoir.)
