Brian Moore's Sketchblog

Here’s an early, slightly different pencil sketch for that painted cover image from a few posts back.

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 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.)

Here’s another Smithson sketch from the archives. Here I had eventual print publication in mind, and was trying to arrive at a b&w style that I liked. And as always trying to draw faster and in a more lively way. I used colored pencil for the linework, with a loose watercolor wash and some gouache highlights. When I finished it I wasn’t that thrilled, but with a few years’ distance it looks okay.

Here I tried my hand at re-designing some Smithson characters, in gouache and ink. This is from a while back; now I’d go a little lighter with the gouache washes. Hey, that’s fun to say.