So I'm feeling pretty inspired after a wonderful trip to Paris.. where I got to witness the most jaw-dropping display of beautiful architecture and artwork. Anyone who's been there knows what I'm talking about, but it was my first time and I'm still a bit awe-struck by it. I mean, I knew Paris would be beautiful, just from seeing all of the photos and movies over the years.. but I didn't think it would hit me the way that it did. Why don't we make things like that anymore (and by "that", I mean pretty much every single structure in Paris)? It seems like the art of masonry has been lost to utilitarian modernism. Don't get me wrong.. I love the general influence of modernism on architecture. But it also seems to have given license for every uninspired, drab, concrete, character-void structure out there (see: strip malls, apartment complexes). It seems the post-modernists were lamenting this as well, but I think they overstepped their rebellion a bit. OK, I don't know where I'm going with this, but just want to basically say that the architecture and sculpture of Paris is... Bad Ass!! And that I'm going to miss it.
If you go to Paris, you must go to the Musee d'Orsay to see the impressionists. I seemed to have forgotten how varied the work was from these guys, and was left with a new found respect. There was a special exhibition of Pastels that was mind-blowing in it's examples of mastery. These guys must have had just huge amounts of time on their hands. Oh, and if you go, it helps to bring along a crafty Parisian who can get you past the 1 hour+ line out front.
By the way, the illustration above is one I did a couple months ago for a group Friend & Johnson promo mailer, which was all about Paris!
I realize that's it's been quite a while since my last update. Thankfully, it's due to a huge amount of work in November and December, and not just complete laziness. In November, I worked on a project for Nike & Footlocker making artwork to be animated for 4 TV commercials. The work was added to live footage that had already been shot, with the animation going on in the background, but unfortunately the job was killed right before starting on the 4th spot. It's a long story which I will cover later when I post some of the work.. but it was still a great project to work on. For now, here's a teaser image: On top of this project, I've been creating much more work for Key Bank to go along with the current campaign I created over the summer. I've been doing collateral work for in-bank posters, brochures.. even for the backs of ATM displays, as well as getting tons of requests from individual banks for direct mail pieces. One of the coolest applications of this collateral work will be as large-format banners inside the Key Arena in Seattle. All of this Key stuff has worked out to be around 24 illustrations in 2 months, many of which I will post soon.. but here's a couple to start with: Also, in the past 2 months, I've created an ad campaign for IBM, made another 2 Men's Journal portraits, 2 more Spirit Magazine portraits, a piece for Dwell Magazine, a couple portraits for Walden University, and started work for some Patagonia t-shirts. More on all of these later...
Last month, I created these illustrations for a new clothing brand called "Tuner Kids". It's an offshoot of the "PRPS" jeans brand, and is aimed at the very niche "tuning" culture of car modification. If you've ever seen The Fast and the Furious and Jackass, it's sort of like that.. just mix the two together. The "tuner kid" is basically one of those kids who likes to beef up their cars (almost exclusively imports - Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi) with additional or replacement parts for extra speed, or sometimes simply for aesthetics. You may have seen them in local parking lots comparing their cars, their girls, and/or the fluency of their slang. Or racing by you wrecklessly with rather loud mufflers (is that an oxymoron?).
I was asked to convey plenty of rawness, attitude, obnoxiousness, dirt.. flies. As well as a little humor here and there. This subject matter is certainly not my norm, which is why I had a lot of fun drawing these. They'll be printed on t-shirts as part of the launch of the brand, with more designs to come in a few months. I'll post a link to the final shirts when they're up for sale.
Here's the 2nd TV spot for Key Bank, entitled "Medals". They interviewed Diana Munz, one of the US medalists in the Sydney Olympics, to talk about her medals and how she used Key Bank to help keep them secure. Overall I'm pretty happy with the animation on this one, considering they had to do a good amount of tweening to get the swimming and mermaid parts to work right.
I included a handful of stills from the final artwork I provided to Digital Kitchen. They mostly kept close to my original illustrations, but a couple of their translations didn't work quite as well (in my opinion). They turned the blowfish and the clam into 3D-rendered objects, that end up losing a lot of the charm and stylization of the more flat illustrative versions I provided. But this is an opinion that's admittedly non-objective. Aside from this, I think they did an amazing job!
This is the first of five TV spots for the Key Bank campaign I've been working on all summer (which I mentioned in the last couple of posts). Digital Kitchen is the amazing motion graphics team that animated all of the artwork, and actually came up with each visual storyline. And Cramer-Krasselt is the forward-thinking ad agency that hired us. My endless thanks go out to Noel Ritter and Lorraine Harkins (the art director and art buyer at CK, respectively) for hiring me to work on this great project. And another thank you to Anthony Vitagliano -- Digital Kitchen's creative director for the project -- and his team, for making my artwork come to life!
The first 3 spots just started airing in target markets this past Friday, so if you're in Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Boise, Seattle/Tacoma/Puget Sound, Portland (OR), or Hudson Valley (NY), you may just see one of them pop up in the middle of your favorite shows..
I'm still working on the last spot -- due next Tuesday -- so I don't really have time to post much info about these as of yet. But I will post more in-depth comments on each one later. You can go to the Digital Kitchen website for a full list of credits: http://www.d-kitchen.com/project.php?p=127
