Uncle Arnold

Here's a portrait of my Uncle Arnold from a picture that was probably taken in the mid-80s. He was an awesome painter and ceramicist, and sadly was lost to skin cancer about 20 years ago. Although I was very young at the time, I have fond memories of visiting his art studio/converted warehouse in Berkeley,CA and seeing his art. His work was gestural and figurative, serious and funny at the same time, and I still think of him as an inspirational figure in my life and in my work. He's missed by many.

Just a sketch

Here is one of the ideas I had for my book cover before I decided to do the whole thing on the computer. It was fun but it's a bit crowded and hard to get a clean drawing with colored pencils. This'll be the last one of these you see for a while.

Book Cover #2

This was actually my first design for the book cover, but it felt more like a poster than a book illustration and the class liked the other one better. So there you go. I debated for a long time whether to keep it like this or more simple like the one below.

20,000 Illustrations Under the Sea

I recently finished an illustration fundamentals course taught at PNCA by local artist Ryan Bubnis. We were given many options for our final project and after much deliberation I decided to go with designing a cover for a classic novel. Curiously I decided to do 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. Curious because I've never read the book. I decided that this was to my advantage, recalling Eastern European film posters for American movies that I've seen. You know, the ones where it's obvious that the artist has never seen the film? These often yield spectacular results, so I thought the same could be true for mine.

Part of my reason for taking this class was to push myself to think about art and illustration in different ways. To get out of my comfort zone a bit. Having always loved the simplicity of mid-century book covers I decided that I wanted to take a stab at it for myself. This really forced me to boil down the plot of the book to it's core elements, and play with those to maximum effect. Below is my final piece:



There are a few different incarnations that I'll post in the coming days, but ultimately this is the design I settled on. If I had more time I would have liked to play around with rendering it in more traditional media, but for now this is what I have. What do you guys think? Would YOU buy this book?