Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Literary St. Louis

I've got a bunch of illustrations in this week's RFT -- including the cover and a big indexed map -- for a feature story on literary goings / geographical locales / (mostly) unflattering mentions of our fine, hot dilapidated city. It's kinda similar to this ARCH MADNESS map I did, but specially about book 'n writers 'n stuff.
My first impulse was to do a pop-up book, and for a while I tried to make an actual 3D pop-up book that would be photographed:
I had a hard time making that work, with the angles and actual street data, so I went back to the 2D drawing board. I built my map with vectors... Then hand-traced it with a lightbox:I did a bunch of li'l spot illustrations ...and added them -- along with new type and color and everything -- here:
We stuck with the "literary tourist" idea for the cover illustration:
And I drew it.
Good luck, and stay cool out there book fans!

6 comments:

STEVE WALLET said...

wonderful drawings (as usual0 and a great explanation of your process-thanks

J Crane said...

Oh my god, I mean JESUS christ, I feel like a complete and utter shirker. Holy chist! Dan, that is amazing. and beautiful.

Bob Flynn said...

Man, great to see you process—as always, Dan! Love the concept, execution. EVERYTHING. Makes me miss St. Louis. Almost ;)

nate beaty said...

Wow, gorgeous drawings, and what a ton of work! I've always wanted to do a photographed-popup-book sort of piece, but agree that it's really hard to make it work. That said, I still love what you did at that stage.

Dan Z. said...

Thanks guys! Yeah, I'll make the actual pop-up book work one of these days ... just not when I need it to work as a map.

amy said...

hi there , I am a graphic designer and I have a project about "pop-up" combine with the map. I 'd woundering maybe we can get together.

if you are interestind please leave a massage as soon as possible.My email is → amy9919@gmail.com