Zettwoch's Suitcase

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Pet Prints on Parade Process Post

I was happy to make these prints for this year's 21st Annual Beggin' Pet Parade, part of the pre-Mardi Gras festivities in Soulard, and "The Guinness Record holder for the largest parade of costumed animals".

Here's a bunch of sketches and stuff that piled up on my desk like a lot of puppies. Early ideas:

Here was the first round of sketches. "Flowchart", "Gang" and "Hot Rod":

We ended up going with the Hot Rod/Dog kinda idea:

Made some tweaks to the final sketch, thanks to Greg S. and fine folks at Purina, and we were just about there:

Final Drawing:

Ink color tests:

Final vector art:

Separations on acetate:

3 colors (indigo, metallic silver, fluorescent pink) down:

And the 4th (yellow):

Thanks everyone! Hope to see you at the parade!. We're really gonna try and get our scoodle into that jester's outfit, even if he hates it.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Communications Work / Smoke Signal Comic

I had a new four-page comic in the last issue of Smoke Signal (the one with the Chris Ware cover) called COMMUNICATIONS WORKERS OF AMERICA. Here are some sketches and behind-the-scenes materials from its construction (click for larger images). Thumbnail / layouts:

Character designs:

Reference Pics:

Other schematics:

Animated .gif showing a page's evolution from thumbnail > rough sketch > tighter sketch > inked lineart > halftoned final page > etc:

Saturday, February 01, 2014

How My Cat Works

ANATOMY: A Look Inside of Your Feline Friend!, Acrylic, Ink, White-out & Silver Leaf on Wood Panel, 20"x16", 2014. This new painting will be up for auction at Tenth Life Cat Rescue event at the Regional Arts Commission, tonight in St. Louis. Here was the original sketch and some in-progress snapshots.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

2013: Say Goodbye

Once again, here's the cover to this week's RFT, and a bunch of weird stream-of-trivia-news-consciousness illustrations for the quiz. Here are sketches and final watercoloured art for each interior spot (click to see 'em larger):

And here were my ideas for the cover:

Once again I was happy to indulge one of my favorite visual metaphors, Baby New Year vs. Father Time. These characters have a rich history of among illustrators, going back to (and probably further back than) the gods Chronos & Saturn. .

Chronos, God of Time by Ignaz Günther

In the earliest days there seemed to be a real adversarial relationship between Father Time and his offspring, Baby New Year, which continued into medieval times.

Evrart de Conty, Les Echecs Amoureux, c. 1498.

I like this painting by Simon Vouet, which suggests that by the 17th century, Father Time and Baby New Year were at least fighting on the same allegorical side, the "team of time." Here they are being vanquished by Love, Venus & Hope in the painting Time Vanquished by Love, Venus and Hope, c. 1646. Then political cartoonists, for good or bad, got ahold of them.

William Hogarth, Time Smoking a Picture, 1761.
But the high point of visibility of these characters has to the 2nd and 3rd decades of the 20th century, specifially the time frame in which J.C. Leyendecker 's covers of The Saturday Evening Post were an annual milestone.

At this point the duo seemed to have developed more of an avuncular relationship, gentle but competitive. Less a passing of a torch then a passing of a joy buzzer. Or the inevitable inter-generational gesture of "pull my finger".