Day 70: logo design process

 

Here's a montage of my process in figuring out a nice signable logo/sigil. I got married to my husband 3 years ago and hadn't stopped signing my work with my maiden name or plain print initials. It struck me a kind of stupid, since my work isn't well known enough for me to cling to a name I've always found awkward to sign.

So I started doodling. I went through more literal letterforms with accent strokes, realized it felt too fluffy to do that, I wanted something easier, more efficient than what I'd been working with before. I didn't want clunky, forced and stylized, I wanted clean and simple. I played with combining letter forms into a little picture, and the five-stroke owl emerged.



I can even have him "stand" on the date, if I choose. And, it was a simple jump from the pen-stroke owl to a more formal version I can use for vector graphics if I want to sign those.



So, there's my owl.

day63: Angry Girl (objectionable content)

 

Angry Girl (1995) Sharpie over pencil on paper. Some digital cleanup because the scan was bad and I can't find the original right now.

I did this as the flier art for an Accustomed To Nothing gig, in 1995 or so when I worked with the band's manager at Comic Relief in Berkeley CA. Brian asked, I drew stuff all the time, so I did it, and I got to go to the gig too. The flier had a big chunk of text over the middle finger so people wouldn't yank them from where they got posted, but this is the original art, no censorship.

I struggled with posting it. I had to get angry enough over something to even put that picture out there. I have to say that I'm afraid of the backlash, that I might never get a creative job again, etc.

But, if it puts another voice on the side of the WTF? Maybe it's worth it.

I'm posting this particular piece today because things are getting weirder than usual with regard to how women are presented in comics. Like, hentai-weird, in non-brown-wrapper packages. Super girls have always been treated like the cheerleaders of the super world before now, but lately it's become ridiculous, and they are being treated, routinely, like softcore porn actresses in bad victimization storylines. It wasn't this bad in the 1940's.

Women of the comic world are getting more vocal than they had been, and it's not like the women who write, draw and edit comics have been exactly silent on the subject. The ire has always been there, but now it's getting more organized. I don't really count myself in with this, since I never wrote a comic, or got beyond storyboarding one, and working up character designs, but I've always been a reader. Since I can remember. I used to read comics at recess in the fourth grade. I loved MAD, I read Xmen and Batman and Sgt Rock. I didn't like the girly comics. I'm such a tomboy that some of my male friends would forget there was a girl around.

Hey guys? I like the gritty, real-life tone that a lot of comics have taken. I love satire, the worse, the better. HOWEVER - this is a big however - gritty does not equal violently porny. Ever. If you can't wrap your head around that, the gesture above is for you.

Thanks.

Visceral reaction on my part follows:

Strong women can be strong without the necessity of their getting spanked by some bad guy in spandex, honest. It won't make your dick shrink to read about it. Grow the balls to buy some hentai books and stop trying to make regular comics into porn. I swear nobody will laugh at you if you by a copy of Legend of the Overfiend.

days 52 and 53: Foodie Glamour Shots

 

 

(1999) Digital photographs, retouched and digitally manipulated.

Two glamour shots I did for the cookbook project I mentioned on day 9.

One's vegan, and one isn't. I can't recall now which is which.

Day 22: Herod and Salome

 

Herod and Salome (2003) 8x10 pen and ink Illustration, some digital cleanup. Intended for print.

This is one of a set of several pen and ink illustrations made from photographs of 12th century stone carvings, which were done for a small-press publication on the clothing of the era. I used about 10 different photographs of the particular piece as the source documentation, and I'm not even sure I consider it art - this feels more like a technical illustration of an extant artefact than my own art.

Day 9 bonus: Scary silverware

 

Scary Silverware (1999) Chapter heading illustration for privately published cookbook. Pencil, ink, colored pen, scanned and digitally cleaned, then finished in Photoshop. About half digital and half traditional, and one of my earlier tablet pieces (not much was done with the stylus though - it really isn't that difficult to draw a glob with a mouse...).

I did several illustrations for this cookbook project, including two page layouts and two old-style cookbook glamour food shots.

ETA: oops! I thought this was posted today, but it wasn't, so there'll be another up in a few.