Click for a closer look…

From the Freelance Files:

When doing freelance work for a lot of different clients it is inevitable you’ll have one of those “Huh? Really??” moments every once and awhile when something unexpected happens on a job. One of those happened to me last week after I finished the artwork for a movie poster for a political documentary film by director Ray Griggs who did the “Super Capers” film I worked on.

I had done a considerable amount of artwork for the movie itself, which amid interviews of politicians and others has three CGI animated segments that I did all the character design and storyboards for and designed a promotional bobblehead toy as well. When Ray asked me to do the movie poster, a relatively simple image of Obama in the classic James Montgomery Flagg “Uncle Sam” pose my first thought was I needed to stick to the same sort of style as the animated characters and the bobblehead, but Ray had other ideas. He wanted something that stuck closer to the original Flagg style in the famous poster. Flagg’s loose and sketchy watercolor look was not going to work very well with a cartoony sort of image, so I ended up doing a richer, painterly look but keeping with a more realistic caricature depiction of Obama as Ray wanted. Ray liked the final results.

The “Huh? Really??” moment came a few days later after some of the investors in the film saw the mock up of the poster with my artwork in place. It seems they thought as I originally did… that it made no sense to have a totally different type of look to the Obama on the movie poster when there was already a visual identity to the film’s imagery (i.e. my cartoon caricature of Obama from the bobblehead and CGI animations). Thus, I had to redo the poster using instead my more cartoony caricature of Obama. At an enormous 29″ x 40″ in size this took me an entire day to do, even though it was in comparison a much simpler image than the painterly original shown above. I can’t show you the new image yet but the posters should be released sometime this summer.

Even though it did make more sense to stick with the same image style as depicted in the film, I much preferred the look of the painted Uncle Obama shown here… it looks more like it belongs on a movie poster. If we were doing the cartoony style we should have done a funny scene with multiple characters in it ala “Animal House” or “The Bad News Bears”. Ah well.

On the other hand, what do movie studio people know?? Not much considering when a legend like Drew Struzan does the art for the poster of a movie like this one:

…yet the brain wizards at Lionsgate go with this piece of PhotoShop crap for the DVD cover???!?:

Riggggght. Good thinking. Sheesh.

I’ve been advertising on and off in Serbin Communication’s Directory of Illustration for about 15 years now, and while the results aren’t exactly staggering I usually get enough new jobs from my ad to pay for it. The real value of it comes from not picking up new jobs per se but new clients from whom I get ongoing work. I still believe the best way to market yourself as a freelancer is a combination of an internet presence, direct mailing and ads like this that get distributed to tens of thousands of buyers of illustration.

The toughest part for me is always putting the page together and finding work that shows a range of subject matter and techniques. This one runs the gamut from my line and color style (Brett Farve illo originally for the Minneapolis Star Tribune) to my new colored line style (guys fighting and guy eating hot wings for breakfast, both for Penthouse) my digital painting style (the Gates vs. Crowley/ Obama referee image done for MAD), a straight up cartoon (Piranha done for the Minnesota Twins) and just for fun I tossed in several of my LOST ink-wash caricatures… I admit did a little digital touching up on some of them as the scans were a bit washed out and some of the detail was being lost (pun intended).

We’ll see how effective the ad is this year.

…you’re getting too old to pull multiple all nighters you find yourself staring at two deadlines, one a last minute rush job for your best client and an unusual family issue tossed in the mix and all of a sudden it’s Tuesday and you haven’t slept since you woke up on Sunday morning.

Ah, well. Plenty of sleep tonight… maybe right now actually. In the meantime here is a rare real painting I did last week for an equally rare non-publication job. This is an executive who was a big MAD fan as a kid, commissioned as a gift (at the last minute, ‘natch). Very simple very quick acrylic.

Blechhh…..

… with a sudden number of quick deadline jobs. One is using real, live paint! I’ll try and do some scans of various steps on that one just for fun… I don’t often get to haul out the brushes and paints these days.

Here is my latest Marlin Co. workplace poster job, I posted the pencil roughs a few days ago:

Click for a closer look…

Here’s the caption/text that will appear under it:

Living a healthy life so that you’ll stay at your peak years from now?

Please keep yourself in gear with a healthy diet and as much exercise as your doctor allows. Every time you engage in vigorous physical activity, it’s like making a deposit into your health bank – and years from now all these deposits may well turn out to have greatly enriched, and lengthened, your life.

Hey, why not feel like you’re on top of the world?

These images make more sense, I think, when I also include the “inspirational message” that the illustration is supposed to reinforce.

Every once and awhile I will pull out some artwork from an old job that might have been interesting to share what it was about. Yesterday I cleaned out a storage room in our house and ran across a pile of old art that I had done for a series of CD-ROM games back in the late 1990′s.

I’ve said many times you never know where your work might end up being used, and sometimes the most unlikely of projects will come your way when you freelance. If someone had said to me that I’d be “illustrating” a series of CD-ROM games I would have scoffed… after all even in the 90′s games like Myst and The 7th Guest were the standard for graphics… lavish and realistic images were the rage, not goofy cartoon stuff.

However there was a subset of games, mostly aimed at children, that used cartooning as their basis. Some of them were quite clever and funny, like SpyFox and Pajama Sam from Humongous Entertainment.CD-ROM games were very popular, and I found myself doing some art for a few odd ones for a company called Parroty Interactive and one for Hasbro.

Parroty Interactive “Games”

I use the term “games” loosely as these really weren’t games. I’m not sure what they were. The best description might be that they were a parody of both a CD-ROM game and some other subject… like if some company wanted to make an interactive CD-ROM based on some TV show, movie or some such, this might be what they came up with, only with a MAD Magazine flavor. Parroty had a pretty successful hit with “PYST“, their parody of the afore mentioned “MYST” game, so they started producing other “humor” CD-ROMs.

My art responsibilities varied from doing hundreds of images for one project to just a few dozen as some smaller aspect of another. Here are the three Parroty Interactive CDs I worked on:

Star Warped

Cover art by Sam Sisco!

This was the project I did the most work for. A lot of it was just in black and white, as they had some color artists that were doing the colors and formatting the images for the game. The “game” was set in the bedroom of two brothers who were Star Wars nuts in Modesto, California. Their room was the game environment, and each POV had click-able elements that would take you to various mini-games like “Whack the Ewok” or the “Yoda Fortune Teller”, or other interactive things. I designed the bedroom environment:

This was an actual physical painting, not digital.

There were several other points of view of the room, and some side rooms as well. They included close ups of things like fake foreign Star Wars posters, spoof toys, etc.

Some of the “games” included the gene-splicing machine, where you could splice the genes of a Star wars character and some celebrity to end up with…

The X-Fools

This was a parody of the X Files that had two FBI agents chasing down aliens. I did a number of different images for this that were part of sections like dossiers on some of the show’s villains and files on fake television shows that would be aired if aliens controlled TV (example” NYPD Grey, “E.T.E.R.” or “Spacefeld”):

This was from one of the villain dossiers

Mully and Sculder

Winblows 98

This was a rip on Windows. I did a number of images for another selection of parody TV shows that we’d see when Bill Gates took over TV like “Mr. Bill’s Neighborhood”, “Touched by Bill” or “Lifestyles of the Filthy Rich and Famous”. When doing a Google search on the game’s name I was shocked to find someone had uploaded some of the spoof shows from the game on to YouTube (!!):

Hasbro’s “Super Scattergories”

This game was the CD version of the popular board game. I did 40 different images that were used as a visual word finder, where you had to identify all the objects in the image that started with a certain letter:

This was all done very early on in my use of the computer for illustration, and I had obviously not developed my techniques for coloring that I am using today. However the images were also supposed to be as simple as possible so the more rudimentary techniques actually worked. Of course none of these games are available anymore, and I doubt they would work with today’s computers anyway.