Boston Globe - Unbearable Lightness of Being

Here's another great little editorial piece for The Boston Globe. This little e-mail came in on a Saturday. Normally not in on the weekends but I was finishing up some illustrations for Matell and needed to tweak them out before Monday. So got this little note from Illoz, ( Thanks Zimm, it's working). Called to actually turn down the job because it was a little tight with the deadline, needed final by mid day Wednesday. and it's Turkey week. I am already covered up. But while I was waiting for Jane to answer I read that little blurb in the copy and the visual was right there and so intriguing. Here are my first thoughts on the thumbnails... they come mainly from the line in the copy that reads: "they are larks flying among powerful birds of prey." I'm thinking to somehow working words and/or text into the illustration, (ie. birds made of text..) Probably use some sort of spot color, to contrast with the black, and draw attention to the lark. Jane said she would rather have a free-floating image. I had this image in my head from the very beginning but I always play around with thumbs to see if there is anything better. Turned out pretty much like I had seen it from the very beginning. I spent a moring on the final; just pulled some Rafter reference together and of course a Lark. I tried and certainly wasted several hours trying to fill the big birds with text but in the end decided to scrap it for a simpler version. I love how these little brush drawing look blown up, Just hoping some of the detail holds up.... . Unbearable Lightness of Being... Here's Jane's very cool design. Love how the birds hang at the edge of the type.

Social Media; 10 strategies, how well they work, and cost

From the very beginning when I got this email from Blake this project looked like it would be a ton of fun. We had to cancel our trip to Canada because of some horrific personal stuff, so what better way to distract yourself from the daily horror than to immerse yourself in work. Well, it’s just how I tried to deal with it. I mean, if you're working and thinking about work, you can sometimes escape the other stuff. Well not really, but worth a try... Blake’s idea was to intersperse illustrations and photos throughout the article and to use different styles to add variety to the layout. For me, it was a blast to be working in several different techniques. The article was about promoting the use of “Social Media” for your business... What works, what does not. Some really good stuff that all of you probably know and use all of the time. For the opener, he wanted airbrush. This illustration started off as a small spot and sort of grew like a virus all over the page. I loved the characters and layout but underestimated the amount of time it would take to get this puppy finished. SO, I procrastinated and of course put it off till the end. On to the thumbnails…. Damn. I like the birds, but the concepts worked as people as well. Blake agreed this was probably a better Idea.. He wanted a little comic illustration for one of them, kind of a limited-color thing like “Bebo.” My original idea was to do something with Facebook; every man silhouetted blue, but the comic was easy enough. Blake said "just make it about “Free Food" or something.” That works too. A little collage drawing for the “Paid Referrals” so a money collage thing made perfect sense. I did a few little thumbnail sketches and decided that the collage thing just needed to be put together to read right. I did two versions of this actually in the same file so I could share the little stamp heads .One with multiple hooks, one with one hook. I had thought of the multiple hook things on another little job and was looking for a home for it. Ultimately the single hook was simpler and I liked the bull’s eye of watercolor behind it. The crowd, well, a little different story. I came in Saturday morning to get a bit of a head start and my original idea was to do a copy-paste crowd, but when I started drawing I just loved the kind of retro feel of the crowd so before I knew it I had drawn them all out. I sent off the line sketch final for Blake to see but of course he’s not there on Saturday. I just started playing with a little color treatment and oops, that was finished, too. Oh well. Send the color off and hold my breath... I am thinking, I will either be way ahead of the deadline or I will be fucked. Either way I liked the drawing too much not to try to sell it. On to the forth spot, “the Lobster." This was Blake’s idea; he just wanted me to do one of my characters. Airbrush characters are time consuming, but this little guy I thought worked pretty well. Add some wallpaper in the background and off to the opener. EEEK! The opener I had been procrastinating on! Oh well, time to dig in…. I loved the sort of pop stylization of the characters. I've been doing these illus. long enough to know this is going to take time. They just do. Ultimately a few tweaks in the racial diversity dept. and we’re done. Looking back I think the comic could have been not so “goofy...” the lobster character could have been funnier. But all in all they worked pretty well. My first round of thumbnails I was trying to use some unifying theme like a bird throughout the spots. I guess I was thinking that direction because of the “Twitter” thing but felt that really made the whole thing slanted toward Twitter so we scrapped that early and went off in another direction. Damn, I liked the birds, but the concepts worked as people as well. I used some of the ideas I liked from the first thumbanils. I think they worked even better using some of the cliche's from the birds and converting them to people. I think all of these concepts were just too all over the place but we narrowed in on a few, made some changes, and picked ones that were working and forged on. He wanted a little comic illustration for one of them, kind of a limited color thing like “Bebo.” My original idea was to do something with the Facebook "every man" silhouetted in blue, but the comic idea was easy enough to pull off. Blake said, "Just make it about Free Food or something,” so I figured, hey that works too. . On to the forth spot: The Lobster, which was Blake’s idea. He just wanted me to do one of my characters. Airbrush characters are time consuming, though this little guy I thought worked pretty well. Add some wall paper in the background and off to the opener. I loved the stylized kind of 1940's characters... I had been playing a lot with those, lately, and this seemed like a great place to put them to use. Certainly a bit more work than the copy paste thing I thought about first, but they just felt right. My forties looking crowd was rejected because it needed to better reflect a more random and diverse group of twitter followers.I still like them. I am fucked. Blake likes the collage but thinks the crowd is not diverse enough to show Twitter followers, and a really random section of crowd, that is what is important, so back to the drawing board. I just used the same basic crowd and drew the new group over them. It went realy fast and I tried the same color treatment. and tried a limited color version, I think this will work just as well. THE NEW DRAWING LIMITED COLOR VARIATION... THE WINNER, For Inc Magazine © Bill Mayer 2011 Collage work for me has always been really spontaneous and done just in sketchbooks, not for cients, so I have been trying to figure out how to make this work. Seems like there is not a sketch that would adequately show how it works, so I opted to just put a few together and see what worked the best. The Winner Of all of the little collages this was my favorite by far. I guess I could have made that call and just sent one. but I really wanted Blake to decide which one worked best with his layout. After all, it's supposed to be a collaborative effort, right?

Deer In the Headlights, Financially Speaking...

I had already been procrastinating on a little book cover, when I got a call from Mihn at the Times. Another spot illustration to be done. This time the theme was the fear keeping people frozen and hindering our echonomic recovery. The headline in the text kind of pointed directly at the concept of having some figure caught up and frozen with fear. Seemed pretty straight forward. Mihn sent me the article wednesday night and the deadline final was set for Friday 3:00 pm est, so not much time to screw around. I read the article about as far as I needed to ge thinking about concepts and left it till Thursday am to start on thumbaniils. I got in around 8:00 and made coffee, did some emails and about 8:30 started on thumnails. At 9:30 I sent them over and called to let him know they were there. I tried some different things I thought would work. Old clichés, you know, being afraid of your shadow, mouse /elephant, caught in the headlights, etc. Then I thought about the painting that Edvard Munch did of The Scream. I thought that could make a pretty funny little parody. Lee liked it too.So cross my fingers and with any luck...... I piddled around on a tattoo design till about eleven and then called Mihn again just to check in. He loved the Edvard Munk parody and so did Lee. I thought this would be a fun one. I wanted to paint it just like the painting, but with a bull in the forground, and a bear instead of the couple in the background....Too funny. I thought I would get my walk in first though. Everyday I drive out to Stone Mountain for my daily walk collecting recycling at our local state park. ( It's really about an hour and a half including drive and hike up the mountain ect...) Mihn called me back a little quicker than I expected with the news "they wanted they're original idea of the deer in the headlights." When I did the little thumbanil and scanned it in the original idea was to just put dollar signs in his eyes this thought with the shadow came later ... I finished my walk and got back to the studio about 1:00. I did the sketch and transfered it down and then started airbrushing. Lee and I were suppposed to meet our son and his family for their anniversary at "Trader Vick's" a campy Tahitian restaurant (They got married in Hawaii), so I needed to finish this one By 5:00. Not so hard right? it was a simple image and as long as I could stay on task, well except for the Michelle Bachman Youtube, and some drop in company, I almost made it, but saveded it till in the morning instead of rushing it. Friday moring I hit the studio pretty early and By 9:30 I had finished scanned and tweaked out the drawing added the shadow and question marks,and sent it for Mihn to review. Only one version this time...So the rest of the day was free to head back to the mountain. work on some personal work and go climbing with my good friends Goñi and Holly . Looking back at it I could have done something more complicated but this image worked with the article. We'll just have to save the "Munch" till another day... Instead of bugging out and going climbing.I could have stuck with it and tried a bunch of photo-shopped variations Or brighter Or made bunches of them... or turned them into candy.... But somehow the original worked without all of that....and we had a blast climbing...Looking back at these pieces I think the face does show up better without the shadow. But the shadow adds a little something conceptual in there and the face couldn't goo dark and have the shadow read.

Under Pressure

It’s always nice to ease back into work with one of SooJin’s illustrations. We had a great break on holiday at the cottage in Canada. Great to unplug a bit, turn down a few illustrations jobs and just get lost. Now that we’re back, Jumping right into the thumbnails is a great way to get back in gear. This article was about the squeeze Euro companies are feeling on their benefits and retirement plans. The first round of thumbs really dealt more with variations centered around retirees having the earth eroded out from under them ( 27). I set it aside for lunch and when I came back to it I liked these directions much better. Sometimes the most obvious directions work the best (28). Final sketch before I started airbrushing...© bill Mayer 2011 I tried several background variations before settling on this grey. It seemed to set the mood better than a blue sky. I likes the way it worked as a neutral pallet. The color gave the piece a bit more of a somber feel and attitude to such a silly concept. Desk top copies of work in progress showing simple steps adding background...trees, hillside... After transferring the image to illustration board I do the airbrush part of the illustration . In the past I would have done the sky and background as well, but now that they have to be delivered digitally I do a lot of the backgrounds a finishing in Photoshop. Tried a blue to yellow transition in the sky ,just was not working...I liked keeping the pallet warm but it just felt like it needed to bit moody... so I added a little dark grey to somber it up a bit.... added a little hill...trying to keep it very simple....Added some shading on the hill...feels like it needs a little depth and dark areas in the bottom... Shadow is helping...I used the path for the original outline and just transform / distort / warped it to fall along the hill top... added a few more hills to give it some depth.... and some simple trees to help add some dark areas along the bottom... a little noise in the background to match to texture of the airbrush.... I always leave a ton of bleed just in case need more room for type....Added some highlights and tweaking to the eyes so they showed up better... Pretty much done now just a few little tweaks....Just need to send it off and get some feed back from Soojin... I played around with a little side lighting but seemed to be getting a bit confusing and made the figure look blurry, so i deleted it.... Much clearer, added a shadow to set the face back a bit and take the focus off of him... Pretty much done now just a few little tweaks....Just need to send it off and get some feed back from Soojin... SooJin had said that the article had been put on hold for some reason . Rarely do you get a chance to look at something again after you finished. I opened up the file the other morning and played around with darkening up the backgrounds. I like the feelling this gave the illustration and thought it might work better with the type as well so I sent off to SooJin to get her take on it. Altogether I think it made for a stronger cover design. This article was put on hold a delayed. So after it sat around for a week or so I decided to take another look at the background... The inside spread, nice clean design. SooJin always comes through with such great design and direction . It’s always such a joy to work on these projects. Here's a copy of the cover I snagged off the internet version of Plansponsor. I really love the way the type is interwoven with the illustration. Nice and clear...It held up pretty well even on the webversion on my iPhone. Although I would certainly prefer leafing through the magazine leasurely...

Creative Carnival

Sometimes something just lands in your lap with so much potential. When you have a client that is open for you to do anything you want, and an audience of your peers that will surely thumb their nose at anything sub-standard, you can't help but panic a little at first; right? This little poster was just so much fun from the very beginning, it was hard to see it all come to an end. Much thanks to all of the folks at Workbook for giving me the freedom to take this wherever it ended up falling. For me, I am much more used to heavy-handed art direction, so this "Do-whatever-you-want" theme I have been getting lately is just such a joy. But also hard to settle down in any one direction. No art director, no writer... Just do whatever you like.... How much fun this would be.... I did the normal thumbnail blast of overthinking directions and came up with four ideas that I thought worked pretty well. So, I comped those up and shared them with Alison. She warned me not to show so many ideas; that although they will enjoy seeing the process, they will not understand them and probably take me off in a direction I really don't want to go in. So we talked about them, and she said, "Do what ever you want...." This is still so hard for me, making decisions on what or where to go with a project so I decided to keep working on them and flush them out and sooner or later one would immerge as the right direction. I took the candidates and ran them by my normal group of internal critics and they like three, which I took a little farther toward the final poster. I wrote some copy and put together some type to give it that Carny feel...finally the two that were working both worked so well I figured either one would make a great poster so Sent them off to the "Reply all" group for feedback. They were split on wich one to go with but now offered some input (yes, of course, never too late for changes) on copy. Adding the performers and free drinks and victuals...( I had to look up victuals...) Here are the first set of thumbnails i did trying to get some handle on style a direction I always loved Carney's, the dark, sort-of seedy side of those traveling freak shows and circuses that we were exposed to early in life. We had a travelling fair that would come through our town every year. I remember those so vividly. There was a great little movie version of a Ray Bradbary story, taken from a line in Shakespeare..."Something Wicked This Way Comes" This was a pefect visual inspiration for the feeling of those old Carneys that I remembered. When we were in art school at Ringling, there were lots of old circus performers that lived in the Sarasota area. It was not uncommon to pass them sitting on the porch of an old boarding house... a dwarf and a fat lady, just sitting, enjoying the day. This stuff has so much great texture. Lee and I collected victorian taxidermy animal freaks for a while . You know Chickens being ridden by squirrels with a little whip... Vampire mice with little capes, animated birds.... There is a great little shop, I think it was called Shoefer's on 31st between 6th and 7th Avenue in New York where we found a standing goat who's penis flies out when you pull his tail. Yeah I know silly stuff to lay around the house, but fits right in with our gypsy junk. Shoefer's is a glass eye sales and taxidermy rentals, bizarre little place that we frequented to buy strange and mostly damaged dead things out of the basement. second set of thumbs, tied a few little color studies, Liked number 44....33, love this little character on 29...gotta think of a way to use him... took some of the four directions and did a little tighter thumbnail and added type. these little guys are about an inch and a half tall... Just trying to get some direction from the client as to where they want to go...unfortunately I liked them all... I did my usual poll of friends to see which ones they liked and decided to keep working on three of them. I don't know seemed like just too much color. I liked this version better in the thumbnail... I really loved the Black and white drawings, and tried leaving it that way. added subtle colors and distressed the drawing... actually, I still like the limited color.. Here is the final poster I sent for approval...I wrote some copy to give it a "Carny" feel. Seemed like it needed a second color. Red and black always work... Beagle Boy to replace the Black faced clown... So I didn't have an art director on this project until the very end and then seemed like everyone had something to say about it. Less type might be better.(Like I designed it originally, before you added all of the type?) Okay, let's bounce it off a few art director friends i know.mThey all say more type is better so the type stays... I am off on other projects. Honestly, I killed myself on this one by doing multiple versions of the same poster. Live and learn... and finally, the black faced clown had to go.... I loved that silly black face so it was hard to let go of this... But I had already been warned by both Lee and Alison that this would be a problem. The black face I never saw as a black person, but a way to bring some solid weight into the top of the illustration... But Black-faced Clown has to go. Finding a replacement I liked as much took a few tries. Seemed like Beagle Boy would do the trick....and he did work just fine.... Still awaiting a decision on which direction they will go with, but I like both of them, so either way I will be happy. And there you have it a final poster just in time for the holiday weekend...© Bill Mayer 2011 Projects like this are always so fun, it's hard to settle down and just do one version. They don't really come around that often and somehow you just really don't want them to end. Thank God for deadlines to help them out the door and help folks make final selections. Big thanks to Alison and the folks at WorkBook.

New York Times "The Right To Be Forgotten"

I got an email from Minh at New York Times about a little spot illustration for a story he said he would love for me to do. I can remember reading it, thinking, "Edel must be on vacation…" Anyway, a great little story about how “we seem to be losing the digital right to be forgotten or deleted." In Europe, there are legislations for consumers (if they wish) to have their personal information be deleted from company data banks. In the US, there’s no such thing. These companies need to keep your info so they can sell you stuff and trade it w/ others. Seemed pretty straightforward, so I shot him an email back and we chatted. He told me I could work in any style I wanted. We decided to let the thumbnails lead us in a direction for style. I started off with a few random thumbnails of a man erasing himself and variations on other disappearing acts and these seemed like they were going no where. Then I stumbled on the idea of having the words coming out of the figure. This series of thumbnails are all loosely based in that same direction. A pretty good bunch of thoughts and some great little drawings in there so I sent them off to Minh to get his response. One last little thumbnail, the article started off talking about going to the dentist and all of the information they would collect. It ended up on the same subject. So I thought they might want the spot to tie into the copy a little stronger. This little image popped up. A toothbrush with the words dripping from it... I wasn't really sure the right way to convey the personal data, as words or zeros and ones. I talked this over with Mihn and we decided on the zeros and ones, keep it simple and not get caught up in the details about the information being stored." Are you overdue for a dental cleaning? Want to recommend your dentist to a friend, write a review of his services, or try the Invisalign brand of clear braces?..." A little side note, I always ask my wife Lee to pick her favorite. Without fail, she will always pick the same as Mihn. Number 3. He liked the simplicity of #3 and how it got the idea across without adding any other comments into the illustration. Simple is good… We talked about style and decided that the airbrush style was not right for this one. He had seen some of the little three-color line things I had been playing around with. After all this great direction we’re off and running. After lunch I started drawing the idea. It was so simple, and i was having a great deal of trouble keeping it that way. I started trying to add more character into the drawing and I stumbled on a couple of great character studies, one of a kind-of heavy guy that I fell in love with and desperately wanted to make work. But rather than sending a sketch, I put it together in color and sent it off to show Minh. I had already started working on alternatives when I got Minh’s call. He said he had real problems with this direction. Although he liked the character, he thought it complicated the concept. I mean, who is this funny fat guy? Why is he peeing all over himself and why are you making this so hard on yourself? These little thumbnails are so nice and simple… Okay, Okay. I get it… simple is good… Simple is good… But still, it just seemed too easy to just do the thumbnail. So, again, I drew and rescanned the figure in and put together little roughs to see which one would work the best. I loved the stark black figure on white and no matter how many textures and backgrounds I tried I still kept coming back to that solid black on white with limited color....Simple is good, yes.... I put together four of the little drawings into the concept to see how they worked. Two were working pretty well. This was pretty easy to do because I already had all of the numbers in a folder so with a little tweaking I could pull them around and get a basic sense of how this was going to work... I had two contenders in the end that I felt strongly enough about to offer them up for consideration. I think they both had things that worked really well so I would not be unhappy with either direction. Minh called me and said he and the writer had gone over both of them. It’s funny how drawing can sometimes have a feeling that may seem to add something intended or not. Ultimately he said he felt the one with the face had more empathy. The dark figure looked too evil. I guess it was those glowing eyes. I took the character and took the numbers off that fat man and as Minh suggested he made a pretty good “Fat Cat.” Just not right for this story. I am sure he will find his way to resurface somewhere. Anyway great fun working on this project with Mihn and a big thanks to him for keeping me on track and to Edel for taking the week off and giving me a chance to do one of these little gems. Much fun… The printed page from the paper....It is still a big thrill to see my work in the Times....I know pretty silly but I can't help it.