MidwestLove Art & Design

I’m pretty excited about this one. A while back, the incredibly soulful young chauntreusse Kelsey Wild commissioned us to do a website for her. We initially went ahead with a design that was based on real life photography of Kelsey cut out and placed among black and white sketchbook-esque drawings of natural scenery and animals. We got as far as having a hired photographer do a shoot, doing all of the illustrations, and actually coding out and almost getting ready to launch the site when Kelsey had some second thoughts about the whole idea. The look was pretty cool in and of itself, but she didn’t feel it represented her aesthetic sense as an artist, which is always our first and foremost goal when associating imagery to a person or band. It has to be something they feel comfortable putting their name on. Naturally Kelsey and I went back to the drawing board and she came up with some great ideas about going more organic and handmade, rustic but not country. So here’s what I came up with…

I constructed six differnt “found art” collages comprised of various pieces of junk, bits of paper, old receipts, scraps from heather’s sewing table and other random objects that I found laying around my house. I then photographed them and strung them all together in Photoshop to make a continual horizontal image, which would actually be about six feet long if laid out in real life.

Click on this to see the full image…

The website will scroll horizontally when a navigation button is clicked and each collage will act as a frame for the content at that location. It will make more sense when it’s completed… Anyway, this was incredibly fun and definitely a challenge, as I’ve never done anything like this before.

The office took the biggest hit-

I’ll make sure to post when the site goes live.

-marky

New Illustration for Snapdragon Records “Halloween Massacre” show poster. Just thought it would be in the spirit (no pun intended) of the upcoming Halloween season to share it with you. This was inked with a regular fine tipped sharpie and colored in Illustrator.

Here’s the full poster-

What is everyone going for this halloween? I’m making my kids each their own WALL•E costume, and I’m pretty excited. Maybe I’ll post pictures of those here when they’re done.

-marky

I just finished this up today, so I wanted to make a quick post of it. This is the cover art for Wisconsin one-man-band This Is The Shiver, the alias of Tom Toboloski. Again, this is a web only release that I really wish was getting a full print run. Each piece was hand painted and cut out. No computer trickery here save for some Photoshop brightness/contrast adjustment and some Illustrator type treatment. What you see above is the final product.

Maybe I’ll post some making of pics later…

-marky

edit- here are some pictures of the pieces being assembled. sorry i didn’t post this sooner, i just didn’t have the time to grab them off my camera until now.

Just wrapped up CD packaging design for FL natives (and 1 Milwaukee transplant) Transmit Now. They wanted something bright and oddly whimsical to represent their flashy, smirking power-pop. This was a fun mixed media project incorporating inked illustrations, water colors, photography, and digital layout. I got to draw a bunch of animals with transmitters for heads (not radios, mind you… very original and legal transmitter heads) and throw paint all over them. Here’s what came out of it.

I think this guy is my favorite…

I was also asked to work up some apparel designs that corresponded with the CD art… this was my favorite of those. All the vine work is hand drawn and inked and the animals were lifted from the CD packaging.

This one had nothing to do with the CD art, but I just really liked how it came together. All the lettering was hand drawn, and the squid monster was drawn in Illustrator. Thank American Apparel for the model.

-marky