Sketches: Walking With The Stars

Nothing too terribly complicated here. I actually came up with the basic idea while driving (which wasn't as dangerous as it might sound), and did a quick sketch on my iPhone will waiting at a traffic light...

...and elaborated on that basic idea in the customary series of thumbnails.


I had it in mind to do something simple and bold (and flat) — but the Author asked that the star be less yellow and bright, and further along that process it also became slightly more representative of an actual Walk of Fame star (which had been part of all my original sketches, anyway). It took some time to work out the details, as the design elements on the star now had to have depth and shading, but I still tried to keep the design (mostly) flat.



I don't think this was entirely successful — if I were to approach the question again, I'd probably just make the star a flat, but more golden color and have done with it (and avoid those additional elements altogether). The gold detail seems to look darker and less delicate when the image has been reduced, though, so perhaps it will all work out better in print.

That's dummy copy on the upper right hand corner of the blue cover. The subhed proved to be too long to fit up there, so it was moved to the lower left. (The Author also asked for the color to be more purple than midnight blue.)

Haunted Airways

What a beautiful cover. This book doesn't seem to be all that rare, or all that difficult to find — this copy seems to be from 1935 (though the book was originally published a few years earlier).

As an added bonus, for some reason this copy had seven One Dollar Silver Certificates hidden inside, most from 1957 (one was from 1935), a few of which look as though they had been minted only yesterday.

Star Trek in High Definition

I'm so very thrilled that I'll finally be able to see that episode (I forget what the title is), you know the one, where young Wesley Crusher stumbles over a flower bed and is consequently sentenced to death — in glorious high definition!

Better Unknown

We went to see the Croton Dam, the day after heavy rain (the remnants of a hurricane) had passed through the area during the night. The scale of the waterfall was breathtaking, and the river it fed into rushed by at a furious pace.

We were surprised to see five men carrying in an inflatable raft — properly dressed for the occasion, and obviously experienced. We saw them again a bit later, further along the fast-moving river as they passed under a small bridge.

We found out later that the inflatable raft had overturned, and all had to be rescued from the river. One of the men, unfortunately, had died.

My wife wishes I hadn't told her. I wish I didn't know.

What I still haven't told her, and the memory that continues to haunt me, is of two women with very young children who were with the men as they were trying to make the decision on where to begin the journey.

Sketches: The New York Old-Time Radio Schedule Book

From time to time, I'll have the opportunity to work on a book that doesn't have a designated cover photo, because none have been selected, or seem appropriate, or meet the technical requirements — or because there are no illustrations inside the book (which was the case here). That makes more work for me, but it also offers much greater opportunity, and (usually) much more fun. I'll create an interesting or unusual type treatment for a mostly type-driven design (I went with the one on the left), or I'll have some other idea that I think might be made to work. This was a some-other-idea. Here are some sketches (somewhat more sketchier than usual):


My first thought was to use a real, actual newspaper page of radio listings (though I wasn't entirely sure what I would do with it), and somehow go from there — fifteen or twenty minutes of searching, though, made it clear that this might not be so easy to find, after all. (I have a bound volume of The Knickerbocker News from the 1940s — it's really cool! — but this book is a collection of listings from The New York Times, so the stations would all have been wrong.)

Instead, I thought it'd be fun to use a photo of an old radio from stock photgraphy (perhaps even three different ones, since this was a three-volume set of books), and have a series of concentric circles, representing radio waves, emitting from it. The shading of the circles would have a rough texture (and the edges would be defined by that texture), that might have been shaded by hand with a crayon and coquille board, back in the day.

But I decided not to go with stock photography, after all. I couldn't seem to muster up much enthusiasm for having to find three distinct images that would have fit with this design, and I don't think a photo would have worked as well as a stylized drawing (which might have been more difficult to find), anyway. Instead, I made the volume number information the sort of focal point of the concentric circles, and adjusted the type a bit so that everything seems to eminate from that point (or, if nothing else, from that side of the cover).

I had conceived the cover colors as yellows and golds and browns (you can see that in the sketch), a slightly off-white background with golden waves — the black-and-grey background was, really, a happy accident, one of the benefits of working with tools with which you can try just about anything without hesitation.

Another thought was to extend the image of the cover to the spine — instead, I decided to use parts of the same image on the spines of all three books that will (hopefully) form a complete image when side-by-side on a bookshelf.

I say "hopefully," because there's no guarantee that the books will be bound with this kind of precision (I've had issues with this stuff before), but why not try just the same?

Fourth Grade

I don't have much memory of Fourth Grade. I have a somewhat vague recollection of Third Grade (and resentment at having lost a spelling bee), and more substantial memories of Fifth Grade (I prepared a report on the state of Montana), but Fourth Grade remains shrouded in mystery. Even what I think I remember, I'm still not sure of. (I collected Freakies cereral premiums with two friends in my class, and we made gadgets out of big rubber erasers by drawing on them. But wasn't that was still in Third Grade?)

My son started Fourth Grade day before yesterday. He's excited about the new year (though still a bit nervous), and doesn't seem to mourn the loss of his unstructured summer days, not in the way I remember. Not yet, anyway.

Donkey Dollars

Something else discovered while sorting through the stuff in my Father-In-Law's house. There was no date on this, and offhand I thought it might have come from the 1960s — but further research reveals these were distributed during the 1944 Presidential Campaign of Thomas Dewey and John Bricker. (No, I'd never heard of him, either.) I love that quaint reference to "Honest, Full-Value Dollars Under a Republican Administration." This was somehow supposed to represent the declining value of the dollar, but I'm not sure that was so carefully calculated. (In case you're wondering, or want to do the math, it's 2" tall by just under 4" wide.)