Sketches: Burlesque: A Collection of Comedy Blackouts

This cover came together so quickly that I really don't have all that much to say about it! But it sure was fun.

I enjoy the challenge of designing a "period piece," though I'll usually try for something that evokes the impression left by that something else, rather than trying to duplicate it down to the smallest detail. I'll keep clear of typography that seems too anachronistic (even if only to a few people well-versed enough to spot such inconsistency), but I won't hesitate to use something that I think conveys the spirit of that something else. (In this case, a poster might have been largely hand-lettered, which wasn't an option, anyway.)
What I hoped to do here was bring to mind the spirit of an old theatre poster, to kinda get people into the spirit of the material. (The book is a collection of comedy sketches from the Burlesque stage.)

I spent time trying a few different methods to "age" the paper, or make it look a bit beat-up — not because the paper would have looked so old or so beat-up back in the day, but because that's the lens we would see that kind of object through now. In any event, though, I never did find a subtle way to make that work as well as I'd have hoped, so instead I just used some slightly darker patches to take the edge off of the yellow (which is a bit more bright than it appears here).

(That Cooper Black on the bottom is sort of the odd-man-out — but I had already used that in the bookblock (before I'd even considered the cover) and I felt it would be better to tie everything together.)

Not much to the sketch, but hey, here it is:

Sketches: Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices

I am surprised to discover that I had been asked to start on this over two years ago. (It's taken that long for the book to be finished.)
These were my earliest concept sketches. Version A. would have had the characters sort of emanating from the open top of Mel Blanc's head, though in thinking about it after-the-fact, that's probably not an apt metaphor for having created the voices for the characters, rather than creating the characters themselves (but hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

I had also been thinking it might either be difficult or damn near impossible to get good, useful character art, and I was trying to design around that limitation — so the other concepts could have used tiny photographs of Mel Blanc's head (perhaps each with a different expression) or character art. (The photos would have been in several different colors, rather than just black-and-white.) There could be a few (Version C.) or quite a few (Version D.), depending on what became available.

In retrospect, there wouldn't have been as many photos of his face in different expressions to support this design (but hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

A year later — literally, a year later! — we had an actual photo (and a really good one) for the cover, and the design was refined a bit...
The idea (mostly in my head, and not at all well demonstrated here) was that all the cartoon character art or photos — at this point I think it was more likely to be character art — could be contained by a series of circles in the background. (Those grid lines in the sketch were for my own reference.) That'd make it easier to put the cover together, easier to incorporate the different shapes of the different characters, et cetera et cetera, and allow for a degree of flexibility, depending on how much or how little became available.

And another year after that, the manuscript had been finished (mostly), and I started thinking about the design of the bookblock. (During this time, arrangements were also made for an artist to provide a selection of cartoon character heads, with the idea that they'd be used in a form more or less like the sketch above.)

Here's where I digress a bit (and I apologize in advance). A few weeks before I started work on the Mel Blanc book (again), I put together the cover for a different book...
...And as you can see, I ended up using a modified version of the basic structure I'd had in mind for the Mel Blanc cover there, instead (but hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time).

I still could have used it again, anyway — I'm not averse to repeating myself, not by any means, and I could easily have made the covers look very different, despite the similar structure — but in the back of my head I'd been thinking of something else, anyway. By this point we had decided on character art, and I was thinking it might be much easier — practically speaking — to incorporate that stuff into a series of square shapes, rather than into a series of round shapes.

That was the way I began to approach the design of the bookblock, with the idea that the square shapes (with the character art) could be used as design elements with the chapter breaks (as seen in this somewhat sketchier-than-usual series of sketches)...
It was during that process that I stumbled across the idea of using word balloons, instead. What better design metaphor for a voice artist?

That very quickly led to the question of how can I use this idea for the cover? Two very quick thumbnail sketches later — one of a series of series of word balloons in a grid, the other a more chaotic arrangement — and I had an answer I thought might work...
...Which I elaborated on just a bit to get an idea of relative sizes, type placement, and so on. (Those notes off to either side are about the measurements for the hardcover case wrap, which will need to be slightly more wide.)
And so, more than two years later, in a somewhat unexpected, roundabout way, we arrive here:
I wanted to use a combination of well-known and less-well-known characters on the cover — hence, the less-recognizable Woody Woodpecker, and the somewhat-controversial (though by now forgotten) The Frito Bandito. Everything had to fit together more or less like a puzzle, and I ended up modifying a few of the illustrations to make them better fit the space I had, making the occasional color adjustment here and there.

There's an ol' Warner Bros. cartoon from 1949 called "Curtain Razor," essentially a series of blackout gags as Porky Pig auditions a series of vaudeville acts. One of the performers (voiced by Mel Blanc, of course) is known as "The Man of a Thousand Voices," and he performs a rapid-fire series of voice impressions. (Sorry, I tried to find a link to the cartoon, but they've all been taken down.) That was more or less the inspiration for this cover — a chaotic series of different cartoon voices that seem to bombard you all at once.

(In the cartoon, Porky responds that he only counted 999 voices. The performer is puzzled, trying to remember what that other voice was — the gag, of course, is that it's his normal speaking voice — and he wanders off, hoping that he might think of it later.)

Mystery Map

Found this in my nine-year-old's backpack at the end of the school year.

Sketches: Eagle Down

I try to spend as little time as possible second-guessing myself and my work, but mostly, I get nowhere with that. I'll have an approach that I like, or what I think is a (reasonably) clever idea, or an unusual solution to a design question — but then, I'll stop and wonder: is this concept going to win over whomever has to make the decision to approve it?

And then I might think, what small adjustments might be made to nudge this into more crowd-pleasing territory? And then, how much time and effort do I want to put into that? Often followed by, geez, why don't you just trust your instincts?
This was one of those occasions. Much as I wanted to use the target shape to replace the missing letter "O", I was kinda concerned that the word didn't instantly read as a word, as it ought to. The shape was there, sure, but it was the difference in color and contrast that created doubt in my mind, and like a juror instructed to not to consider stricken testimony in court, you can't "un-see" something. (Not really.) Out of concern that this might doom the entire concept, I did an alternate version, mostly for myself — that's it on the right, the version with the target shape filled with a clean version of the sand texture in the background. (You're probably not seeing that texture on screen — I think it's been mostly lost to the JPEG compression, though I hope will be a bit more obvious in print.).

While I was wondering over which I ought to submit, my nine-year-old son saw the original version (that's it on the left), and read the title out loud with a moment's hesitation, but without prompting. I guess if a nine-year-old can make sense of this, I shouldn't be too terribly concerned.

Oh, and here's the quick sketch I did before I started working on this. I had been asked to design a cover based on the cover of the screenplay, but there really wasn't anything there to draw on for a formal book cover (and I wanted to do something in keeping with the other books in the series). But I did use the silhouetted figure.

There's a turtle in our pond.

It's a small pond, and a big turtle. (Reasonably big, anyway. It's about the size of, I dunno, a salad plate? Seven or eight inches wide, I think.)

Seems a good chance this is the same Painted Turtle we saw briefly last year (seen in the photo above), when it spent the morning inexplicably wandering around the edge of the unpaved driveway in front of our house. We were concerned it might wander into the street, so we brought it to the backyard, where it discovered the pond, and eventually wandered off. That was the last of the turtle excitement.

Then, about two weeks ago I spotted it — or quite possibly another turtle, can't be certain — from an upstairs window, basking in the sun on the big flat rock in the middle of the pond.

It's difficult to get too close enough to get a better look, though — it seems rather shy, and retreats into the water before I can get the least bit near to the pond. It's a bit more comfortable under the water, though. It hides among the leaf litter and algae, but it can usually be spotted. That's how we know it's a Painted Turtle.

(We have a frog, too, but we've had frogs every year. A turtle, that's something extraordinary.)

Monday Evening

I should be working right now. I'm not, and I suppose really don't have to be — but I can't help but feel as though I ought to be. I can't just sit here, comfortably, and do nothing without this sense of unease that something isn't getting done.

That's the way it is when you enjoy your work, I suppose. It expands to fill a vacuum. And when you're self-employed, it becomes difficult to seperate work from home from whatever else. I have to make an effort to make the time for whatever else.

Much as I enjoy my work, though, it can still wear me down. I need the time away — that's what "now" is supposed to be. But that desk in the next room, the computer on that desk, it's all still there, and were I to wander over to the office, I could easily lose an hour or two with some small task I-just-want-to-get-this-done, and end up falling into bed at 3:00 AM.

Saturday Afternoon

Mind is meandering. Decision-making has wandered off somewhere, to look for more interersting stuff to decide. Concentration has become diluted. Work is done for the day.