Sudden Impact!

It is not that I have nothing to say.....
or Don't call it a comeback ('cause it ain't)!

Work has interfered with life (and blog postings). The office has been flooded with projects including a really cool museum-type installation, a Flu-shot campaign, a bunch of websites and a few other things. I am not complaining- it is a good problem to have- I just want to get a little more free-time, so I can blog, sleep, stay away from the computer, etc.

So stay tuned sports-fans.

To keep you tied over- here is the latest rock poster I did for another rockin' Wolf Tickets show. This one has a great 1960s-era LIFE magazine photo of 'Broadway" Joe in stripclub prior to NY Jets Spring Training that year. Oh, the horror and the beauty of it all.

Then there is this.......


BONUS VIDEO BEATS: from Mick Jone's basement!

Don't Call Me Scarface!

The latest installment of OtherWisz posterdom is for the upcoming Punky Reggae Party 2 at the Mohawk Place. This event features some great local punk bands (Wolf Tickets, Chosen Ones, Rockas) with a ska/reggae bent all wrapped up with WBNY's DJ Universal.

This poster is probably one of the more colorful pieces I have created in a while drawing on the red, green and gold of traditional reggae graphics. The client wanted something including, and I quote, "punk rockers, dreads, and speakers speakers speakers!!!"... so did I listen to the client..? Not exactly. Instead I used Don Letts! I figured since Don was using one of my posters in his movie, I would put Don on one of my posters (read post below). Seemed fair enough.

The Formula- how it was made....
I "found" a cool photo of Don and blew him out, bit-mapped him and started to build up around the event title. I have no idea why I am so drawn to this western-circus font, the Rosewood Standard, or why it even works here, but for some reason it does. I think because the font has that old-timey poster feel to it, juggle the individual letterforms around and it lends itself well to a party atmosphere. The rest of the text was set in one of my favorite chunky rock font, Poplar Standard Black. I don't know, maybe I need to start using some different typefaces..? You tell me.

I was dying to use the 2-Tone guy and by balancing him with the Circle Jerks dude-- we had both the "punky" and the "reggae." I then added the ska checker board at the top and bottom to frame it. But I wasn't ready to call it day and something felt like it was missing.... I wanted to get some of the aggression and violence that the rastas, punks and ska dude rallied against when the Punky Reggae movement was born in 70's London. So a spray-painted, bloody splat seemed to work just right. By layering it behind and on top of the corner pieces of art, I got some messy depth.

Some fine tuning at this point included pulling an ornament from the typeface and offseting it on top of the jumbled characters. I took the same ornament and placed it over our main man's glasses to add to his 'death stare' with an implied set of daggers. I gave him a golden yellow halo, and we we were just about finished. As per usual, with any OtherWisz rock poster, I had to add a few stars. I started to "over-star it," and the client asked me to pull back a bit on the stars... I think it was a good piece of advice.

BONUS BEATS- the above snapshot was snatched from a photo taken at the Mohawk Place last week and it shows my poster hanging in it's natural environment. Rock on!

Agnostic Blues

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but the Wolf Tickets CD artwork finally showed up at my door, and I gotta show it to you. I know I wrote that piece about the poster for the CD release gig and how I made the masthead graphic by hand, but I thought I would post some photos of the final CD packaging since I was pleased with the way it came out.

The graphics tell a sort of story as the front cover illustrates 'defiance' (man vs. tank), the inside j-card is the 'retribution' (cop beating kids) and finally the under-the-cd graphic illustrating the 'penance' (man in jail). I am not sure that's what I was thinking as I first began to work on this, but something made me link these images together and it fell into place as I was desiging it.

This CD job went through a lot of changes, as did the music and the band during the process. The back cover image was suppose to be the front. I was never keen on using the baby as the cover, but maybe it plays into the story as the beginning phase (the baby as early troublemaker...?)-- proceeding to the cover 'defiance' stage of life? I don't know. The whole thing just gelled in the end- the band, the music and the artwork.

Here Comes The Hell!



Front, inside flap and CD. What is black and white and red all over? Wolf Tickets!



Front with back.



Masthead on CD starring P22 Typewriter font.




Close up of masthead created with presstype (details here).



CD with inside flap with a snatch of title track lyrics (plus stars, and lots of 'em)...



Lyric sheet.




Back cover. Love vs. hate.



Tray card graphics. Oi!

BONUS BEATS- Nate's photos from the CD release party at the Mohawk Place.

Mohawk Riot

The Hell Cometh

My latest rock poster design is for the upcoming Wolf Tickets CD Release Party at the Mohawk Place on Friday, Sept. 25th, 2009. I was pleased as to how this one came out, so I thought I would write about the process of creating it.

This design was based on the CD artwork which I developed earlier in the Summer. The CD art will see the first light of day (or should I say, dark of the inside of the 'Hawk) the Friday of the show. All the stuff I have done for head-Wolfer Chris Malachowski have 2 things in common: stars and the color red. It just always seem to fit what I do for the band.

The CD title is Here Come The Hell and I played around with creating a title graphic for some time for this project starting with the CD. I tried to find a font that was punky and sans serif. I use serif-less fonts often in rock posters, often relying on the Futura family (love that Extra Black!). From a distance, I think they are more readable. 

I couldn't find a font I wanted to use for this and I was getting tired of manipulating the typeface in photoshop- so I decided to go old school. I pulled out some old decrepit Lettreset Presstype (Helvetica Medium) and started to hand-set (or rub, I should say) the album's title. The sheets were old, crackly and the letters didn't stick very well- but I loved it!! I overlapped a few characters which a second burnish to cover pieces that fell off after not sticking. Kerning characters by eye, as well as lining up/overlapping them manually created the offset to the characters that I was looking for. Once I was happy with this built up art, I scanned it into Photoshop and adjusted the levels so the background became white and the characters solidified tonally. Also I filled in some of the missing pieces to hold together the integrity (ever so slightly) of the letter forms. I made a 600 dpi bitmap TIF file and dropped it into my cover image on the CD of the tanks. It was reused on this poster design.  And there you have it- by hand, punk rock!

The use of P22 Typewriter font was exactly what WT requested. This typewriter-themed font style has become popular with punk rock designers for ages so it fit the bill. It also has a hint of a quasi-military feel-- M.A.S.H. did the same thing for Stencil fonts. When I stared to add elements and text to the piece I decided to make the CD title art huge (it is proportioned about 400% larger that on the CD cover) to draw attention to this catchy name 'Here Comes The Hell' (no exclamation point needed). So if you can imagine this full size (see link at bottom), you can read the title from 15 - 18 ft. away. I added a few more stars to keep with the WT brand and decided to give the whole thing a rougher look by framing the large, manipulated, color-tweaked photo in a sharp-edged frame giving it the 'viewed through a broken window pane' aesthetic.

I took a few extra steps to further distress a couple elements. I upped the font size of a few characters and added a bolder stroke to others.   Some of the letters moved up a hair and a few down a hair creating some motion, some uneasiness and a bit (ever so slight) of drama. The main manipulated image borrowed was a square photo so I had to do something to fit it in the 11 x 17" format. By simply copying a chunk of the top of the photo, flipping it and pulling it out like taffy, I was able to fill the space with a ghostly shadow which almost looks like smoke. If you notice above the 's' in 'comes' there is a repeat of the tank antenna. I didn't bother to stamp it out as it looked natural as part of the background behind the large title.  Happy accidents, eh?

There you have it. Click here for a large PDF (4.2 MB) of the the poster or go authentic punk: go to the show and tear a poster from the wall of the 'Hawk as a souvenir. That is the greatest compliment to any poster designer.

Oi! See ya on Sept. 25th at the Mohawk!!

BONUS BEATS: Wolf Tickets on MySpace (hear 'em!).