This is a story of how I created and produced a particular project, one that both delighted and challenged me; one that let me trust my instincts, benefit from my experiences and take some calculated risks. I’m happy with the results, yet it may or may not be some of my best work. Hopefully this story will be interesting, even instructional, to some.

Here’s an outline:

• Contact
• Prologue
• Acceptance
• Hello, anyone home?
• What are the criteria?
• Never mind the criteria
• Trust me
• This is fun
• This is scary
• This is tedious
• This is done

Contact

It started innocently enough with an email.

Are you up for doing a poster for my neighbor’s concert/block party. its Sept 12. He asked if you would be willing. Joan.

Which is how last year’s poster pretty much started out.

Prologue

The venue is a little neighborhood in the West [Greenwich] Village in New York City. One short street named Cornelia, with a handful of restaurants and shops, would be closed to automobiles for a late summer evening, and a stage with a giant tarp angled behind it, tied to trees and fire escapes would be the backdrop. Very casual yet professional. Trumpeter Leif Arntzen, a Cornelia Street resident would not only headline the event, but initiate it, put up the stage and the money for all of it – after convincing the locals it’d be worth it. As he did last year, Leif would take the broadside file to a local repro shop and make 50 or so laser prints on 11 x 17, then find homes for them in storefront windows and on lamp posts.

Acceptance

I was fairly busy when the request came in, but really craved an assignment where some expression would likely be expected. This would be my second time helping Leif and my friend Joan (another Cornelia resident) – at no charge – and would be a chance to cut loose and outdo last year’s edition. An added bonus: I’d have a bit more than the one week I had last year to turn it around.

Hello, anyone home?

Sure I was eager, but this was a freebie and I was busy, so it had to get started. I tossed out a few emails to Leif, cc’d Joan, even hoping to meet with Leif when I’d soon be driving into Manhattan for an after-hours tour of Pentagram (yes, that Pentagram) from Joan, a project manager there (another story) at the time. I lazily awaited word of what might be any different than last year. But no direct, helpful replies came. And the studio tour fell through, so…

What are the criteria?

A week or so had gone by. I now asked more pointed questions via email regarding what was important to communicate with this poster.

Never mind the criteria

The reply from Leif (the musician client) was not the tidy outline of salient points I’d hoped for but a rather poetic rambling, an imagining of the stage being set up, with him taking to the stage… The email concluded with

You can edit or expand as needed, or toss it and tell me ‘Leif, that makes no sense whatsoever – it’s a *&^(*&^ poster, man!’

Hmmm. First impulse was “Oh, great…thanks a lot” but then I made a decision to roll with it, take inspiration from his nebulous-but-energetic missive and get to work.

Trust me

I took a calculated gamble (remembering that my quickly-turned 2008 poster was well received) by attempting a translation of the spirit in Leif’s email, knowing that would be the backbone of a solution. My emailed response back was

Thanks for the feedback. I get it; I’ll interpret all you said in a strictly positive manner, and forge ahead with something that should be fun for us all.

This is fun

My good friends Paper and Pencil begged me to begin. I wanted to see energy. I wanted to hear music. Recalling how enjoyable last year’s street concert was, germs of ideas sprouted. Bing! Bam! One rough idea after another, as quickly as possible, trying to rope the elusive essence of a screaming, but melodic, free-form trumpet and pin it to paper, over and over. Take chances. Cast that straight line out and snap it into a curve! I didn’t necessarily decide then that an illustration was coming. Rather, I was simply imagining on paper what kind of happened-upon poster would seduce my senses and provide me some window into what the music was about. Included below are 3 pages of sketches, most involving a trumpet with either swirling or zig-zagging lines See if you can find the “chosen” one.

My wife took a peek at these and liked a few ideas, but time felt tight, so going on gut instinct was my decision. At this point, an illustration was inevitable. Able to create and to enjoy doing illustration, I don’t really call myself an illustrator. Mine need to be within certain parameters, and have, oh, let’s call it a wide margin of error. My love of drawing goes back to childhood, and messing up sheets of paper is a real pleasure, but a finished, polished product is a bit intimidating. But an executive decisions was needed, and this designer blurted out “I can do that!” and away we went.

My favorite doodle, the tiny bird-in-trumpet one, got slapped onto the scanner, greatly enlarged, and framed up to see what sort of room I’d have for accompanying text. The illustration would be relatively tall on an 11×17 inch broadside, and I saw two choices: the art needed to be small enough, allowing a reasonably large rectangle, above or below, for text, or the art could sit comfortably in the middle and – somehow – the text could surround it. How am I going to fit all this different text about the event into this weird, uneven shape? Very little type will fit above or below the center art… last year’s was similar; I used the really brief info like time and date in the narrow side areas… hmmm…

Right here was probably my biggest thrill in this whole dragged out story. Deciding, at this very point, to commit to the idea of me creating a ‘finished’ illustration somehow surrounded by text. And to go boldly and move swiftly…

The scanned thumbnail went into Illustrator and drawing… brushing… whatever… commenced. I use the app enough but don’t freehand illustrate a lot with it, so I kept things simple with a uniform line weight. Progress needed to be made; not a lot of time to experiment. With my Wacom tablet and some Bezier curves, I captured a good amount of the doodle’s spontaneity. Next phase was building up shapes of color, starting with yellow and adding progressively darker warm tones. Part of me said “refer to a photo and “add some white to the reflections”. The other part of me simply pushed on. A similar process followed for rendering the bird. The original doodled fowl looked a bit tentative, even anxious, so his personality got a tweaking and ended up more relaxed, even aloof?

Perhaps the second biggest thrill in the process, and certainly the most meditative-yet-fun aspect was the surrounding lettering itself. I had no doubt it could be done, somehow, and that’s a great feeling, one worth getting lost in. So the .AI illustration file, with its thin gray border was opened in Acrobat and printed from my color inkjet. Into the cabinet for my trusty pad of tracing paper, and with some white artist’s tape I hinged a sheet to the print, for easily peeking at will under the vellum.

This is scary

As confident as I was, this was a lettering-to-fit project and as such was a high-wire juggling act of sorts, constant planning and adjusting; leaping ahead and returning to compensate; always looking ahead, around and under the vellum. And let’s hope that when it’s finished, there’s not either a typo or a text change! Note the eraser along with my mechanical pencil. It and it’s larger rectangular cousin got a decent workout along the way. But I worked carefully and methodically, always striving for that elusive liquid look. Challenging too was treating priority and not-so-priority information respectively. Even though color would eventually help to organize the presentation of all this amorphous text, you really have to avoid burying key info in such a stew. Again, constant planning and adjusting…

This is hard

When completed, the penciled-tracing-and-inkjet sandwich was scanned, the penciled area’s levels adjusted for readability, and this rough pdf proof was emailed to the client. Who I didn’t hear from for a day or two, but happily he loved it. And it had to work… I’d invested a decent amount of work in it. My friend Joan, advising the client, asked about a rain date – D’oh! Overlooked that whole notion (sure enough, it was on last year’s version)!

An area needed to be found to add this and quick. I erased about a third of the lettering in the right/lower right and got to work. The image of a dripping poncho seemed like a good idea for a containing shape for the rain date, but it had to be positioned and sized to be among the last items a viewer would focus on – and still allow room for the critical date/time and other key text.

Once those repairs were made it was time to ink all the lettering. Not all that familiar with autotracing in Illustrator CS3, I aimed to be as detailed, neat and precise as possible, so that the tracing would go smoothly. A rather painstaking operation, I carefully outlined each letter with various widths of fine black markers. Some letters were left rather ambiguous in the pencil stage, so I had to make confident and careful strokes to avoid the hesitation wiggles I sometimes suffer when trying to follow a precise guide line with ink. After outlining each character, a slightly thicker pen was used to make an inner-stroke of sorts. So it was akin to outlining every letter a second time, with only slightly less precision. The purpose of all that fine-lining was to allow each character’s final interior inking to be done more quickly, with a fatter marker.

This is tedious

As pleasurable as losing myself in this technique was, there was other paying work to complete! I soon found myself wondering, complaining and ultimately regretting this path. So much detail work (sometimes while wearing two pairs of reading glasses for comfortable magnification) and cussing each time a line ever-so-slightly wobbled, was not time well spent, with regard to the goal of bringing the art into Illustrator. I now think autotracing could have easily ignored the interior aspects of each character, or could have been used to efficiently deal with these un-filled spaces. But I must admit the different types of satisfaction – aesthetic and technical – in seeing the finished inking, with all characters filled solid black, before laying in on the scanner glass.

Once the inked art was in Illustrator, I toyed with the idea of making the tracing super-precise; I did after all want the hand-crafted nuance (not to mention all the time I burned) to be captured precisely. But the thought of then editing a hundred or so paths, with thousands of anchor points, times two control handles each, made me groan with dread. I just couldn’t afford another lengthy phase of detail work on a free job with only days left to deliver.

I instead opted for a looser, more forgiving fit of the traced contours. Minor fiddling with the options gave me a surprisingly acceptable (or as my dad would often say, “perfectly good”) result which fit in well with the intended character of the overall design. Because there was no real color strategy, I new there would be experimenting with the text coloring in the actual file. I have to admit here that color strategy is not a strength of mine. Perhaps a real illustrator would have worked out some ideas ahead of time on paper? Maybe. But I already had the central illustration, colored, in the file, so in the file seemed like a natural and efficient place to determine color. Settled. It was now time to assemble individual characters into composite paths, based on my improvised decisions regarding how colors and words would be split.

Here’s where I fast-forward through scores of separate color choices I made. It was fun, but a lot of work. At times, 75 percent of the color seemed to be worked out, but then something wouldn’t make sense, or a color used in another area was now needed over here which of course had a ripple effect and undermined earlier progress. But that’s the stuff of creativity and improvisation in particular – confidence in one’s ability to pull a rabbit out of a hat, built upon year after year of successes.

This is done

The finished broadside design

Epilogue

The nighttime event itself was enjoyable to be sure, but because the blocked-off, narrow street was lined with mostly brick buildings, and because the simple stage was backdropped by a large, dark brown-looking tarp (all nicely done, mind you!) I was struck with an overall impression of warmth and warm colors versus the somewhat more festive colors of my broadside’s palette. Although it was open to all, and was a truly inspired and energetic event, it was really a neighborhood event. And the neighbors, including the restaurant patrons – arriving, departing and loitering – were not rowdy, with only few dancing briefly. It was perhaps a more intimate affair than what my design suggested. I’m not at all unhappy with my work; just something to note for next year.

Thanks for hanging on to the end, dear reader!

The last, last word

Just received some photos (very top and below) from the event (photos by Nick Daddazio, a long time Cornelia Street resident and sculptural artist). I think you’ll see what I meant in my epilogue. What a great time with great music, all thanks to Mr. Leif Arntzen.