Like most people, I grew up seeing the fun cartoon portrayals of the Beatles in their Yellow Submarine garb. We all know the addictive chorus to the lead track, and I’m sure you will now be humming it for the remainder of the day. Heh heh, sorry.

I was fishing around Burlesque of North America this morning and the lovable Fab Four landed on my screen once again, what a friendly looking bunch of guys. What I didn’t know until now was the man behind these legendary designs, Czech illustrator Heinz Edelmann. Beautiful character designs and he’s certainly adept at watercolor. The topmost poster is a show-stopper, I need to track down a large version of that for the wall. He’s obviously done far more work outside of the Beatles, which is why I posted that last image above. Not sure what it’s for, but its really pushing me to hit the sketchbook.

I don’t know a great deal about Edelmann’s work, maybe my pals Ron or Ben could help me out in the comments.

If you are following me on Twitter, you might have caught a bit of the process behind this new poster design last night, which I’ve dubbed ‘Elle’. I decided to show various stages of the design while I was working on it, something I’m not accustomed to and found challenging, a bit scary yet pretty fun.

So, I’d like to dedicate a post to talking a bit more about the poster as I progressed as the 140 character limit didn’t allow for a lot of explanation. This is, once again, a high-level version of the process as there are a lot of subtleties and details I will gloss over for the sake of time. So, here we go . . .

1. As I’ve stated numerous times, everything I do starts with the sketchbook. Here are a few little roughs I created to see how the overall design might drop. It has a few variations here and there, but I generally had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish.

2. I then needed a dame, and this image might work nicely. I had this image onhand while doing the sketches above which is why things look consistent. Much easier to conceptualize when you don’t have to guess or hope the right pose is found. I obviously need to tear this image to pieces in order to achieve my goal.

3. Lets throw in a bit of inspiration to keep me going. I came across this Vogue cover a while back and really wanted to attempt a poster in this style. The palette is really light with the monochromatic face, very nice. I have also always loved the simplistic design of Bowie’s cover for Aladdin Sane, so I kept that image close by as well.

4. Time to crop this lady out. I like the idea of smooth selective cropping and I wanted to try this with the neckline. I also chose early on that this wasn’t going to be a dark poster, so the background is lighter this time around.

5. Now that the cropping was coming around, I started messing with the overall palette to see what works. I ended up working on the skin tones for a very long time as I wanted a slight blue/green tint but I didn’t want the dame to look like Frankenstein. I noticed the hair was also going to be a problem with where the image was cropped. I knew I needed to sort that out somehow, but it could wait.

6. Now the skin was starting to shape up. I did a lot of blurring and airbrushing to get rid of the grittiness which resulted from me changing hues and levels several times over. I wanted to maintain a bit of roughness (like the Vogue cover) but I didn’t want the skin texture to look like a hack job. I also added a but of selective highlight and shadow bits to make the photo look a bit more interesting, and put in a flat pink for the lips.

7. I ended up ditching this color idea because it made everything look blurry, but I wanted to show this anyway because the idea of using purple and blue as main colors would come back around later. Decent idea, but not this execution.

8. I fixed up there hair with some scribbles. I like adding some hand-made elements to my work, like splatters and things, and the orientation of these lines made for a nice back piece for the hair. It also covered up that crumby hard crop that was giving me troubles earlier. I did some more skin color work here, and added some flares to make the sunglasses pop out.

9. In keeping with the original sketches, I really wanted to add some tears or some sort of liquid streaming from the eye area. I got the idea of having the lens strangely melting down over the frame and cheek, so I got several photos of whatever dripping, cropped out the drops, and adjusted the levels to make it look like mercury. The lenses got completely blacked out as the reflections were competing with the drips. I also added a bit more color to this version with that pink burst over the scribbles.

10. I realized that all of my mercury drops had the wrong lighting compared to the rest of the image, so I flipped them all around in order to match things up and added a touch of color to them. I hadn’t worked on the background at all until this point, so a bit of rough texture was added to put a little interest back there.

11. And finally, I added a few more lighting bursts, some stars reflected in the lenses of the glasses and come subtle color overlays to bring all the different palettes into the same league. Those stripes were also a last minute decision as I didn’t want the poor girl just floating in empty space.

And there you have it. I would also like to point out that all of the photography and bits used in this design came from Thinkstock.com. Big thanks for the weaponry, guys!

If you missed the Signalnoise Broadcast 4 last night, here is the recorded version of me and the crowd exchanging dialogue about design, inspiration, processes and advice.

A big thanks to everyone who dropped by to say hello. As I said, I really enjoy doing these broadcasts because it offers a nice window for discussion with like-minded creative folks. I got some great questions last night and a wonderful turnout of familiar names. More to come, for sure.

Way too much time has passed since I held the last Signalnoise Broadcast. I’ve been way too caught up in work since the holidays came and went, but I miss everyone so enough is enough :)

Tomorrow, Thursday, March 4th at 8pm EST I will be holding Signalnoise Broadcast no.4. It’s long overdue and I’ve been looking forward to chatting with you guys for a couple of months now. So, queue up those questions and swing by for some discussion on art, design and whatever else happens to pop up. If you have any questions you would like me to add to the list, feel free to drop them into the comments here.

I’ll be sure to give the heads up on my Twitter as the time approaches. Hope to see you there!

A few days ago I posted some choice designs by the talented Alex Varanese. After leafing through his work for a few days, I reached out to Alex to see if he might be interested in writing an outline of the process behind one of his recent works. I was very interested to see how he tackles creating his unique art, and I’m sure other readers are in the same boat. I was thrilled that he agreed.

Check it out as Alex dissects the tools he uses, the planning and process he goes through to conceptualize his works, some ‘in progress’ shots and discusses some hilarious bits along the way.

A huge thanks to Alex for letting us all get a glimpse behind him and his excellent work. I’m very excited to announce the first Signalnoise Exclusive starring Alex Varanese. Enjoy!

. . . . . . . . . .

For me, producing a piece of art is a lot like child birth. Not so much because I’m bringing something new into the world, but because I’m hopped up on drugs so powerful that they have to be injected directly into my spinal column. I’m kidding, of course. Everyone knows that winners don’t use drugs. Winners do use a variety of tools, however, and I’d like to talk a little about the ones I use to create my work. Specifically, I’ll be dissecting the very first piece I created in my current collection; it’s called “February ‘06″ (which is strange, since it was made in September of 2008) and it’s the first entry in a 6-part series called Circuit Bent Type:

Let’s start with the basics: I come from a 3D illustration background, so I tend to think in terms of objects and places rather than photographs or 2D shapes. I had a few goals for the Circuit Bent Type series, and I wanted to make sure the first piece hit them all:

• A heavy emphasis on retro audio gear and hobbyist electronics (hence “circuit bending”) and a “found art” feel that looks convincingly like an actual arrangement of real objects.
• The incorporation of both 2D and 3D typographical elements.
• No use whatsoever of commercial typefaces, down to the model numbers on the chips and the signature in the corner. All text is either hand-drawn lettering or a custom-made font.

As is the case with a lot of my ideas, the general layout came to me all at once. I knew I wanted the term “LO-FI” to play a central role, and I had vague images in my head of some kind of homemade cassette-playing apparatus. I immediately committed the ideas to paper to make sure I wouldn’t forget anything:

If you’ve seen the rest of the Circuit Bent Type series, you’ll recognize early versions of other pieces mixed in here as well. As you can see, these borderline scribbles aren’t meant to impress; I generally sketch as fast as I possibly can to keep up with the flow of ideas out of fear that I’ll miss something. Then, approximately 7 seconds of frantic chicken scratching later, I catch my breath, notice that my million dollar idea didn’t abruptly vanish after all, and wonder what all the fuss was about.

You’ll notice that quite an evolution took place between this initial idea and the finished piece. My sketches are always more of a loose outline than a blueprint. The following screenshots are taken from 3ds max, my full-time renderer and part-time lover, and give an idea of what the modeling process was like:

I tend to model and texture in separate phases, so my first goal was simply establishing the geometry of the scene. The following “clay render” is what the piece looks like without any materials applied:

With the modeling complete, I began the soul-crushing, thanklessly laborious task of unwrapping the texture coordinates of each mesh and painting textures to wrap back over them. In total, this scene required 44 separate maps, most ranging from 384×384 to 2048×2048. Here’s a little collage of a few of them:

The party then moved to Illustrator, where I prepared a few typographical elements for the final composition. I used an ultra abstract typeface I’d recently designed called Edgewise to spell out an appropriately cryptic phrase from one of the real audio cassettes I used as a modeling reference: “SUPER PRECISION ANTI-RESONANCE / CASSETTE MECHANISM HIGH BIAS EQ”. It was either that or “PAPA DON’T PREACH / I’M IN TROUBLE DEEP”. The combination of a meaningless message and nearly illegible lettering allowed for a text element that would fill the space in a visually interesting way but wouldn’t demand specific attention from the viewer.

I was then ready to start stirring it all together in Photoshop:

These are the three basic layers of the piece: the original render from 3ds max, the typographical lockup from Illustrator, and a grimey background I painted using grunge brushes I’d created from some texture photos I took around town. To really drive home the retro feel, I finished up by overlaying some noise and about a bajillion adjustment layers to tweak the color balance, saturation, levels and so on. Check it out:

The bottom half is the unmodified image, all drab and vanilla, while the upper half is straight up old school playa-hatin’ funk. The combination of a 3D render as the base imagery, vector and typographical elements on top, a grungy texture layer on the bottom and a heavy dose of hyperstylized post-processing to tie it all together worked well and set the pattern for most of the work I’ve done to date. Here’s the final piece again, as well a number of full-res closeups taken from the original 36×16″, 300dpi PSD file:

In summary, my approach to the creative process requires three fundamental elements: rendered imagery, thoughtful typography and fabulous hair. In practice I rarely achieve more than two of these at any given time, but it’s the constant struggle for the trifecta that keeps me on my toes.

Alex Varanese is a beast. His work started showing up on Ffffound over the past two days and I literally had a “whoa” moment when I hit his website.

Alex has a beautiful blend of retro greatness mixed with urban grittiness and typography, certainly not an easy style to hit. But the bay area artist does it smooth and sweet, to the point where his works seem almost effortless in execution. That topmost highway design is just killer, excellent aesthetic eye.

I only plucked a few of my favorites for this post, but be prepared to get steamrolled by the size of Alex’s portfolio. Check out his website, his Behance, and say hello on his Twitter.

Here are some screen shots and poster from the film Moon starring Sam Rockwell that came out last year. I had seen the poster kicking around Ffffound for the past few months but my trip to New York finally afforded me some airplane time to watch a movie. Moon was it.

Not only did I enjoy the story very much, but the conceptual design for costumes, props and sets was extremely well done. I’m a big fan of what Kubrick did with 2001, and Moon is certainly a sci-fi film aimed directly at the same style and pacing. The computer interface and signage designs on the moon base show some wonderful typography and basic shapes. The props are very utilitarian and rugged, very practical for the environment the film takes place in.

Plus, Sam Rockwell is awesome. If you haven’t seen Moon yet, I’d recommend having a look.

The Signalnoise Studio has a new mascot, thanks to a birthday gift from my sister. Standing at 4.5 inches long, Emperoth is small but mighty. He enjoys black metal, fish flakes and taking long swims in the tank.

I asked him to be a guest writer on the blog, but he burped bubbles at me and hid in his skull. I guess that’s a no.

It’s been a little while since I gave a bit of an update on what’s going on around these parts. I like having a more frequent update schedule on Signalnoise with work and inspiration stuff, but sometimes client and preparation work steps in and must be done. It’s all fun, but leaves little time for writing.

So, here’s the scoop. As of a few weeks ago Signalnoise Design Studio Inc. has become an official business entity. I have been operating as strictly an individual freelance artist for the past few years and I felt it was time to make the push and set up the structure needed to grow in the business realm. So I have been going through the motions of setting up everything needed to get all processes running smoothly. It’s all new and weird, but it’s all exciting.

At the same time, I’ve been working diligently on a new version of Signalnoise.com. If you’ve been following my tweets over the past while you would have noticed me bitching about CSS stuff, and that’s why :) When it comes to my website I’m a real sticky bastard about not changing things too drastically, mostly because I’m happy with how simple everything is and I don’t want to have to get used to some new crazy thing. So, the new Signalnoise.com will be a bit beefier but maintain a similar overall aesthetic. I have no solid launch date as yet, so all I can say is ’soon’.

While at the same time I’ve been working with some really great clients, two of which are Reckless Love and Nike while cultivating some new exciting jobs over the past few weeks. Not only will I be kicking off these new projects, but the next few months will see me speaking at FITC Toronto (see my presentation entitled Back to the Future) this April.

On top of everything else, I just returned from an excellent trip to New York where I took part in Immersion Day at Getty Images’ office as part of the ThinkCorps team. I’ll have more to say about this soon as it might require it’s own post, but some big highlights were meeting folks like Adelle Charles and Josh Smibert from the mighty Fuel Brand Inc., fellow canuck Chad Mueller from Inspiredology, John Fiorelli of the Cut & Paste digital design tournament and a bunch more. Awesome bunch to hang with.

As you can see, it’s been a wild 2010 for Signalnoise so far with no sign of letting up. Just the way I like it.

We are in the midst of Olympic mayhem here in Canada, considering Vancouver is the host and our country invented winter. Since the games officially kicked off, the crack team over at The Canadian Design Resource have been posting a lot of wonderful Olympic material from the past. Lovely stuff, so I plucked a few of my favorites to show here.

And if you missed their tweets, the CDR have been guest blogging over at Sports Illustrated to bring some homegrown flavor to their coverage of the event. Be sure to check out Part I: Canada’s Emblems, Part II: Canada’s Posters, and Part III: Torches and Cauldrons.