Bill, When Are You Coming Back?
In Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip, Nevin Martell sets himself up with the impossible task of tracking down someone notorious for being more fame-averse than Greta Garbo and J.D. Salinger combined. I won’t spoil the ending, but I will tell you that I had a fun time reading this book. It’s equal parts memoir, history, and trying to understand an enigma. The tales about Bill Watterson and the genesis of his legendary Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, trying to get his career off the ground after years of frustration, and his love/hate relationship with success are fascinating. Watterson’s well known resistance to any and all merchandising of his characters is also fully explored here, and it adds another dimension to this complex man. It’s a frustrating tact to take, but I can understand it. It called to mind how much I cherished the Peanuts characters as a child, when what I really loved was the ancillary stuff (dolls, TV specials). Indeed, I didn’t fully appreciate Schulz’s comic itself until the Fantagraphics Complete Peanuts volumes came out. The result of Watterson’s stance is letting the comic strip speak for itself, revealing it to be one of the most brilliant explorations of childhood imagination ever committed to ink and paper. Martell shares a similarly glowing view of the strip throughout this book, ruminating in an appealing, leisurely style that oftentimes comes across not so flatteringly like magazine writing. Overall, it’s not a very substantial book (at times I wish Martell didn’t inject so much of himself in the content), but the journey he takes is an enjoyable one to tag along with.
Book Review: The Handy Book of Artistic Printing
Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas’ book The Handy Book of Artistic Printing: A Collection of Letterpress Examples with Specimens of Type, Ornament, Corner Fills, Borders, Twisters, Wrinklers, and other Freaks of Fancy is a long-titled exploration of a relatively short-lived trend in graphic design history. This beautifully designed volume covers a roughly two decade-long design fad from the late 19th-century that has previously been given scant attention by historians. With the emergence of letterpress and other new methods in the 1870s and ’80s, printers of the era showed off their wares and attracted clients in the form of promotional specimens. These particular specimens came emblazoned with the typically Victorian visual traits of excess ornamentation, strange color combinations, eclectic typefaces, and randomly jumbled layouts. Artistic Printing delves into every possible aspect of this phenomenon — how it came to be, a representative look at sixty different printers’ samples, and the movement’s ignoble fall in the juggernaut of 20th century modernist dogma.
This was such a cool book to page through, and oddly comforting in a way. Its centerpiece is the sixty printer’s specimens, each generally getting its own page with a nifty paragraph or two of background info on the opposite page. The specimens cover a gamut from the best of their kind to the run-of-the-mill and tacky. Many have a masturbatory “look at what I can do” bravado (in graphic design, some things never change), but the finest examples leave me breathless as to the care and craftsmanship good letter press printing requires. Sure, they may be as subtle as a lady’s hat festooned with a dead bird, but even the worst samples have a giddy exuberance. This book is the kind of effort that has inspiration on every page, right down to the weird and wonderful 1800s fonts reprinted in the back. One small complaint: in contrast to the lively and informative specimen descriptions, the text in the opening and closing chapters is very dryly written and academic (interesting and comprehensive, but still dry).
The odd thing about this particular trend is that it never fully disappeared. Printers’ ornaments of the era fell into the public domain, eventually getting re-published by the likes of Dover for new generations of designers to explore. As noted in Artistic Printing’s concluding chapter, this style is no more immune from other graphic styles for revival, preferably with a postmodern twist. For a good example, check out the cover story layout in the paper edition of the August 2009 Wired magazine — retro ornamentation everywhere!
The Handy Book of Artistic Printing comes from Princeton Architectural Press. Buy at Amazon.com here.
Addictipedia
New Two Bunnies and a Duck is up today. Subject: Wikipedia. I can’t get enough of Wikipedia. You go there to look up something, then find that an hour has gone by and you’re looking at something that had nothing to do with what you originally came there for.
There’s also the Two Bunnies and a Duck book at Lulu.com. I find that the book has been downloaded exactly zero times since being uploaded six months ago. Not that I’m bitter about it or anything.
Cuteness In Bulk
I’m awashed in a lot of things right now. Awash in work, awash in computer problems, but mostly awash in cute. To give you an example — recently I asked Christopher what kind of gift he desired for our anniversary. He replied that he wished for a drawing featuring (and I quote) “a bunny and a duckie.” So I came up with this little watercolor:
Cute, eh? The cuteness didn’t end there, however, since a few days later the rockin’ Julie sent me a link to this All American Glamour Kitty Contest photo set. The hilarious photos and recollections of a girl entering her beloved puss in a whirlwind early ’70s kitty litter-sponsored beauty competition has loads of cuteness. But it’s a melancholy sort of cuteness tempered with Playboy bunnies, hideous fashions, and one terrified shorthair.
Oh, and there’s also the Japanese-inspired Vancouver 2010 Olympic mascots to ooh over, thanks to loyal scrubbles reader Jan. So cute you could just spit!
Horse Mosaic Finished, Yay
Here’s to art projects — even the ones that turn out differently than expected. The ambitious bead mosaic of a horse’s head which I first started last spring is finally finished! Head over to my flickr set to see how the project went along, step by step. Now the big question is how does one hang something like this on a wall? It’s got to weigh at least fifteen pounds.
How to Make a Mosaic
Let’s talk about art. For the past several weeks I’ve been driven to try something new — transfer a digital image to a hangable piece of mosaic art. I’ve always been fascinated by this kind of stuff, with people using Legos and whatnot, but the process is proving more complicated than originally anticipated. I started with this simple cropped photo of a horse, then reduced it to 40×40 pixels and eight colors:
Eventually I’d like to render the horse in painted wood balls. Or maybe beads if the balls don’t work. This will require a large but still manageable amount of pieces — 1,600 to be exact. At that point what I needed most is a Photoshop plugin that tells you how many pixels of each color an image contains. Far as I know, such a thing doesn’t exist. I’ve also tried various online ASCII art doodads to translate the pixels to text, but those didn’t work out they way I wanted. Finally I ended up enlarging the image to 400×400 pixels (as seen above), overlaying a grid in Photoshop, then printing a screen grab of the gridded horsie (because Photoshop doesn’t allow grids to be printed; see, I told you it was complicated). The next step will be roughly calculating how much of each color I need, then actually doing it. Piece by piece, line by line. Exactly how is something I haven’t quite figured out yet. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I came across a few helpful links during my research. Adam Kempa’s archived weblog post on how he made an awesome bottle cap mosaic really inspired me, since the older Lego mosaic he refers to in the post was one of the original sparks for this project. The post contains many neat links to other mosaic projects. The Instructables.com article on making a Lego mosaic was also very helpful, although it references a piece of software made only for Windows users.
Howard Pierce Desktop Patterns
Thought I’d share these nifty patterns I made back in 2000 — try them out for a cool “Desert Modernism” look. These are based on photos we took of the roofline borders on sculptor Howard Pierce’s home in Joshua Tree, California. The talented Mr. Pierce, who died in 1994, made his name designing whimsical ceramic figurines of animals. Some photos of Pierce’s public sculptures in Joshua tree can be seen here. Enjoy!
Idol Chatter
I was thinking I haven’t posted anything “artsy” here for a while, until this interview with illustrator Calef Brown came up via Drawn! Brown is one of my idols going back 15 years or so, and it’s good to read that he seems like a nice, down-to-earth kind of fellow.
I Can Only Draw Cats
Drew this while chatting on the phone with Christopher. Here is Eero napping on top of her beige carpet-festooned kitty condo.
