Merch to be promoted

Illustrations for a cd by my friends Anthony Cossa and them. Sonic madness and rhythmic glory combine to form modern progressive ear food.

This job taught me things about illustration in general in today's tech - digital and paper. I like to start with a quick thumbnail sketch and a little marker color. Most of the time the thumbnail is the best version due to the inevitable downgrading as it goes to finish. This is where I go off the tracks, but with work it looks decent. The key is to stay faithful to the thumb and push it without losing the first flash of inspiration (See the John K. blog "All Kinds of Stuff") which we know is very difficult for knuckleheads like myself. The rough layouts were done mostly with marker and pencil plus a little black felt marker, then scanned and tweaked in Corel Painter 9. Using a small Wacom tablet, the colors were saturated and the inking was cleaned up. Found and created images were scattered about like Waldo. I love doing stuff like that - it's a collage! It gets tricky when the various images are very different sizes, leading to resolution problems. I usually do it the hard way and just slog through to the end, scan and resize, delete, resize - rescan and so on.