Illustration Project 2: Musical/Stage Performance Tour Design

The assignment is to design a poster and a t-shirt for a band or performer of any sort, so I chose my favorite band that currently tours now: Medeski, Martin & Wood. I decided to design specifically for the actual tour they're carrying out right now, the Radiolarian Series, which is basically an experimental series of three tours out of which three albums will be created (1 album per leg of the tour). They are pretty much just busting out improv jams with very little planning and there seems to be an emphasis on acoustic instrumentals based off of the show I saw of theirs from the first leg of the Radiolarian series.

Anywho, my idea for this first design is to portray the band in "Radiolarian" attire. Radiolarians are aqueous micro-species which have amazingly intricate structures. While looking at them, I began to see crowns and septers and other various things which they might be morphed into, but mostly crowns stood out to me..thus, for my first draft I want to portray Medeski, Martin & Wood as underwater Radiolarian kings which gesture you into their realm of being. When I draw this one again, I want to render their clothing quite differently and have them floating perhaps...not digging the midieval drabs I threw on them in this one. Of course, when I produce my final draft, their faces will sure change and become more true to their actual faces.

Any commentary or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

"Man, this year Halloween is going to suck"

Tattoo

Concept drawing I did tonight for a friend of mine who wanted to get a tattoo of Aquarius/Taurus to symbolize his two sons' star signs.

CNN iReport: Typographic Portraits of 2008 Presidential Candidates

Screen Shots of my designs from:
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-93189

Franz Ackermann

One of my inspirations for my own personal works of fine art as well as design. I am inspired by him because I feel that I am hesitant to use a lot of color in my designs, and he most definitely exploits color usage to the max. He does some very interesting things with mixed media on canvas.

From Portikus.de:

Franz Ackermann studied fine arts in Munich and Hamburg.
The young artistic work of Franz Ackermann, as well as his methods of research, cannot be fixed to a certain genre or to a certain medium. Using small-formatted works on paper, large-formatted photostats and objects, he creates images and memory traces of explorations of cities. Cities as spatial but also mental orientations within an urban network; urban structure as a model for cultural and social systems of reference - these are themes Franz Ackermann is preoccupied with in an individual and virulent manner.
During a one-year working stay in Asia and continued in numerous extended travels, Franz Ackermann has created a series of more than 100 small-size water-colour works and collages. In these so-called "mental maps" the artist investigates the urban structure and situations of a city. The "city maps" reconnoitre the geomorphic and topographic conditions of a city, to then turn them into individual and subjective images. The pictorial solutions are at once characterised by biomorphic chaos and well-ordered stringency; their ornamentality highlights the fact that we are not dealing with an imitation of functional cartography, but with a subjective, "mental" experience of the city. Apart from these "mental maps", pictures painted directly on the wall and several photostats created specially for Portikus will be exhibited.

Medeski Martin and Wood + Radiolarian Art

Art School Posters