Art in society

Illustration Work

I have just finished work on a series of nine illustrations for theChicago Street Theater’s upcoming season.

For some reason I decided to video the process with a view to posting the results to You Tube.

The actual content of the images was agreed before hand as was the palette – blue. Working with just one color was certainly a challenge!

Here is one  of the pieces – The musical Annie.

Street Art

I’ve always had mixed feelings about street art, the best is excellent but there is a lot of worst, same with graffiti which I suppose is a subset.

Here are some excellent examples:

Think of street art and the first name that springs to mind is Banksy. Some of his stuff makes me smile that much is for sure but I can’t help feeling that here is a guy who is basically an editorial cartoonist who likes working big with a shtick. What he does takes more guts than I’ll ever have but he is obviously very aware of how the marketing machine works judging by his numerous quotes on the subject, and exactly how to play it.

Chicago Street Theatre Illustrations – 2010 Season

These are the illustrations that I did for Chicago Street Theatre’s 2009 season.

Surprisingly, they have done me the honor of asking me to provide illustrations for the 2010 season so expect something in the very near future.

CTG are the best community theatre group that I have encountered – no exceptions.

Children’s Art Contests

Fascinating piece from the ever excellent Boing Boing. I have often wondered about the criteria for judging children’s art contests and long ago came to the conclusion that the first consideration is normally unremitting optimism. Anything even slightly edgy normally gets consigned to the also ran pile regardless of merit.

Two works are used as examples in the article and I suspect that the ‘acceptable’ one was in fact done by an adult but that doesn’t detract from the story or the point.