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One of my dreams has been to use my location drawing/visual journalism work as final artwork. I lived that dream through Bird, and have taken it to another level by illustrating this year’s Baltimore Transmodern Festival poster. A lot of my most interesting projects find me serendipitously, including BIRD. This job was no exception.
When I moved to Baltimore back in June of 2011, I took a trip to the Baltimore Museum of Art to familiarize myself with the art scene in my new hood. While there, I came upon the video work of Stephanie M. Barber. She was working on “jhana and the rats of james olds or 31 days/31 videos”. Of course, I partcipated, and upon leaving, ran into Stephanie in the hallway (she was taking a lunch break). She noticed that I looked a lot longer at the work than most visitors, to which I responded, “I’m an artist. We speak the same language.” From there we talked about MICA (where she also teaches!). One thing led to another and we became facebook freinds. After seeing my Visual Journalism work week after week, Stephanie invited me to create a poster for the Baltimore Transmodern Festival. The pay was modest, but my poster will be all over the city (flattering of the ego always works for me). So, me and one of my awesome Visual Journalism students, Jordan Jones, went down to the Current Gallery, sat in the back alley (where the festival will be held), and drew. From there, I did a little photoshop magic and came up with this:
I did the drawing in one sitting in my giant Archie Grand sketchbook. From there, I took tracing paper and drew a bunch of tiny colorful balls (to represent summer festivusness). I then did lettering on a separate layer of tracing paper and multiplied ever’thang in photoshop. Total job took about ten hours. Yay.