Hot Rod

Hot Rod magazine- my favourite front cover.

It hasn't any of those pull quotes or anything but I would buy it in a flash.

This was found in a book about independent magazines (such as adbusters).

Hunger Magazine

http://www.hungertv.com/pages/about/

It's quite new, only came out in November last year.

Sketch all the time.

http://v4.jasonsantamaria.com/articles/pretty-sketchy


Jason Santa Maria:

http://thegreatdiscontent.com/jason-santa-maria

David Lachapelle

Pierre et Gilles

how many?

You people love your papercraft, don't you.

Magazine part 3- Qin Shihuan

The first Emperor of China, so influential that the country is named after him, tried to gain eternal life but died because he took mercury pills.


"Qin Shihuan was buried in a tomb accompanied by an army of hundreds of thousands of terracotta soldiers in present-day Xian. The tomb was uncovered by a farmers digging for a well in 1974. The Emperor had been obsessed with immortality and spent years trying to find an elixir to life. While physical immortality was never achieved, it would seem Qin’s quest for to live forever was ultimately granted – his policies and legacy are practiced and remembered in China today." http://chineseculture.about.com/od/historyofchina/a/Qindynasty.htm

That story has parallels in today's search for anti-ageing creams. We may snigger that Qin would happily swallow poison in the belief it would extend his lifespan, but people today also shell out for anti-wrinkle, time-slowing, rolling-back-the-years moisturisers, others exercise and diet excessively to prevent heart disease (only to die of a heart attack from the stress, probably), so what has changed?

Interestingly, the taoist train of thought that led to alchemy and finding the elixir of life was originally about scepticism, that the world around is an illusion and nothing can be known about the world. In folklore, the ones who reach this truth become immortals.
(that's my understanding of it anyway)

Luckily for the sake of quick and effective visual communication, not only is chinese and taoist culture very visually distinctive, Qin himself has a few markers about him:

• the mercury he took
• burning books
• the great wall of china
• the terracotta army

What a guy. He's the parallel to our end of time, to represent the eternal search for eternity. At least, living for eternity.

Magazines- research and ideas part 2

Eternal

Food made of imperishable materials

eg. ice cream made of rock (made with lots of food colouring, possibly paint, mashed potato and some photoshop magic)

plastic toy food

metallic fruit

you could argue the stone in a peach is indestructible. The soft fruit around it quickly disappears but it's heart will remain in the soil until it becomes a tree.

Images from Uppercase, The simple things, an interiors magazine from the uni library whose name I can't remember...

Lifestyle magazines- initial research and ideas

Eternal

Antiques, re-cycling, old technology re-used, modern items made out of old materials

Antique objects and techniques are given eternal life by a nostalgic revival or recycling them into something new.

raido times 4- Val Biro

Val Biro, radio times. They don't make 'em like they used to.

raido times 3- R F Micklewright

More from Radio Times, this time the illustrator has busy black lines and lots and lots of detail. 

This kind of drawing is going to give you a headache and will take hours to complete, but it's amazing to look at. 

Reminds me of a still for an animated film.

radio times 2- Edward Ardizzone

Edward Ardizzone from Radio Times. Look at the lady on stage at the top, it's like a painting with the dark and light tones.

She's very stark against the blurriness of the background in the stalls.

Then at the bottom we have a railway carriage scene, which I would really like to do one day. The interior and the gestures and costume are very distinct.

I wonder what kind of pen that is.

radio times 1- Bob Sheriffs

Just look at that caricature of Winston Churchill in the lower left of the last image.

Bob Sheriffs was a caricaturist for the Radio Times back in it's glory days when all you had were gramophone and jerries and you bloody well raised a family on two guineas a week.

Bob stands out in the massive Radio Times illustration book because of the contrasting thicknesses of his lines and very expressive figures. His work actually looks quite contemporary, probably because you can achieve a similar effect on Illustrator CS5.

More splash pages

 More from the second project of the year.  I'm using the first one and discarding the second one, despite being advised that it looks like National Geographic (actually I don't think that was a compliment).

I didn't actually do the rest of the article design for the polar bear splash page, which is a shame because  the image makes more sense than a lot of ice, water being a melted form of ice and the article actually being about melting ice.

Anyway, the unused splash page will live on in this blog post, saving me hours I would otherwise waste on useless regret and wondering what could have been.