Ink Vines.
One thing I haven’t written about in a while is the illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby” that I’ve been working on. I think I’m on year four of working on it but I really haven’t done much with it this year. I’ve done a ton of illustrations for it ( maybe a few dozen) and I’m happy with them but what I’m not happy with is my book design. That’s where I’ve been stuck.
I’ve set the book up as a 9×12 inch art book and I’ve even done a lot of design work on it. The problem is that the design work is terrible. It’s bland and uninspired. I never really had an idea for the book design but I went about making it anyway. There is only a tiny bit of flair to the text and I used a lot of textures on the bottom and outside of the pages.
I used all those textures because I had made a lot of ink textures last year for various purposes. I made a 150 different ink textures so it made sense that I could use them in this in the Gatsby book and even have a different one on each page. But it just made the pages look busy and there seemed to bo no point to them. I could not think of anything else though. So there it sat for months and months.
This week one of my students asked me how the project was going. I told him it was at a standstill and he asked to look at it. I sent him a digital copy of it. He agreed with my assessment of it. He told me to move all my endpapers (120 portraits) to the back instead of half in front and half in back and to delete all those textures and start over. Sometimes it takes someone else telling me things out loud to get me going again.
A decorative Gatsby drinking glass.
So this weekend I got going on the design again. I drew little thumbnails of page designs and came up with a couple of things that I liked. I came up with the broad idea of having little spot illustrations on each page that reflects something going on in each chapter. I also came up with this organic plant like idea. Sort of a decorative vine on some pages.
On Saturday I decided that I wanted to try to draw some plant inspired ink vines. I wanted to make them big so that I could use the whose sweep of my arm to draw them but I didn’t really want to use up my 11×17 inch Bristol board. The I remembered some extra paper that I had.
Back in the 1990s when I was working in the Marvel Comics’ offices they used to give out drawing paper to the artists. But they also had paper that was cheaper that we would use for paste-up projects. It was still pretty good paper but it said “For paste-up only” on it and it was never given out to the artist to draw and ink on.
In around 1995-1996 Marvel switched to desktop publishing and we started doing everything on computers instead of on paper. That was for the behind the scenes production work. The comics were still drawn on paper. But Marvel didn’t have any use for the paste-up paper any more so they gave it away to anyone in the office who wanted it.
Rows of grass.
I don’t think I took more than a few sheets of it at the time. But my friend and fellow Marvel Bullpenner, Jerry, did. Cut to just before COVID in the spring of 2020 and Jerry is moving apartments. That’s when he gives me a bunch of comics books he no longer wants and a big pack of this paper. About a hundred sheets. It’s just been sitting around for the last five years waiting for me to find something to do with it.
I walked out to the garage where I had the paper on a shelf and grabbed a sheet of it. Then I got a brush and some ink and started figuring out what I wanted to do. Big sweeping ink lines made with a few different brushes. I spent a good part of Saturday doing this and ended up filling up six pages with ink designs. There are about six designs on each page that run the length of the seventeen inch paper. I might make more. I’ll have to see.
Also on Saturday I got the idea to draw some glasses. I had already drawn some glasses for earlier illustrations but this time I thought that I could make some simple graphic drawings to use on the pages that had parties on them. On Sunday I started drawing them and after a few quick sketches I decided they would best be done as vector graphics. So I opened up Adobe Illustrator and got to work.
By Sunday afternoon I had ten glasses done. I figured out a style for them that was simple and in black and white. When doing these sort of things I usually tend to make them realistic and then pull back and simplify them. Some people are really good at realistic but my own version of it tends to end with me being bored with the drawing. That doesn’t bode well for other people liking it. I like the striped down graphic design glasses that I ended up with.
I’ve still got a long way to go with the design and a lot more ideas to work out. It’s kind of untenable that I want a spot illustration on each page. I’m going to figure out which ones will work best on which pages. That and I need a few more ideas on top of glasses and vines. I might use some confetti on some pages.
One of the things that talking to my student about this project brought back to me was that this is my project. I can do what I want with it. I don’t have to follow the rules. There weren’t any particular rules I was following that were hampering me but I couldn’t get anything done because of some vague rules in my head. It’s good to get out of your own head sometimes and see the world.