Booktoberfest

Our illustration for Crowley Webb's Booktoberfest poster. Learn more at www.projectflight.org.

Sippy Cup

A recent sketch...

Adam Hughes

 

Another recent addition to the Inkwell Studios library- Cover Run: The DC Comics Art of Adam Hughes (DC). In the comics world, they're called Good Girl Artists- the illustrators who specialize in drawing fetching young women, often wearing tights and capes (the characters, not the artists). The late Dave Stevens revived interest in Good Girl Art with the Rocketeer, but Adam Hughes is its best-known practitioner. Unlike so many comics artists who fall into a cookie-cutter sameness that passes for style, Hughes has kept pushing his technique in new directions. Lately he's been creating his covers as grayscale marker drawings and then coloring them in Photoshop. He's also incredibly well-versed in illustration history: look at the nod to Maxfield Parrish in the Supergirl cover above, and to Norman Rockwell in the Wonder Woman "Girl Scouts" cover. And he has a great sense of humor- I love that image of Superman cooling his heels while Diana and Lois engage in a little late-night girl talk. AND, if that weren't enough, he and his wife Allison are two of the coolest people in the comics world.

Chevy

Another recent illustration- this was created as a demonstration piece for a digital illustration class I'm teaching.

Overspray

 

Yet another recent addition to the Studio library: Overspray: Riding High With the Kings of California Airbrush Art (Picturebox). The airbrush-as-illustration-tool enjoyed a brief heyday in the 1930s, thanks in part to Wrigley's artist Otis Shepard and pinup masters George Petty and Alberto Vargas. In the 1970s, a group of California artists, beginning with Dave Willardson and Charles White III, revived interest in the airbrush with their glorious pop-surrealist illustrations for magazines like West, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Oui (yes, Oui), movie posters and hundreds of album covers. The California airbrushers embraced pop culture iconography with a rare enthusiasm, and their work is saturated with so much chrome, neon, glossy lipstick and carnal sweat it leaves a not-altogether-unpleasant buzzing sensation in the skull. Norman Hathaway writes, "The carhop in Dave Willardson's poster for American Grafitti is so intensely American it's nearly painful."

Irish Classical Theatre Company

For the past ten years or so we've been creating posters for the Irish Classical Theatre Company. Here are a few selections from the 2011-2012 Season.

Blue Monk

Design mavens Greg Meadows and Pete Reiling created the identity for Blue Monk, a bustling gastropub on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. We created this little Cartoon Modern drawing based on one of Pete's sketches.