MidwestLove Art & Design

Sorry for my lag in posting lately. I have been unbelievably busy, and this posts is only coming at the exchange of sleep, seeing as it’s 2:30 in the morning. Carrying on with business…

Awesome little pop-punk band from Chicago The American Autumn wrote an eight song EP full of catchy, lovable pop songs hopped up on mall food court sodas and PBR called Do You Like Me? Yes/No/Maybe. They asked me to draw some stuff for it that didn’t have anything to do with passing notes. This left me in a bewildered state for about 2 months while I pretended to know what I was going to do. In the end it turned out all right, as I came up with an idea that was mildly ambiguous but still along the lines of “Do You Like Me?”. I figured, if I kept it bright and heartwarming it should be ok.

This project consists of pages of old vintage paper from my wife’s grandfather’s journal, some vintage typewriter keystrokes also provided by my wife (who should probably have gotten some sort of artist-assistant credit in this project) and this little bear and bird that have been hanging out in my sketch book pages for a while. I had really been wanting to find a project to properly draw them for, and they just happened to fit nicely into the concept for this EP.

Ah yes, the concept… mostly, I just wanted to get across the idea of “adventuring off of the pages that we’re drawn onto”… or something lofty (silly?) like that. So, I drew the little explorers venturing off to sea and whatnot and eventually saying goodbye. I had a few other illustrations of them, but there was limited space in the layout so I had to just choose the ones that I liked best. All in all, I was pretty pleased with it and so were the American Autumn guys… who are awesome guys, by the way. Check them out.

Let me know what you think!

-marky

Big Announcement Time!

www.MidwestLove.Etsy.com

Today marks the official launch of the MidwestLove Etsy store where you can purchase beautiful silk screen prints of my some of my artwork. Now, this store is just in it’s infancy, currently offering only three prints, but the plan is to try and add a new print every month or so. I may also be offering other items in the future, but for now I’m focusing primarily on silk screen posters. Needless to say, I’m incredibly excited to finally be able to offer some of my work to the general public.

The prints that are currently available are the Cursive @ DeKalb, IL poster, the Byronfest 09 poster, and a very, very small number of the remaining Alkaline Trio/The Felix Culpa @ Poplar Grove posters. But fear not, there are more coming, including the Hey Mercedes Reunion Show poster, the David Bazan @ The House Cafe poster that was done back in December as well as some plans for a really cool Venna print and some other huge stuff.

All of the prints are 19×12.5″, printed to frame on heavy stock French paper and all are in VERY limited quantities. Once they are gone, they are gone. They were all lovingly screened by hand by the fine fellows at Orchard Street Press in Milwaukee with all environmentally friendly inks and materials, so it’s all homegrown stuff. Feel free to use this as an excuse to spruce up your living room, college dormer, submarine quarters or whatever. And please let any of your friends who would be interested in this kind of stuff know about it.

Thanks so much for your support and enthusiasm for this latest endeavor. It totally means the world (and rent/grocery money) to us!

-marky

Former client and friend Rick Bisenius asked me to draw up some custom illustrations for his and his fiance’s wedding invitations. They suggested a theme of “Robots In Love”. How could I resist that opportunity? I was pleased with the final results, so here they are…

Invite and RSVP Card-

Custom Envelope, Back and Front-

Feel free to print these off at will and RSVP to their wedding! I suggest getting the vegetable neopolitan.

-marky

Wow… This has got to be one of the coolest events I’ve ever been able to design a poster for. John at Kickstand Productions put together this incredible bill comprised of one of the bands I’ve followed since my high school years, Alkaline Trio, and one of the bands I currently reside in, The Felix Culpa. Needless to say, I immediately jumped all over the opportunity to do a poster for this show. I wanted this one to be awesome so I took the opportunity to go all out with the over-the-top, whimsically dark style that Alkaline Trio has become synonymous with over the years. They always have such distinct visuals and I wanted this one to feel right at home along side their other stuff.

I was unsure of the type treatment at first, but it has actually started to grow on me. I think hand drawing the type would’ve been too much. It needed something to reign it all in. Hopefully it works. Let me know what you think.

These will be silk screened and available for purchase at the event, signed and numbered, limited to 30.

-marky

I just had to share this, mostly because the illustration makes me laugh. Madison show promoters, TRAgency have commissioned me to do a series of printed posters for their upcoming shows. I was given complete artistic liscence to do whatever I wanted for each, so my goal for the series is to be as diverse as possible while remaining relevant to the style of each show, and also to try out some new techniques. This was a mix of illustration and digital art. The main character (I named him “Ponce DeLeChicken”) was done with pencil, inked and scanned. The backgroud is a blank page out of my wife’s grandmother’s antique scrapbook that I’ve been waiting to utilize for a while now. The big orange “C” has no significance whatsoever. It just looked right and framed the illustration nicely. I wish I had some more insight into it’s reason for being there, but there is none. Thus is life.

I’m going to try and make updates more frequently on here so all of you with RSS subscriptions can have more MidwestLove in your inbox everyday.

-marky

Texan power-pop engineers Seymoure contacted me to put together something for their upcoming album “Pretending It’s Casual”. They wanted the visuals to be organic, but whimsical and (of course) featuring animals.

This was done in the same style as the This Is The Shiver cover art, with water color painted cutouts, double sided tape, and minimal digital manipulation. Here’s some other pieces from the project-

 Above, Interior Panel

Below, Disc Face & Tray

I was able to do a full color disc, which was fun and pushed the concept a little bit further. Taking a second look at it, I wish I would’ve made the logo a bit bigger on the disc, but… c’est la vie. There’s always at least one thing on every project that you wish you could get back.

Here’s a better look at that sweet word mark… this was my favorite part of the project. The band actually ended up adopting this as a full time logo.

Also, I found this awesome rough concept sketch as I was deleting files and thought I would share it with you… ha ha.

 From this concept sketch, I determined the individual pieces
I needed and I drew them on regular sketch book paper to get the
shapes looking good. When I had gotten the shapes just right, I cut them all out. Then I painted full sheets of color wash and used the sketch book paper cutouts as guides to cut out the final pieces. Then those were all layered together and affixed to more painted backgrounds via double sided tape and then finally scanned. After some digital lightening and darkening of appropriate areas and layout adjustment along with the typesetting, we have the cover shown at the top of the post. The final version actually came out pretty close to that concept sketch, save for the background color.

As always I’m curious to hear everyone’s feedback, so let me know what you think of this one. Also, I have some big, big projects coming up soon, and some potentially interesting announcements concerning the future of MidwestLove, so keep checking back.

-marky

After a chance meeting on AIM, I was hired to do a 1-up tshirt design for Wisconsin pop-punk band Fast Forward To June . They gave me free reign to come up with a concept, so I challenged myself with the question, “what’s the coolest possible thing that I can draw?” Behold the results. Apparently the part of me that determines what’s cool is still eight years old.

3 colors on American Apparel gold T.

-marky

Tshirt illustration for my (other) band The Felix Culpa. The concept initially came from an idea my friend Timothy gave me almost 6 years ago. It stuck with me and I finally got a chance to use it.

2 colors on maroon (pictured) and charcoal gray shirts.

-marky

Ok, this is a little bit of self promotion as my band Venna is also playing the show this poster is promoting, but I was pretty pleased with how this came together so I wanted to post it none the less. Plus, it bears the name of one of the most prolific, intelligent, well spoken songwriters to ever pick up a guitar and I can’t help but bragging that I got the chance to put his name next to my band’s on a poster… next to a little guitar that I drew, none the less. I feel like I won a contest or something!

This was intended to be a 3 color silk screen, with two color options printed side by side on an 11×17 (double the promo per page!). I’m not sure which color scheme I like better…

And here’s the original illustration of the guitar, just cause it will never show up in it’s entirety anywhere else but my sketch book.

In all seriousness, this guy’s music is absolutely unparalleled in my life as far as meaning, inspiration and longevity. It was an honor to do this piece. Hopefully I did it justice. So let me know what you think, and grab one if you see them posted up anywhere!
-marky

Today I sent off the CD packaging for one of my favorite local bands, Kid, You’ll Move Mountains. This is a veritable super-group of talented musicians formed from members of the bands Troubled Hubble, El Oso and Inspector Owl, the latter two I’ve had the honor of not only designing for in the past, but seeing play many times and getting to become great friends with over the years. Needless to say, this project was an immense amount of fun and it’s always rewarding to design for a band that you’ve got a personal stake in.

This was done as an eco-wallet, so the front and the back covers could be comprised of one seamless image, like so…

There were a few different renderings done with typesetting added to the back, but when it came down to it, both the band and I agreed that the piece spoke much louder without any song titles or typesetting at all. The initial whale illustration actually came from a rejected concept for the From The Headline project. The band suggested the idea of having various items coming from inside the “belly of the whale”… a concept I was happy to run with.

Here’s the interior. All of the illustrations were done with pen, scanned and painted in photoshop. I actually did about 20 different spot illustrations, but these were the ones that I either liked the best, or just felt right. I especially liked the camera…

Overall, I was incredibly pleased with the way this project came together, but the toughest thing was actually trying to work around the unusual amount of punctuation in the bands name… I was pretty proud of this solution-

 That’s all for now. Should I start posting pictures of the actual printed pieces? Would anyone be interested in that? Let me know.

12/9 Update- got the CD’s back yesterday and they look rad. I’ll post pictures soon. Also, there’s a really nice interview with Jim from KYMM over at The Deli and he spends some time talking about the album art. Check it out!

-marky