MidwestLove Art & Design

Here’s a cool event poster for a local festival held annually in Byron, IL aptly titled Byronfest. My band Venna is playing, so I had to do something to help promote. Heather drew the awesome Polaroid One Step which inspired the whole thing. We may have to work together more often!

This is getting a three color screen print on French Paper Pop-Tone Berrylicious and will be sold alongside a bunch of my other prints in an online store very, very soon. Scout’s honor.

Which reminds me, if you haven’t seen Up yet, go now.

-marky

In March of 2006, at a little legion hall in Milwaukee, WI some of my friends in an relatively unknown indie rock band played their last show. Their band was called The Meteah Strike and it is a crime how few people got a chance to know and love those guys the way my friends and I did. They were a band comprised of some great musicians, but better songwriters. At that time in the Milwaukee indie rock scene, no one was making anything as endearing, heartfelt or genuinely magnetic as The Meteah Strike. Their music had the wry accessibility of Death Cab For Cutie, the clever edge of Elvis Costello and the gentle, off kilter experimentation of The Notwist. I still listen to their small collection of songs on a regular basis as part of my musical diet. One of my bands even re-recorded a cover of their song Big City Story. I miss those guys.

But, what’s this? Out of the ashes of one of my favorite bands, the founding members formed a new musical entity this time called Fable & The World Flat. This is nothing like their previous musical endeavor. This is neo-motown soul with an indie rock back-bone and some trip hop flavor. In other words, it’s fantastily different and incredibly engaging, with even more personality. Dance music for the disengaged, drinking class. Sign me up!

When I heard from the guys that they were putting together a full length record, I asked if I could lend some art direction. They obliged, and even gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted. I thought it would be appropriate to give this project a laid back, old school Blue Note-esque vibe. So I spilled some coffee on a few sheets of paper in my office to get some “authentic” looking age stains. (I know, I know… sacrificing perfectly good coffee? That’s dedication to one’s craft is what that is.)

My friend Brett suggested the use of Stilla for the “Fable” on the front cover, which totally made the whole thing come together. It also led to this sweet wordmark, which I’m secretly hoping they’ll put on a tshirt for future wearing potential-

I’ve got to say that there’s nothing better than being able to do work for your friends and be even a small part of the music you love to listen to. Seriously.

Let me know what you think.

-marky

Old bros and past clients, The Color Morale recently signed a deal with mega-metal label Rise Records, and they commissioned me to design a logo for the front of their debut CD. They instructed me to make it intense, but still legible. Their music is straight up brutal, new-school hardcore wrapped around some fairly melodic guitar work, so I figured I should do something a bit more customized by hand instead of going with a typeface. Plus I really like these guys and wanted to do something special that would work for them for a while.

Now I only had one day to turn this around in order to make thier print deadline for their CDs, so I just ran with my first idea and threw out the rough sketch approval process. I painted out a good 13 or so logos until I had one that felt right. To make sure I got as much movement and “violence” into the strokes as possible, I got out my wife’s antique calligraphy nibs and india ink (please don’t tell her) and scratched and drug the nibs across some heavy weight textured watercolor paper getting all of that violent, splattery effect. Heather… nothing was damaged during the making of this logo and I washed off all of your pens when I was done. Please don’t kill me.

After a few minor changes in Illustrator (moving the “The” down), they were totally pleased with it, and it is now being used all over their myspace page and CD artwork and promo stuff.  The actual CD packaging and layout was done by the awesome guys at Synapse. Check it out -

On a personal note, I couldn’t be prouder of these guys watching where they came from, starting out in the scene a mere 3 or 4 years ago. I was at Garret and Steve’s first show (as a fairly different band) in a little record shop in Rockford, IL and I remember being blown away by their conviction to their music even back then. They are incredibly hardworking and talented and genuinely nice guys and they deserve all the success in the world. Congrats dudes.

-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

Just launched the brand new www.KickstandProductions.net. Fully database driven so the Kickstandees can update with event info, band info, venue info and more. This was the first site that I worked on with my new web development parnter and all around good guy, Brad Manderscheid. Click around the site, let us know what you think and find a rad show to go see.

-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

Fantastic Chicago promoter and good friend Rebecca of Betta Promotions asked me to draw up a poster in celebration of her 2 year anniversary show. I initially just did all the typesetting real quick in Illustrator, but thankfully she ever-so-politely pushed me to redraw all of the text by hand. It was the right call.

Congrats to Betta and her 2 years of keepin it real in Chicago!

-marky

Hey everyone, I recently got to do an interview and answer some questions about the future of album artwork and designing for the music industry in general. You can check that out over here at The Orange Zest. While you’re at it, make sure to check out the rest of the Orange Alert blog/webzine as I’m postive you’ll find something to spark your interest over there. It’s an overall excellent site. Thanks to Jason for the interview!

-marky

Hello everyone,

As you may have noticed, MidwestLove.com looks a bit different. I’ve launched a new portfolio based website at the www.MidwestLove.com doman and the new home for the MWL blog is www.blog.midwestlove.com.  So update your RSS readers and bookmarks! Sorry for the lack of advance warning, this idea for a new web site quite literally sprung up overnight.

In other news, I’m going to be using the blog here for more in-depth look at specific projects, so if anyone has any requests for projects they’d like me to blog about, let me know. Who knows, I might even get creative with posting some of my thoughts on other things such as music, books, personal life and (take a deep breath) other people’s art. We’ll just see what this turns into.

Anyway, thanks again for checking in. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback on the new site or anything else you may feel compelled to talk to me about. Thanks!

-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