Dubai

It's always a lot of fun when you get asked to do something that's not really your regular thing. This time and art-director working on a job for KPMG (the big accountants firm) was looking for a Art Deco style poster, and through my agent he came to me.

He needed me to do a poster for an event taking place in Dubai. The poster was part of a larger campaign also involving a website and flyers etc. The concept behind the campaign was based on the story of the genie in the lamp.
I was asked to the typography and the illustration and also provide some additional art-work for the website.

Here's the breakdown.
As always, I started with a nice bit of sketching. The artdirector had provided me with a very quick sketch to show me the basic idea and based on that I did some more detailed and realistic sketches for all the seperate items.


When this was approved I started working on an even more detailed pencil version of the thing. And from this I went straight to illustrator. In the work I am usually asked to do I would first ink the pencils and then color it in photoshop and/or illustrator. But this time it needed to be all quite straight and sort of cubist, so no need for nice flowy brush strokes.

This is the background, only a fragment of which is visible in the poster, but was needed for the website.


The artdirector was looking for the grainy texture which are characteristic for those old art deco prints. I would have like have achieved this by using scanned in textures made with charcoal or chalk pastels, but there wasn't really the time. So I administered some photoshop trickery which came close enough (click the pic for a larger view).


Then there was the typography. There aren't that many strong Art Deco inspired typefaces, but one very good one is the Duiker which incidently is designed by my friend Paul van der Laan of Type Invaders.

So that took care of the smaller type, but I wanted to draw something custom for the big eye-catcher "Dubai". It went through a few phases, I did a sketch and the idea was to have the lettering to move along with the shape of the top of the window. This in hindsight might nor have been the best of ideas, I have to admit. It sort of works, but not quite. De 'D' gets in the way and needs to have the strong vertical on the left (otherwise it looses to much legibility) so that makes it very hard to squeeze in the onion shape of the window.
And not trying to squeeze it in left the lettering somewhat out of balance... anyway this is what the lettering went through. If I would have to do it again I think I would not have tried to have the lettering to follow the window shape and just lay it on top of it, more independently. But again the time constraints...





And here's the finished result of the poster (click the pic for a closer look).

Corrections

A while ago I posted an animation on here that I did as a self promotional/educational piece. And as I wrote back then I was still to do some changes to the sound. Well I'm still working on (or better: "asked a friend to help me with..." ) an original score but I have added some sound effects.

And some anonymous eagle eye spotted a typo in there too, well it wasn't too hard to spot but he/she was the first to point it out to me. Thanks for that Anonymous.
Anyway it's all fixed now.



If there's no clip, please check back in later, it might not yet be verified by Youtube.

Bruce & me...and the man

I'm sorry if you got here expecting a post about the new Akzo Nobel logo and how it came to be.
Well it's not here anymore. I have been forced to take it off.
It's a very long story and way too boring to go into here, but involves the threat of legal action. I can't afford legal action.
So again I'm very sorry. Thanks for all the comments and thoughts and please come again.

I can refer you to the site of Saffron (who commissioned me for this job) they have some of my work showcased on their site.

Keeps coming back...

Some time ago I designed this poster. Which I then reproduced during a mimeograph workshop. That left me with about 50 posters (decent ones). When I hooked up with the nice people of Prints and the Revolution I decided to start selling them through their website.
This got noticed by the people at Boomerang. A company that distributes free postcards through bars and restaurants, forming a platform for little (or big) ideas and the inevitable advertisement.
So now the poster is available as a postcard for free at most Dutch bars etc.

For those of you reading this from outside of Holland and who would like a couple of cards too, let me know. Drop me an e-mail through my website (boltgraphics.com) and I'll send some over.



BOLT Propaganda

Click the little star and rate the thing at the Boomerang site... if you like.

Animated

For the last few weeks I've been doing quite a bit self commissioned work. In september my new and improved website will (should) go up online (SCOOP! SCOOP!!) and I want some new fresh work on there.

Especially the animation department is in need of some fresh meat. So I prepared some... here it is:



I used After Effects and Cinema 4D. And iMovie to put it to music.
I'm not yet happy with the music and it needs some sound effects, so that will change, but you get the idea.
Hope you like it.

Canvasses

As you could have read in the previous post, there are now two shows on in Amsterdam with some of my work in there. One has smaller drawings and the other has some of or rather all of my paintings... Two you already know about, but here's a sneaky peak at the other two.

They are sort of a couple because apart from being the same size and have similar style in images, in both I am sort of exploring the same techniques. I started with a background wash of two or three very transparent colors. Then I put on the drawing (using an overhead projector) again using transparent loose paint, mixing two colors. Then I partially detailed and worked through certain parts of the piece.

The goal was to get some dynamic or 'movement' and depth into the things using composition and color... I know it reads like some of that typical artsy-fartsy bullshit but that was the goal. Not sure if I really succeeded but they are a lot more interesting then what I did with some of the paintings that went before. It was a good learning process.

Here are the paintings. The shots are of about half way and the final result.






The show will be on untill the 3rd of July.

2 for 1

It's been a while since my last post, sorry about that, but my wife and I took a little trip. About which I will post more later.
This post is blatant self promotion... uhm wait every post is blatant self promotion I guess. But next week there will be two art shows that my work will be a part of.
The first one is the "Prints & the Revolution" show. It opens on the 19th of June. And I will show some old works ("the Clown" and "SCUM") and two new paintings I'll post about later too.
The other show is the "Garage Sale" opening on the 20th, and there I'll be showing a bunch of drawings. All new.

Here are the flyers with all the details. Hope I'll see you there.

Buy SCUM

Not the pond variaty, but the painting I finished a couple of weeks ago (scroll down for that post).
It's now for sale on through the online gallery run by Arne Toonen and Birgit Schuurman called "Prints and the Revolution". There you can also buy the "Paco" skateboard decks series I did last year and a little poster I did in whih I share my opinion with the world on US foreign and economic policy.

Right now I'm working on a few screen prints that will also be available on the site in a few weeks (if all goes well).

Go check it out, and don't forget to subscribe to their newsletter.

Sketches are drawings too...

As some of you (but only some) might have noticed, an illustration I did was published in the Dutch magazine Nieuwe Revu last week. It was a portrait of strong arm to Dutch crime boss Willem Enstra and somewhat ironically named Geurt Roos (for all you non-Dutchies his names sort of translates into Smells [like] Rose). I was asked to do the portrait because they only had a really bad photograph of the guy and they liked a portrait I had done of musician Pop Levi.
So I did a sketch for them to approve... and they came back with not only approval of the sketch but they wanted to actually use the sketch instead of a 'final inked version (like the Levi piece) because it fit the new style of their mag better.
It was a nice surprise, were it not for the fact that I had (somewhat over confident) already inked the thing... oh well. I cleaned the sketch up a bit, but it went in the magazine almost unchanged... Maybe I spend too much time on my sketches?
Here's the stuff I did for the mag plus a quick scan (unpolished) of the inks.

Done! No really... it's done.

I'm sorry. I just couldn't help myself. I know I said it was done before, but now it really, really is.
The thought that there was something still missing had been nagging at the back of my mind ever since I had declared the thing finished, but I kept dismissing it by telling myself I had to keep it simple.
So that gaping big yellow space kept staring me down and in the end I just gave in. "SCUM" was the name of the piece. I decided to make that more obvious. Adding a bit of depth as I went along.
Here's the result. Hope you like it.

Adi Dassler's

A while ago I was asked by 180 Amsterdam to hepl them out visualising an animation the were thinking about that gave a little insight into the man behind Adidas; Adi Dassler.
I spent a day with the talented creatives at 180 (Samuel Coleman and Dario Nucci) and after I had handed over my sketches I didn't really hear much about it. As it often goes in the advertising industry.
And then all of a sudden I bump into this on that world wide interweb thing.



It's great to see how it stayed so close to the orignal ideas, something the doesn't happen too often in said industry.
Here are the sketches I did.

Sketches

I don't what it is about buying and then using new stuff. A new pencil, a pen, sketchbook. It always makes me want to do new drawings, it's inspiritational in a weird way. Some people have the same thing with cleaning up their studio or their desk, I have it with buying new stuff... maybe that's my feminine side.
Anyway, new sketchbook, here are a few new sketches.
I like them because they're nice and loose. Hope you like them too.

Paint

It's been about a year in the making... maybe even more. And I am ashamed to admit it, but I thinkg it's still not quite finished yet.
It's damn near to it though! I did some more work on the painting I posted on before and I think it will take maybe 2 r 3 nore hours and then I'm going to leave the poor bastard alone.

older shot:


as it stands now:


Sorry for the quality of the pics being a bit wobbly... the colors in the second one is closest to the real world.

We're back...

...for now.
The site is back online. Fingers crossed it will stay there.

Great start...

For those who haven't noticed yet, my main website (boltgraphics.com) is down.
The guy who hosted it decided to take a vacation and forgot to pack his brain or something. He says he made a deal with another comany that they would keep his servers in check, but they say they don't know nothing about anything....
In the meantime I'm screwed. No e-mails, no website, no webstore, no nothing... wel there is this blog.
So please people, don't be alarmed. I'm still here, don't panic and sit tight, I'm working on it and will be back with you shortly.
Thank you for your patience....
Cheers,
Martijn

oh and a happy new year!!

Britannicus

A while ago I was asked to do a bit of art on an almost blank poster. As part of an art-project build around a run of performances of the play 'Britannicus'. The whole thing was thought up by my good friends, the Stone Twins.
The play is about Nero, the Roman emperor and also one of the most sadistic tyrants the world has ever seen. So the theme of the play (and the poster) was power... and the abuse there of.
See if you can find all the little hidden messages.

I did it all for the 'Nouky

Every once in a while you get a call from a potential client and from the very first words they utter you just know it's going to be a nightmare.... Especially when those words are:"Do you work on a 'no cure no pay' bases?"

This time it was EMI (remember them, from when you had to buy music from a shop). It concerned the artwork for the upcoming release by Anouk, one of Holland's biggest selling artists. They were obviously shopping around for cheap and eager designers. As it turned out the only two they were trying to snare were the guy who I share a studio space with (Shamrocking.com) and me. And unlucky for them we are neither cheap nor eager (not eager to work for the major music-industry anyway). To cut a long and for EMI somewhat embarassing story short, we decided to do it together (Shamrock took the job and I would help him out as he didn't have too much time).

HRH Anouk's manager (a nice guy, it has to be said) came by to tell us about the feel they were looking for. He was talking about religious (catholic-) imagery used in southern Californian and Mexican Latino cultures and we, quite entheusiastically, jumped in with all kind of ideas fo ourselves...

First priority was the artwork for the first single "Good God". EMI kept insisting we show them 5 different completely worked out proposals for them to pick and choose from... well we told them that that's just not the way we (or any other designer we know) work. So we gave them two proposals plus a presentation of collages (or mood-boards if you will) to show what kind of feel we had in mind for the rest of the campaign (album, posters, dvd etc.) Anyway this is what we did... keep in mind all this was of course on the tightest of deadlines.. (3 weeks ago).

This was Shamrock proposal for the single art...


This was mine...


And these were some of the collages for the rest of the campaign...





They picked my design and really liked the ideas we had for the rest of the stuff....
So I started on finalising the art-work for the single. The only thing they wanted me to change for the finals was the color of her face... I thought the silvery look was kinda cool (remeniscent of old silver statues in catholic prosessions), but they wanted her face to look as young as it could... (she is in her forties so I understand her insecurity).

Made the required ammendments, made the deadline, job's a good'un.


Or so I thought...
The day after the deadline. We get word from EMI (Shamrock had all the client contact go through his agent at this point because we didn't want to deal with the bullshit anymore): "She want's her hair to be more visible. Could I move the picture over a bit?" O...K.... I had to make the type a bit smaller for that too:


So that's surely it...isn't it? Oh no it ain't!
"Don't like the logo touching my face... and it's covering too much of my hood" This is seriously what she said.
Anyway (I was getting on my hourly rate by now, let me assure you):


And upon seeing this, HRH found those ornaments too distracting and why not take them out all together..
Well I stopped caring two versions ago so I just started the clock again...


So finally that was it... the bitch was happy and I was done. During all this she also decided that she wasn't going to (ab)use us for the other artwork. I didn't care really because these types of jobs give me flashback of the years I used to work for a boss and I hated those years...

So a few weeks go by and I start to wonder when this thing is finally going to be released upon the populace... so I checked her site and to my ashtonishment:


So here's a call to all budding young designers: Don't let them screw you around. They are used to people jumping at the chance to design something 'high-profile' and this is why record companies aren't used to paying decent fees. So make sure you do get paid right (which luckely I did) because it's not like they don't have the cash... they just don't want to spend it on you.... the bastards

Sketchbook exhibition

On de 2nd of November there will be an exhibition hosted by my agency Shop Around. They asked all the illustrators to scan some pages from their sketchbooks and send them in. They'll be printed and then shown at Kunstcafe Gommers.
I send in 5 scans, some of which have already featured on this blog.
Read the flyer below for more details. (if you can't read it... click the thing for a closer look...duh)

Shirts...

As my website and new corporate identity design is nearing completion, I'm also working on some new t-shirt design to accompany the beg launch of it all (no date set as of yet, but will be soon enough). And I know this isn't very professional, but I want to ask you, my trusty blog lurker, to help me pick the one that will be actually go to print and up for sale in my online shop.

I've got three different design for you to choose from. Just leave a comment and let me know which one you'd pick or wear or hate and (if you have the time) why...
I'll get you bastards to comment yet!.. or not... please...?

Anyway here you go.



Number one:


Number two:


And number three:


happy picking... and commenting.

Sketch-o-rama

Hey kids,
A quick post of a sketch I did in my sketch book.
Usually i start every fresh doodle on a blank page... and in the spirit of environmental awareness I thought I would stop that and fill the pages to the brim. I also dusted off my little watercolor compact and added some color this time, besides the usual red and blue.