Illustration Friday - Chicken

When I first saw the word for this week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge, which this week is "Chicken," I wasn't sure of what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I wanted to do something somewhat retro looking. My first sketch showed a chick with a worm in its mouth being chased by a mother hen while another chick comes running in from the side. For some reason I couldn't get the sketch to look the way I imagined it in my head, so I tried again. This time I decided to eliminate one of the chicks from the foreground and to have the hen and chick pursuing the worm (which I decided to turn into a caterpillar). By doing this, it allowed me to make the hen and caterpillar larger and therefore give me some space to show a facial expression on the caterpillar.

First Sketch

Revised Sketch

After I was happy with the sketch, I placed it into a new Adobe Illustrator file where I started to draw the basic color shapes (I could have done this in Painter, which I used for doing the sketch, but I don't like Painter's shape tool as well as I like Illustrator's).

To the left is the image after I traced the basic shapes in Illustrator. From here, I exported the file as a Photoshop file where I used a Mister Retro filter on the shapes to give them the appearance of a vintage print.  With Mister Retro you can make it look like the ink has been scuffed or even out of register.  You can also add halftone dots.

Once I finished adding the Mister Retro filter, I reopened the file in Painter where I used some of Painter's brushes to add in detail. If I knew more about Photoshop's brushes I could have finished the image in Photoshop, but I find Painter's brushes unbeatable when it comes to imitating chalks, pastels, conte crayon, watercolor and leaky pens.

To the right is the image after I started adding some details in Painter.

At this point, I was pretty happy with the image and could have called it quits, but then another idea struck me. While working on this image I had come across an old card game from my childhood. It was a card game based on the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show. I have always loved the graphics on card games from the 1960s so I decided to try and make my image look like a vintage children's playing card. That was my first idea anyway.  As I continued to work on the image, I began to think that it might be even better if I tried to duplicate the look of an old card game box.

Here is the original box from the Bullwinkle card game.  I scanned this box and then removed the illustration in Photoshop so that I would have a blank background to work with.

Image with the layer mode set to Darken

I pasted my image of the chicken over the blank box and scaled it to fit. I changed the layer mode to darken, which made the image somewhat transparent allowing the textures from the box to show through. But because this also made the colors too dark, I decided to duplicate the chicken layer and to place the new layer under this original layer.  I changed the layer mode on the new layer to screen.  This caused the colors on this layer to brighten almost to the point of looking washed out, but when viewed through the layer above it, it made the colors look just right. 

Image with layer mode set to Screen and the above Darken layer turned off

Image with both the Darken layer and the Screen layer visible

The last step was adding in the text.  I decided to call my fictional game "Who's Got the Worm?" because that sounded to me like the name of a children's card game. After trying a few fonts, I ended up using one called Saddlebag.  I played around with distorting it a bit, being careful not to make it look like a computer distortion (I wanted this to look vintage after all).  Once I got the letters to look the way that I wanted, I duplicated the text layer.  With the lower of the two text layers, I rasterized the type, selected it and then expanded the selection by 20 pixels.  Then I added a red stroke to the outside edge of the selection.  By expanding the selection it gave the stroke some distance from the original text on the layer above, so it looked like an outline that was drawn around, but not touching the original lettering.  I then ran the text through a Mister Retro filter to give it the scuffed, vintage printed look that I had given the illustration and then lowered the opacity a bit so that some of the texture of the box showed through.

Hoarding and Vintage Valentines

Members of my family have a history of holding on to things from their past, myself included.  Over the Christmas holidays, I had an opportunity to watch 'Hoarders,' that new reality program that looks at people who have a compulsion to save every thing.  As I watched in horror as clean-up crews uncovered dead animals under mountain high piles of trash, I told myself, "I'll never let myself get like that," and "I'm going to start throwing things out as soon as I get home," (we were in Omaha visiting Mark's family at the time) but here I am two months later and I still haven't begun to go through things or thrown anything out.  Now, don't get the wrong idea, we don't have mountains of trash littering our home, but our dining table does tend to get covered with junk mail that sits around for weeks and right now, as I sit in my small office, I am surrounded by piles of books, magazines, bills and receipts, CDs, DVDs, small boxes of miscellanea, old padded envelopes (that I intend to reuse) and . . . well, I think you get the idea - there is a lot of stuff.

If my father had lived alone, without the influence of my mother, I think he could have turned into a first-class hoarder.  I don't remember a time, during all of the years that I lived at home when we were able to park a car in our garage.  The reason? My father had filled it with stuff, from floor to ceiling, front to back, side to side (see the above photos).

I had planned this entry to be about vintage Valentines and I've gotten off track.  The reason that I started off talking about hoarding and saving old stuff is for the simple reason that I wouldn't have the following examples to show you if I hadn't held on to parts of my past.  Some of the cards shown below, may have even been found in some of the boxes stored in the above mentioned garage.

I have fond memories of how Valentine's Day was celebrated in our classroom when I was in the early years of elementary school.  You brought an empty brown paper lunch sack to school on that day.  At some point during the day, the teacher would take a break from regular classwork and tell us to put our empty sacks on our desk.  Then all of the students were allowed to get up from their seats and drop Valentines in to the bags of their classmates.  As I recall, it was a free-for-all, kids going up and down the aisles searching out the desks of their intended Valentines.  After all the cards had been given out, you were allowed a few minutes to look at the cards that had been put in your bag.  Of course, now when I look back at this practice, I realize that there were probably some kids who received very few cards in their bags and may have gone home feeling sad.  Not that I received tons, but lets just say that I was always satisfied with what I received.  I remember there were always a few kids in class who gave every one cards, and there were others like myself who, as I recall, only gave cards to the classmates that I really liked (or had secret crushes on).  I think one reason that I had to be selective was that my mother would only buy one package of Valentines for us to give out and that one package had to be split between myself and my brother and sister.  So I chose carefully who I would take aim at with my cupid's arrow.

Okay, that brings me to the Valentines themselves. There are some things that I think most people would probably agree were actually better in the good old days.  I think Valentines made for children are one of those things that were better in days gone by.  Today, if you look for Valentines for kids (and I'm speaking of packaged cards, not the individual Hallmark type of greeting card) all you will find are boxes of small rectangular cards with perforated edges that have popular characters on them - Spongebob, Batman, Disney Princesses, etc.  There are no longer any die-cut cards cut in the shapes of the animals they depict.  Gone are the cards depicting two anthropomorphized hot dogs holding hands (some people may think that is a good thing), no cute little monkeys in sailor suits riding very big bananas (get your mind out of the gutter), no ducks in hats, dazed bears or happy peacocks.  As far as packages of cards go, I haven't seen any that aren't tied into some sort of merchandising for a brand (Nickelodeon, Disney, DC Comics, Marvel).  Now I have nothing against using popular characters on Valentine cards, I actually find that phenomenon to be a fascinating part of pop culture, just like I find Christmas wrapping paper depicting Spiderman wearing a Santa's hat to be an interesting slice of American culture at this moment in time.  Later this week, I will share some of my contemporary kids' Valentines depicting merchandized characters, but for now, I hope you enjoy these vintage cards.

All of these cards were given to me when I was in elementary school, so they are at least 45 years old.  I'm 55 now and I think most of these cards were given to me during my first three years of school.

You can click on each of these cards to see them slightly larger.

and my personal favorite - 

What child wouldn't want to become a vegetarian after receiving this card?