Illustration Friday - "Yesterday"

Click illustration to see it larger

As someone who has a hard time of letting go of his past, I’ve often associated the word “yesterday” with a feeling of nostalgia. I especially get nostalgic for my childhood, a time when I was closer to my sister and lived in a home where I felt safe and secure. I didn’t come from a perfect family, we definitely had our dysfunctional problems but I won’t go into those problems here. Despite our dysfunctions, I felt cared for and loved by my parents and even when I was younger, I think I knew they were spoiling my brother, sister and me.  

I was sick a lot as a child and because of this I missed a lot of school. My bedroom became my refuge and safe haven. I was a shy and inhibited child, afraid of much of the real world and my room, with all of its books and toys, became the only place where I felt safe and secure. I remember thinking that I would be perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life in my room. 

For this week’s Illustration Friday challenge, I’ve drawn an affectionate portrait of the way I remember my room.  It represents ‘yesterday’ to me because I often feel as if my childhood in that room took place only yesterday. I find it hard to believe that it’s been over 40 years since I could legally be considered a child. It really does seem like yesterday that I was curled up on my childhood bed and reading the Oz and Narnia books.

I’ve tried to include a number of things that were actually in my room at one time or another. I always had a lot of stuffed animals and dolls on my bed, a few of which I’ve shown in the drawing, including a Raggedy Ann doll, a plush green snake, a large dalmatian, several bunny rabbits and a teddy bear.  Above the bed, sitting on the headboard is a large papier mache cheetah that I made when I was 11 or 12.  On my walls I had thumb-tacked several posters, including a reproduction of a 1920s poster for  “The Thief of Bagdad,” starring Douglas Fairbanks (shown on the wall behind the cheetah). I remember I also had a poster showing a ruined castle in Ireland (you can see a portion of it on the right edge of my illustration).  The floor was made up of linoleum tiles in various shades of speckled browns and tans.  For awhile I had a large, oval braided rug that took up most of the floor space.  At the base of my bed I remember having a decorative green cardboard box that had a flowered lid. There were often newspapers stacked on this box because for a while I used to cut out and save the ads for my favorite movies.  The curtains on my window were beige and patterned with green, blue and tan representations of colonial shop labels and broadsheets. My room faced our backyard and from my window I could look out on to our backyard with its oval swimming pool and the brown mountain that rose up a block away from our property.

Even after I moved away from home in the late 1970s, my parents continued to live in this house so I often returned for visits.  Some time in the mid to late 1980s disaster struck my room in the form of a busted water heater which was in a service porch behind my bed. When the water heater broke, it flooded my bedroom, damaging many of my record albums and anything else I had stored on the floor. The linoleum was also damaged and had to be replaced. After this disaster, many of my things were put in storage and moved to other parts of the house. From that time on, my room never felt the same again. It no longer looked, or felt, like the room I had grown up in. 

I created the illustration using Painter 12's "Real" watercolor brushes and a customized "Pen" brush.

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.

Toys That Remind Me of My Childhood Part 2

As much as I try and keep this blog to the subject of illustration and favorite illustrators, I tend at times to drift into areas of nostalgia, in particular, nostalgia for my childhood. But even when I'm indulging in nostalgia, I try and have a link to something illustrated. In this posting, I'm going to share another toy from my childhood, that is if you can count a card game as a toy (since the back of each card has a small logo on it that says "A Built Rite Toy," I guess I'll let that be my confirmation that they are toys). 

I have three old card games from my childhood that were based around cartoon or comic strip characters. In this posting I will show you the cards based on the Harvey cartoon characters.

The Harvey cartoon characters that we all know and love, the most well known of which is Casper the Friendly Ghost, have a rather convoluted background.  Casper (who is not represented in this card game) was a cartoon character developed in 1945 by Famous Studios (which itself came into being after Paramount absorbed the Fleischer brothers' debt-ridden studio).  In 1951, Harvey Comics, who was already licensing newspaper comic strip characters like Dick Tracy, licensed Famous Studios' cartoon characters, including Casper.  At the same time they began releasing comic books with characters that they had created (Wendy the Good Little Witch, Little Dot, Richie Rich, etc). In the late fifties, Harvey Comics stopped licensing the characters from Famous Studios and purchased all rights to them. In 1963 they started producing their own cartoons, the "Harveytoons," that I'm sure many of you baby boomers remember from your childhoods. (Thanks to Don Markstein's Toonopedia website for this background information).

I don't know the individual histories of the characters represented on these cards or even when these cards were manufactured (there is no date or copyright marked anywhere that I could see). I suspect they are from around 1963 or 1964. I believe that Wendy the Good Little Witch, Spooky, Nightmare and the Ghostly Trio were all spinoffs from the Casper series.  I have strong memories of seeing all of these supernatural characters in either cartoons or in comic books.  I have vague memories of cartoons starting Inchy and Wolfie, but I have no memory of Pedro or Little Feather.  Wily Fox, Moe Hare and Tommy Tortoise are so generic that if I remember them at all, I may be confusing them with similar characters created by other studios (what studio didn't create their own version of the Tortoise and the Hare story?).

It would have been great if the backside of the cards depicted a grouping of the Harvey characters, but instead we have a group of generic funny animals and goofy people. In closing, I'll mention a few things about the cards that I love - Besides the great artwork of these once famous characters, I love the wavy edge of each card, which according to the box top, was designed to more easily fit the hand, making them easier to hold. I also love the box itself which has a clamshell opening design, which is much sturdier than the other card game boxes I have where the flaps have torn and in some cases gone missing.

I hope seeing these cards, have jogged a few memories for some of you.  For those of you new to the Harvey characters, I hope you have found this interesting and will be curious enough to seek out their old comics or to read them in their newly released archive collections being put out by Dark Horse comics.