Art | I am Graeme McMillan's Blog

Mar

That Goes In There, And That Goes In There

I can’t remember why I started carrying a sketchbook around with me everywhere.

This was the year after I’d finished art school – or, at least, studying in art school; I stayed for another couple of years to teach, on and off, but that’s another story – so it had nothing to do with impressing professors or trying to make a grade. And, to be honest, it’s not as if the sketchbooks were all about drawing, anyway. I was already getting disillusioned about that, in my young, jaded ways, and the majority of each book was writing: Notes, quotes, weird scribblings that were never meant to be seen by anyone else but read like mutated beat poetry nonetheless.

It went on for… a couple of years, maybe? But the height was 1999, when I decided with the zeal that only bad ideas bring that I would write at least one page a day, and draw quick, observational studies everytime I was out in public on my own. Again, I have no idea why this seemed like a good idea (The latter part, admittedly, may stem from my love of Dave McKean’s Cages, a comic about creativity that at times makes the idea of sketching in public if not quite a noble calling, then at least an agreeable pastime), but there it was. And so, for a year, I did just that: Recording the minutiae and detritus of my life in scrawls and scratches of people on buses I took, airports I waited in, details of parties and painted fingernails and loves longed for and lost.

I drifted away from all of this when I started blogging; there is only so much writing I could manage about myself without being so self-indulgent that I annoyed even myself, after all. But there are times when I think I should still have a sketchbook and pen on hand at all times, just in case my peoplewatching in coffee shops gets out of hand.

Mar

Distraction Nostalgia

As a distraction from everything that’s been going on recently, I spent part of yesterday scanning old sketchbook pages from my art school days. Here’re some of the few I wasn’t so horrifically embarrassed about that I immediately pretended that they didn’t exist:

One of the odd things about going through the sketchbooks was finding things that I had no memory or explanation for; this page above looks like it’s something I drew from observation, but I have no idea where it could’ve been, and if I made it up, I have no idea what it could’ve meant: what’s with the child’s bike? Why the off-kilter angle? What’s with the Elastica poster? Well, okay, I can explain that last one: I drew this around the time the album was released, and I had become obsessed with it, listening to it non-stop. But everything else? I have no idea.

Another non-observation one, but I know where this all came from: It’s Rachel, from our Paris vacation on the Christmas following my 21st birthday. I don’t remember taking my sketchbook on that trip, though, so I’m guessing that this may have been done from memory, soon afterwards. This style of drawing was one that upset a lot of my teachers at the time, because they thought it was too scratchy and made it look like I didn’t know what I was doing (They were wrong).

I love the colors in this, self-importantly. Ignoring the impossible positioning inside the car – Seriously, how did they get in that position? – what this reminds me of is my love of the phrase “kissing in cars,” which for awhile was one of things that kept appearing in various places for awhile. “Kissing in cars” came, I think, from a song lyric that I can’t remember anymore, but I have no idea why I glommed onto it the way that I did… I blame my girlfriend at the time, and that which happened at the end of many evenings out. Ah, those were the days, apparently; who could be surprised it showed up in my work?

For the masochists amongst you, there’re more of the images here.

Feb

Seeing The Unseen

Back when I was at art school, I lived in sketchbooks more than my “finished” work; I found it easier and more comfortable to work out ideas there, leave things unfinished and mistakes visible, for some reason. Maybe that’s why I’m always obsessed with the chance to see the sketchbooks of professional artists whose work that I love. And, with work like this, who can blame me?

James Jean:

Kent Williams:

Suddenly I want to draw again.

Nov

Look What You’re Doing

Apropos of a Twitter conversation with io9’s Julia Caruso, I found myself remembering the covers for Pulp’s This Is Hardcore singles the other day; the Chip Kidd-esque split images, the unsettlingly intimate photography (which gained a new meaning from the title of the single) and the sobriety of the type (with the band’s name only visible in relief, which I always thought was a nice touch, as if they were disappearing, somehow). This got to me to remembering how much pop music design influenced all my graphic design loves and choices when I was in art school, the way that it seemed to feed into what I wanted to make and, at its best, somehow be exactly what I was into at the time I was into it.

The best example of this for me was Styrolouge’s designs for Britpop also-rans Menswear, whose singles were things of beauty, as superficial and surface and empty as the band’s music – and I say this as a fan, as someone who thinks that they were an amazing and amazingly underrated pop band – but just incredible pieces of design:

The economy of the logo, the hidden type on the side of the image… Gorgeous stuff. Each of the singles from the first album looked like this, an image on a white background, with the logo placed over it, and the title of the single on the top left hand side below boxes, color-coded for each release. “Being Brave” was different, in that the logo was actually printed on the sleeve; for “I’ll Manage Somehow,” “Daydreamer” and “Sleeping In,” the logo was printed on the CD case itself, making the images clean on the sleeve underneath, which the graphic design student in me loved:

(There was also the “Stardust” single, which had the logo printed on the sleeve in silver, fittingly for a song about superficial fuckers, but I couldn’t Google up a decent image of it.)

This was – and in many ways, still is – an example of perfect, ideal design for me. I fetishized these singles, more for the way they looked than the way they sounded (Again, fittingly for a band known more for being made up of former models than anything else). The album, when it came out, had a disappointing cover that deviated from this format and seemed ugly and pointless because of it, and in some ways it broke up my love affair with pop music graphic design until Julian House came along and did everything Primal Scream starting with Vanishing Point. Oh, other people could do smart, attractive covers – See Peter Saville’s “This Is Hardcore” covers above – but it took House’s retro clutter to make me feel like someone was designing just for me again.

Good design is like good pop music. You take it personally, and think someone understands. For awhile, Menswear and Styrolouge made me understand that, and for awhile, they made me a better designer.

(And then I walked away and became a writer. But that’s another series of stories altogether.)

Nov

The Out Is Classic Design

Turns out the platonic ideal of 1950s pulp covers are the work of a man called Mitchell Hooks. Who knew? Well, these guys, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that we can all now join together in wishing that books still looked as awesome as this. Just look at the typography, even if you don’t dig the illustrations (Although, if you don’t, then you’re insane).

(Seriously, this is the kind of thing that the covers to Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips’ Criminal aspire to already, but I’d love to see many other comics manage this kind of design playfulness. Is that just me?)

Oct

Visual Stylings

A variation on Stuart Immonen’s Marvel 70th Anniversary Covers meme, only this time with two DC Comics dated October 1974 – the month of my birth – and using photos I happened to have on my iPhone.

Original:

Redone:

Original (and, by the way, holy shit that this came out dated October 1974):

Redone:

I still love that cover line for OMAC.

Oct

:P :S ;)

I’ve been thinking about emoticons, recently. But not in the way that we think of them now, but remembering when they were new and, if not exciting, then at least odd and unusual enough to be interesting. For example, I have fond(-ish) memories of Ben and Jason’s 1999 album Emoticons, which capitalized on the then emerging trend with this cover:

And if you think that title has aged badly, you should check out songs like “LOL (Means Laughing Out Loud)” and “I Can Haz Chronologically Challenged Referenz?”.*

(* – This is, of course, not true. Instead, they did gentle and inoffensive pop songs like this.)

But it’s odd; I use emoticons myself, and kind of hate myself for it – I don’t really like them, you see, but I use them non-ironically nonetheless, somehow – but I can still remember when they seemed smart and clever uses of typography much in the same way that typing 07734 and turning the calculator upside down was so exciting as a kid. i-D Magazine, with its logo turned on the side so that it looked like a winking face (the cover of each issue featuring someone recreating the pose to varying degrees of success), was the zenith of hipster Britain media for years, and that logo was part of it. It genuinely seemed smart, at the time (It launched in 1980), like someone had found a new way to communicate an idea at odds with language itself.

Nowadays, the idea seems… what? Boring? Twee? Both? Probably, and those are fair takes on the idea, and also fair fates for what seemed such a new and fresh idea almost 30 years ago. But just realizing that, thinking about how an idea I remember being stylish and interesting at one time has become so devalued and… beyond mainstream, makes me feel at once both old and ridiculously happy about how easily graphic design can seep into the real world and become something else.

Sep

Knowing Is Half The Battle

Despite being of non-American origin and pretty-much pacifist insofar as I’ve really thought through the use of military might and armed conflict, I have this strange love for GI Joe that I’m not entirely sure that I fully understand. I discovered the franchise when I was eleven years old, perhaps, or twelve, when it was (re)launched in the UK as Action Force (“GI” being a particularly American concept, you see, but “Action” apparently being a universal language). I’m not sure whether I saw the toys or the comic first, but it was definitely the first comic – reprinted as a back-up strip in the British Transformers comic – that really grabbed my attention. I can remember it now in vague, idealized terms: Larry Hama and Rod Whigham writing and drawing and the story being something that involved motorbikes and Lady Jaye and a bald villain called Dr. Mindbender and some kind of mutated plants. It was kind of like a superhero comic, kind of like Star Wars (Robotic drone soldiers! Pulpy, over the top dialogue!), and kind of unlike anything else I’d read at the time. I was hooked.

But only slightly hooked, it seemed. I only read the Action Force comic that followed for awhile; it was full of lazy British attempts to copy the (superior, even to me back then) American stories and I soon gave up, convinced that a comic based on a toy wasn’t the sort of thing a nearly-teenaged boy should be reading, even if I secretly wanted all the toys (Zartan changed color when you put him in sunlight! Even now, that seems pretty awesome to think about, even if it was less the promised camouflage and more “Oh, he’s turned blue”). This was the same logic that led me to dump my Transformers addiction, although that was helped by Transformers having become an impossible-to-read mess by that time.

That said, my love affair with the toy incarnation of the military industrial may have been short but it’s turned out to be surprisingly long-lasting. I mean, it’s not like I’ve ended up going back and buying all (or, indeed, any) of the toys or rabidly buying up back issues of the comic, but there’s still something about the idea of GI Joe that appeals to me; I remember the few stories from the American comic that I read as classics from my childhood, and the characters as some untouchable, uncriticizable ideals that nothing new could ever live up to. I have no doubt that neither of these beliefs are actually true, and have stayed away from newer versions of the franchise for fear of disappointment, but still; even now, I secretly think that Destro and Cobra Commander are some of the greatest fictional villains to ever be created, up there with Darth Vader and Doctor Doom.

What can I say? Apparently guys in masks seemed extra evil when I was a kid.

I write this because beside my bed there lies an unread copy of Classic GI Joe Volume 2 from the local library, picked up in a moment of “What’s this? Oh, wow! Remember this?” nostalgia, but untouched since it got home. It lies there like a reminder that sometimes you can’t go home again, and shouldn’t even try, especially when “home” is a romanticized world of toyetic hijinks that never really existed in the first place. I want to read it and love it for what it was as much as what it is, but I’m convinced that it’ll let me down. So this is me apologizing to my child self for the disillusionment that I’m about to go through… but, really. You brought it on yourself.

Sep

In My Life, I’ve Been Them All

As I finished up my bachelors’ degree in art school – What you Americans call “undergrad,” I think? – I started to keep a comic diary; this was when I was (a) very into the self-mythologizing, and (b) also feeling very disconnected from everything that was happening in my life apart from school, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. I scanned some in, years ago, thinking I could put them online but never got around to it… Until now. Here’re three of them, to celebrate the mundanity and hair I had in my life back then.

Looking at them now, what’s funny isn’t how much they remind me of that time in my life, but how obvious the Eddie Campbell and Dave McKean influences are to me. The first one, in particular, makes me kind of ashamed, it’s so blatant.

(Strange but true: The “Ring, fucker.” panel from the third one? That was the image on the business cards I gave out at my BA degree show.)

Aug

Because Stuart Immonen Demanded It!

So, artist, designer and all-round good guy Stuart Immonen came up with this unexpected way to celebrate Marvel Comics’ 70th anniversary:

Here’s the deal. Remember the Typophile Album Cover Meme? This is much like that, requiring you to re-imagine a Marvel Comics cover from the last 70 years as an actual contemporary novel cover. Follow the steps below, and post the results on your own site or forum:

1) Click this link for a list of Marvel publications from a random month and year at Wikia.com (Link removed because I don’t understand Javascript and couldn’t make it work. Go read the original entry on Immonen.ca). Choose the 7th cover (if there are fewer than 7, choose the last one).

2) Search for the first word appearing on the cover that jumps out at you (this may be the title itself) on Flickr. Select the 7th (or last) image (as with the album cover meme, it’s best to select an image with Creative Commons rights released.

3) Use your favourite image manipulation app to create a new 6×9 image, incorporating the original title (and as much other original text as you like) and the new image.

4) Share!

Happy 70th Marvel Comics.

My year, 1954. My cover?

My revision: