Holiday present: A.M. Cassandre Photoshop Airbrush Tutorial

A reader wrote to me today to find out more about how the airbrush effects were achieved in the Gallatin “Listening to Wine” poster design. The design had been based on the feel of many wonderful posters by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, whose dramatic shading effects defined an era of 20th century advertising posters. As a holiday present to all who may stumble upon this post, here’s a quick and dirty tutorial to help you experiment with the stippled airbrush texture effect made possible by Photoshop’s dissolve blending mode:

1. Start with a new Photoshop document, with a blank white layer as the background.
2. Create a new transparent layer on which you will use your “airbrush.” (It’s a best practice to create layers instead of destructively airbrushing directly on the background.)
3. On the new, transparent layer, create a circular selection using the Elliptical Marquee tool.
4. On the Layers palette, click the “Add layer mask” button (looks like a shaded rectangle with a white circle inside). This will create a layer mask from your circular selection, allowing you to work on the layer without having to worry about losing the original selection shape.
5. Click on the Layer 1 thumbnail to make sure that the layer itself is selected and not the layer mask. It’s sometimes difficult to tell which is currently “active.”
6. Select the Brush tool from the tool bar (or press “B” on your keyboard).
7. From the Brush palette, select a brush that is soft, round, and large. The exact size will depend on the application, but you can use the [ and ] keys on your keyboard to scale the brush up or down while you’re using it.
8. Also from the Brush palette, use the Mode drop-down menu to change the brush’s blending mode to Dissolve.
9. Make sure that the Foreground Color is set to something other than white (black is a great color to practice with), and then click and drag your brush tool across the canvas. You should see a speckled effect on the feathered edges of the brush. If you were using the “Normal” blending mode instead of dissolve, the feathered edges would be soft and clean and would lack the texture that “Dissolve” offers.
10. You can vary the effect by changing the brush size and also by altering the Brush palette’s Opacity or Flow settings. Experiment in order to find the effect that works best for your application.
11. Use additional layers and layer masks just as you would use vellum and stencils in the real world. Layer mask “stencils” help to define the boundaries of the shading effect, but the brush itself defines the look. Another advantage to using layer masks, rather than simple selections, is that the “overspray” is accessible if the mask needs to be moved at any point in the future. It’s like having a stencil that can travel through time!

Tags: 1930s, A.M. Cassandre, font, Mostra, paper, poster, retro, technique, tutorial, typeface, typography, vintage

Josh & Alyssa Wedding “Save the Date” Postcard

[View with PicLens]

 

My fiancée Alyssa and I are not typical when it comes to our wedding planning. For one thing, we’re getting married at an unconventional venue, the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Moreover, we both work in design, and there’s no chance in heck that we’d buy any prepackaged save-the-dates or invitations. No sir. So we’ve spent the better part of the year planning out how our wedding will look, from the décor to the communications, and the first component of this gigantic undertaking is the “Save the Date” postcard that you see before you.

Original photographs that became our silhouettes (Photo by Sakura Koontz)

We want our wedding to feel like a party. Not just any party, mind you; more like a 1960s-concert-in-the-park-meets-prehistoric-hipster-safari. Or something like that. We’ve been scouting inspiration from far and wide, and one of the first ideas that hit us was to create a “gig poster” or a vintage-style handbill to inform our potential guests of the basic logistics in advance of the invitation. I’ve designed a whole bunch of save-the-date postcards for Gallatin at NYU (as you can see on the portfolio), but this was obviously a lot more personal. We decided it would be an adventure to silkscreen the invitations ourselves using the “split fountain” technique. It was a popular method of decoration for old concert or boxing posters, but it was usually used in the background to create a bright, colorful gradient on which black type would be set and printed on a letterpress. To stick with the theme, I used a combination of different type and lettering styles, some of which mimic the rough letterpress style of printers like Hatch Show Print in Nashville and Colby Poster Printing Co. here in Los Angeles. Other lettering comes from House’s Photo-Lettering site, such as the “Save the Date” script at the top. We referenced old show prints as well as movie posters (for the “Dino Vision” logo, a pretty blatant rip of the Cinerama logo and the Sinclair dinosaur mark. For the central silhouette illustration, we combined vector traces of two photographs taken by our good friend Sakura Koontz.

The process was remarkably smooth. We’d both done some screenprinting on t-shirts before, but neither of us had any hands-on experience with serigraphy on paper. The stock we chose is French Paper’s Mod-Tone in gray, which comes with a pre-printed pattern. We designed the card to be printed without bleed, 2-up on an 8.5″ by 11″ letter-sized page, allowing us to make a very simple cut and end up with a finished product. (We printed the back side on the cheap using inkjet). Using a Photoshop mockup of the design, we determined that Pantone Orange and Rubine Red would make a nice, yummy “Tequila Sunrise” gradient. Our comp wasn’t far off the mark, but the real-life result was far better than the digital version. Before we knew it, we’d printed up about 150 of them. The right side of the screen had some imperfections in the emulsion which led to some interesting artifacts, while the left side was nearly perfect. I think the variation between different prints is one of the beautiful and lively aspects of hand-printed serigraphs. So even though we sacrifice a bit of legibility, I think we’ve really hit the mark with our attempt at creating a vintage, imperfect look.

Tune in some months from now to see what we do with our invitation!

Tags: 1960s, font, French Paper, Hatch Show Print, lettering, mid-century, Photo-Lettering, postcard, printing, retro, screenprinting, serigraph, split fountain, technique, type, typeface, typography

Where the Wild Things Are Pinstripe Tribute

Where the Wild Things Are Pinstriping Art Tribute

Ever since we saw the Spike Jonze / Dave Eggers film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, my fiancée Alyssa and I have been a bit smitten. The exemplary, ultra-laid-back marketing campaign and the this-is-how-it-should-be-done film itself are a one-two punch of quality, so often lacking in mass-marketed entertainment. Right before we saw the film, we came across Terrible Yellow Eyes, a blog dedicated to Wild Things fan art, featuring loads of talented artists giving their visual perspective on the book / film. (You know the film has to be making huge waves if it’s generating this much inspiration.)

Alyssa's secondary variation

So over the past week or two we’ve been working on our own little contribution. Not sure whether or not it’ll get posted anywhere else, but we figure it should see the light of day one way or another. Besides the obvious reference (“Carol” from Where the Wild Things Are, we referenced hot rod pin striping art styles like those popularized by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.

In terms of our method: we were originally experimenting with Scriptographer, an amazing Adobe Illustrator plugin platform that allows for all sorts of scripted tools and filters. One of its scripts, reflector, allows the user to draw on one half of the artboard while the drawing is automatically reflected, in real-time, over the X-axis, Y-axis, or both. (Yes, for those Kustom Kulture purists out there, this is definitely cheating.) But in the end, Alyssa sketched out the final geometry with pencil on paper, and I scanned it in and vectorized it with bézier curves in Illustrator. There we added color, exported to Photoshop for some texture and experimentation, et voilà, out popped the finished design.

Tags: Adobe Illustrator, Alyssa Zukas, art, Dave Eggers, illustration, Maurice Sendak, movies, pinstripe, pinstriping, Scriptographer, Spike Jonze, technique, Where the Wild Things Are

Cosmographs update

After my recent post on harmonographs, I ponied up for a copy of the Photo-Lettering Alphabet Thesaurus, Volume 2. And now that I can read the book in “full resolution,” I learned a bit more about these mysterious space drawings. The following is transcribed directly from the book:

The figures on the following pages are a unique graphic arts innovation. Photo-Lettering has picked the name “COSMOGRAPHS” to describe these intriguing, orbiting motifs. They represent a significant, modern art-form, for here is scientifically-produced art that unerringly reflects the pitch and flux of this electronic era…free forms unencumbered by traditional patterns…designs with internal momentum capable of exercising a subliminal influence. These are not superficial ornaments; they possess a visual harmony with an enchantment that sets a dominant mood or tone.

Cosmographs are the product of an invention by Edward Lias, physicist in sound. They are visual records of patterns produced by interfering sound waves. Each figure represents a harmonious musical chord or triad. The adjustment of tonalities to different ratios produces the varying formations. The potential of effects is limitless. Here science and art literally join hands in the unity and harmony of basic universal motions.

This introductory showing of cosmographs will no doubt suggest a variety of interesting and practical uses. The designs are available from Photo-Lettering Inc. in SpectraKrome color prints, or black and white glossies from reproduction…as shown or flopped over… positive or negative. Size should be measured on the longest dimension. Prices are adjusted to the intended use.

And later:

Cosmographs are useful for setting moods, attracting attention, decorating backgrounds, and adding distinction to printed matter. Some specific applications include record albums, book jackets, trademarks, letterheads, package designs, wallpaper, murals, displays, TV spots, etc. Also special uses in the areas of electronics, music, art, architecture, fashion, industry, etc.

I think the persuasive 1960s copywriting is almost as good as the designs themselves!

[View with PicLens]

 

Tags: 1950s, 1960s, font, harmonographs, lettering, math, mid-century, Photo-Lettering, retro, sci-fi, technique, typeface, typography, vintage

Harmonographs: Drawings of the Future

Harmonographs: Drawings of the Future

My path to discovering the world of “harmonographs” is slightly convoluted. It all began when House Industries announced that it would be digitizing and selling selections from the Photo-Lettering, Inc. type collection. Now, besides the fact that this will allow digital designers such as myself to take advantage of the analog type of yesteryear, House plans to sell the fonts in a more affordable way—one headline at a time. Just like Photo-Lettering did back some decades ago, House will allow designers to specify headlines for typesetting and then order only the glyphs that are necessary for the job. This keeps the cost to the designer/client down, and will hopefully stimulate volume sales. It’s revolutionary. I can’t wait.

House 3009 Catalog Cover

So how does this relate to harmonographs? Well, after hearing about House Industries’ plans, Grain Edit recently posted some photos of the Photo-Lettering, Inc. Alphabet Thesaurus, Volume 2. One page in the type specimen catalog includes these amazingly retro Spirograph-like images called “cosmographs.” I’d remembered seeing similar imagery gracing the cover of the House Industries “House 3009″ type catalog, in all its Space-Age glory. Also, when I recently visited House for their Tag Sale, I picked up a 12″ vinyl LP called “Fantastica: Music from Outer Space by Russ Garcia.” It too features a cosmograph-like image on the cover, again evocative of that whole 1950s/1960s film-and-television sci-fi zeitgeist.

So, Google to the rescue, and I came across Cosmographs.com; not a terribly functional or attractive site, but fascinating nonetheless. I put two and two together and saw that the site credits Edward J. Lias, the same fellow mentioned on the Cosmographs page of the Photo-Lettering catalog (“Recorded by Edward Lias”). Looks like I am on to something, I thought. I tried his email address to no avail; my message bounced. A Whois lookup of his domain name leads only to his hosting provider. Dead end—sigh. Wikipedia time! I looked up information on Spirographs, those fun pen-and-ink toys I used to play with in school, and as Wikiing often allows, I eventually found the harmonograph, another variant of a pendulum-like line graph¹ . Great, of course, but I wanted so badly just to be able to make them myself! Luckily, related links at the bottom sent me to subblue, an extraordinarily amazing site where one can actually create harmonographs (as well as guillochés, fractals, and mind-blowing M.C. Escher-esque graphics). The icing on the cake is that with a simple right-click and access to a PDF printer (I recommend CutePDF writer, by the way), the files can be saved, and voila. Vector harmonographs.

1. UPDATE: After acquiring my own copy of the Alphabet Thesaurus, Volume 2, I learned a bit more about “Cosmographs.” Check my newer post for more information. [↩]

Tags: 1950s, 1960s, fonts, harmonographs, House Industries, math, mid-century, Photo-Lettering, retro, sci-fi, technique, type, typography

Devin’s Debut

Gallatin Listening to Wine poster, first draft, straight out of Illustrator, and before Devin's Magic

For a recent NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study poster design, my brother Devin Korwin contributed his Wacom tablet skills and helped make a good poster design great. We were inspired by the gritty-yet-soft shading techniques used by advertising poster artists such as Adolphe Mouron Cassandre in the earlier half of the 20th century. After designing the layout, the illustration, and typesetting the copy (in Alternate Gothic and Mark Simonson’s Mostra), I handed my file over to Devin for him to add his artistic touch. The shading alone adds so much depth and interest to the design, but the aged paper texture puts the icing on the cake.

Whereas Cassandre must have got messy with stencils and airbrushes, we digital cheaters can achieve a pretty decent looking analog using Photoshop’s “dissolve” blending mode.*

I’m finding it really cool that I get to work with my brothers on occasion. My other brother, Zach, has been helping out with Wordpress sites, most recently including donzukas.com (which I still have to make a portfolio entry about!)

Tags: 1930s, A.M. Cassandre, font, Mostra, paper, poster, retro, technique, typeface, typography, vintage