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.