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My weblog ELECTRON BLUE, which concentrated on science and mathematics, ran from 2004-2008. This weblog, which is more art-oriented, is its successor. Please visit the archives of ELECTRON BLUE using the link to the right.

Thu, 19 Feb, 2009

Jazzy Graphics

Here's an interesting project which is quite unlike what I usually do. A longtime friend of my family from Massachusetts loves jazz. He plays the saxophone and jams with other jazz-loving friends. Over the years he has commissioned me to do a number of interesting artworks, often with text incorporated into them. The latest of these commissions is a graphic "illumination" of a verbal riff he wrote about jazz itself. Though he expected it to be done in hand-drawn calligraphy, I decided that it should be done digitally, with all the entertaining resources that Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS2 could provide. Here are the two pages of the illuminated text, each of them done in CS2 with clip art, photocollage and typeface elements. One note of information: Adolphe Sax (1814-1894) was the inventor of the saxophone.


And here is page 2. Each of these is about 8.5" x 11", the size of an ordinary sheet of paper, so that it could be printed in a folio form if requested.


So far I haven't heard back from the client, though I sent him printouts more than a week ago. Perhaps this isn't what he was looking for. It's hard to convince some people that work done in a digital medium is really "art." They are still looking for hand done calligraphy. But I assure anyone who looks at this, that this kind of visualization took a lot of work, perhaps as many hours as it would have taken to do handwriting and collage. I think it came out well, if no one else does. Illustrator and Photoshop are not the easiest programs to work with.

Posted at 8:30 pm | link