Oscar Coloring

Oscar Poster, personal

Well, I missed my first Oscar telecast (I’ve seen every one since 1972), and I won’t even comment on the brouhaha that has arisen over a certain ‘slap’.

If you’ve been following along, I’ve been working on an ‘Oscar Coloring Book’ personal challenge, attempting to do a page of nominee caricatures for every year of the oscars, from 1929-2029. You can see more on the project as it evolves at this link. Today I started work on laying out 1937, and also finished up a ‘colorized’ version of one of the previous pages (just to see what kind of challenge would be involved in coloring one of these things). I did a bit of tweaking to Wallace Beery, also, since I wasn’t quite happy with the likeness on this one.

Oscars 1936

Oscar Poster, personal

This week I finished up my sketches for the “Who Was” book, and worked on other projects (see previous post), but in the spare hours of the day, I moved ahead on another of my ‘Oscar Coloring Pages’ (see this link for more details on this ongoing personal project). These pages are starting to get a little more complex as the calendar years advance, and we haven’t even gotten to the first year where they started awarding ‘Best Supporting’ categories. This year’s collection included 5 actors (which would eventually become the standard), 6 actresses, 4 directors and a whopping 12 nominees for best picture. I may have to do some creative arranging in future pages, as this becomes even more complex.

After some thought, and some dissatisfaction with the way I am treating the ‘list of nominations’ companion page, I have decided to try a different approach. A typographical ‘mish-mash’ is what I am currently leaning towards, as pictured below. Thinking that the person coloring the book would have more creative options for handling this sort of treatment.

Car Parts

Planted Media

Did some work this week for a new client, for a website / video presentation. This client wins the prize for geographic proximity, as he lives right next door. I wanted to try out a different style, and he was open to experimentation, opting for something simple and clean, yet still loose enough that it didn’t begin looking too sterile and mechanical. I was sort of picturing those old colorform toys that we used to play with as children, which was apt as the art would be saved in layers, so that various bits could be rearranged and recycled as needed, very much like the colorform experience.

A little TOO horrible…

Dover

Turns out a couple of my ‘Horror’ coloring book pages were just a little too horrible for the general public, so I was asked to revise them. The ‘Bluebeard’ page was completely redone (pictured above — I have to smile, as it was my favorite of the bunch, so there must be something dreadfully twisted and wrong about me — the curious can see the original ‘Bluebeard’ page here, and I may decide to color it and reuse it as a self promo piece, to drive away whatever future clients I may attract), and the ‘Damned Thing’ page was revised so that the gun was pointing in a different direction (see below).