Found: Brooklyn, Near Piers, November 2010

Found: Manhattan, Upper West Side, October 2010

I dug up this old advertising pamphlet in my mother’s basement and beyond the New York City connection, I was inspired by the retro artwork of 1960’s advertising (not to mention the cocktail culture which it was a part of).

A few other interesting notes:

• The Unisphere (which just underwent a $2 million dollar renovation) appears to be a registered trademark of United States Steel and copyright of the New York World’s Fair 1964-1965 Corporation. I never would have guessed that.
• The entire brochure is produced by Southern Comfort and is essentially a product tie-in for the World’s Fair event. For every category of cocktail in the brochure, they provide a Southern Comfort enhanced version. I guess some things never change.
• Strangely enough, I do take pride in how the pamphlet boasts of the skills of New York bartenders (or mixologists to use the modern vernacular). This has nothing to do with my sampling of the wares of said mixologists and more to do with my belief that NYC is the center of the universe.

Stay tuned for more 1960’s advertising dug up from my mother’s basement.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever get used to it. Every summer I end up working on projects that are promoting something for the winter holidays. The old phrase is “Christmas in July” and I never cease to find it weird. It may be 90+ degrees outside, but I find myself drawing snow.

Here’s some samples from this summer’s big winter project. They’re from a Sony PlayStation fourteen page booklet I designed and illustrated. I really like the way the cover came out and no one can resist Sackboy.

For an added bonus, one of the pages of the booklet got picked up in the gaming press and posted online — starting a huge debate (i.e., flame war) regarding Sony’s new motion controller.

Here’s a poster I’ve been drawing up for the upcoming holiday weekend. It’s about 90% complete, but I wanted to post a preview before the holiday. There’s still some minor tweaks to do, but I think it’s looking good. I’m thinking of using it as a foray into screen printing — actually working with a printer to get a limited edition run on a nice paper stock. The hard part will be pairing down the colors. I tried to keep it to four colors, but kept coming up with other ideas — and that was before I started working on the texture for the background. In any case, I think I get a version that is somewhere around 4-6 six colors for screen printing (although that’s still a lot). It’s 22″ x 28″.