THE THINGS YOU DO

This work was inspired by my desire to create a poster that featured the texture and bold text style of old newsprint advertisements. And I also wanted to include some of the pastel-style illustrations I’ve been creating lately. I’m really proud of the realistic texture I was able to recreate in the newsprint, with creases, ink stains and all. I’ve been getting kinda ill with digital brushes, if I do say so myself.

As this was just an experiment in texture, I plunged into this project without a plan, so the copy of the poster was derived by the song playing at the moment of its creation: a Dilla classic — 2U4U by Slum Village. The way the copy reads here in isolation is a little sinister sounding, but it’s really a very sexy song with an addictive beat. The accompanying images are only loosely related, but I liked their color scheme and the way they went with the vintage theme. (And the nature of art and the mind is such that the brain will create its own causal relationship to explain the relationship between images and words.) So I’m not worried — the meaning is up to the beholder.