Boy Meets Bob

It’s the late 70′s. A six-year old boy finds some Penthouse magazines in his neighbors trash and after reading a story about the infamous Penthouse photographer and publisher Bob Guccione, decides his mission in life is to be “Bob G.”, in spite of his parents’ attempts to point him down a more respectable career path.

This hilarious, touching short story is from the pen of Archer Adams, a writer from Montgomery, Alabama and is available on Amazon. If you like David Sedaris, Jean Shepherd, you’ll love Adams.

Pixels passing in the night

But this is also a story about how collaboration happens in the digital world. Adams was all set to design his own book cover and contacted Foolish Fire via email after finding downloadable chalkboard backgrounds on the FF site. Not being a designer, he offered to hire me to do some hand-lettering as one option for his cover but quickly realized that Sedaris had used the chalkboard motif for his highly recognizable book Me Talk Pretty One Day and nixed that idea.

So step one…I asked Archer to send me his story to mine for inspiration and he basically had me hooked like a fish farm trout from the first paragraph. By the end I’d laughed so hard I nearly had to re-upholster my Herman Miller. The story stirred up a riot of imagery and after some brainstorming and a quick negotiation, we arrived at the solution you see here, sorta chalkboard-y but not literally, leveraging the hand-lettering to retain the innocent quality of the narrative and incorporating this freakishly bang-on image of the kid with the camera (which ironically could have been me at that age). The whole process took a few days.

As it turned out the girl on the left was the hardest element to get right, requiring several iterations and copious “research” on vintage Penthouse models on my part, which also turned out to be a very interesting exercise in explaining stuff to my wife. Deftly handled by yours truly I might add, except for “the forgetting to take down the reference print outs I had taped to the walls” in a timely enough fashion.

Call me “old school” but doing random projects like this still brings me back to that first, naive, emotional experience of sitting up in my bedroom with my new, beige Power-Mac G-Series I’d just bought at Sears. I recall the exact moment like it was yesterday…signing onto the “World Wide Web” for the first time with a non-graphical user interface and within seconds chatting with someone in Australia about sailing, in real-time on a fledgling online community called “The Well”. I knew nothing about sailing but it didn’t matter. Almost 20 years later, I still experience a rush when these kinds of serendipitous connections happen and better yet when ones and zeroes beget pixels beget book covers.

Stay tuned for much more from Archer Adams.

I don’t often post work from my day job on Foolish Fire, preferring more illustrative pieces that contain hand lettering, but I thought for a change of tone I’d share this recent Danville Community Band concert poster.

For any design deets geeks out there, it was executed in Illustrator CS4, the font is Brandon Grotesque.

There I was minding my own business reading Mary Roach’s new book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, when during a chapter about digestive disorders she just casually mentions in a footnote that Hairball Awareness Day is rapidly approaching. In fact it’s every year on the last Friday of April. Who knew? By the way, (and you might want your kids to leave the room for this), did you know that humans can get hairballs, too? It’s called “Rapunsel Syndrome”, I kid you not. The rest is too disgusting for prime time interweb publication. Read Mary’s book.

So we have two cats, one of which, Eddy, gets a hairball about twice a week and although he’s dumb as a bag of hammers, he has refined his “delivery” with an uncanny, Cy Young award-winning, GPS guided accuracy so as to “deposit” his 6-inch mucous bombs exactly where I will inevitably walk. Love him dearly but seriously…I’m pretty “aware” of hairballs already, thank you. As are most cat owners.

But, being a fan of both obscure holidays and “awareness” in general, I just had to make a little poster in honor of this unfortunate (and sometimes serious) consequence of being both fur-bearing and a neurotic groomer, in other words, being a feline and/or George Michael. I know dogs get them, too, and again…some people, and again…eeewww, but cats got the evolutionary shaft on this one. So let’s cough up a little compassion for our feline buddies, even if it is a few days late.

A second love quote in the run up to Valentine’s Day. When I read this it initially struck me as tragic and dark, but it may also have a flip side—love does create space for the “other”, and often in filling that void makes the heart grows more full than before. Either way it speaks to me. Enjoy. Or not.

A favorite love quote by the Bard. In case anyone’s interested, here are some general details about how this piece was created. As most of my work these days tends to be, this piece involves working back and forth between hand lettering, Photoshop and Illustrator:

• First, the background and “smoke” shape was drawn as a vector shape in Illustrator and placed in the base Photoshop file. The whole thing was printed out and the shapes traced onto paper where the lettering would be drawn.
• The text was hand lettered by pencil, using the base shapes as a guide, then inked, scanned and opened in Photoshop where it was cleaned up a bit and the contrast increased with Levels, using the white and black set point “thermometers.”
• A copy was pasted onto a blank Illustrator document (the same size and resolution as the final piece) and Live Traced. Once the text was in vectors, a copy was pasted back into the base Photoshop file. More clean up.
• Once all text was in place, the final adjustments to text layers was made. This is always a case of playing with blending modes, transparency and color until the right look is achieved.
• The face shape was created separately in Illustrator and the filled shape pasted into the base Photoshop file. Shadowing and detail were added in subsequent layers.

Tip: If you like this kind of thing but you want to avoid the “totally from scratch” hand-lettering part, stay tuned for our next, free tutorial that involves setting text in Illustrator, Word, et al and tracing. A great way to get comfy with basic letterforms and give your creations a hand-lettered-ish look.

Skills used: pencil and ink drawing, layering, using blending modes, masking, scanning, cleaning up, lasso tool for selections. Resources used: Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4, vintage background textures collected from ephemera sites, Wacom tablet, flatbed scanner, #2 pencil and sharpener, various thicknesses of artist’s fine line ink pens. Time to complete: App. 6 hours.