Here is a new illustration that I’ve just finished for one of the projects I’ve been working in lately: a children’s book about monsters at home and how to not fear them. The working title is “Boos And Creaks” and it compiles a collection of illustrations and text about those annoying monsters that every kid fears and show up at any corner of the house. Every monster is being categorized and filed and I am also writing some suggestions and advices about how to deal with them and to not be scared about them anymore.

This particular creature is called “Amgonnaitya”: a monster that grows in fridges and pretends to swallow us whenever we open the door for food or for a drink. He is pretty pathetic because he doesn’t know there’s another silly monster living inside his mouth. I won’t tell much more about this so I don’t unveil the whole story about this pair.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take this project, probably several months to get it completed since this is a side personal project that I have to complete in my spare time. I hope to see it finished by the end of this year. By the way, I still don’t have a publisher for it so if you are one and you are interested, please contact me.

From the first moment I thought about building my own web site I decided I wanted to do everything as personal and customized as I could. Fonts are one of the most important aspects in web design and sadly the possibilities of customizing are very short because of impossibility of the browsers today to recognize a font that is not installed in the user’s computer. It is possible though to customize small portions of text with a technique that we’ve been using at Intuitive Designs for different web design projects. I have to say that I am not a professional font designer, although I have designed a few fonts before. I just thought it could be interesting to share the way I build my own web site, and this is another part of the process.

The first step to build my own customized font was to make a sample sheet with my own script, which I did using a special calligraphy pen that I’ like to use to write personal letters and special signatures. So I did several versions of each letter in the alphabet in order to have different options to pick. I did samples of all of them, including caps, as well as special punctuation signs that I may use and other symbols. Then I got them all scanned and did a selection on the computer.

Once I have all the sample letters selected I edited them one by one with a vector program, cleaned them and made them even. It is very important at this stage to use a geometric grid to compare all letters and made them even. Hand writing is not something really even: every letter in the paper is different, and it is great to keep this kind of sense of imperfection in the scripture in order to make it appear believable. In the other hand, it’s very important to keep a sense of balance and consistency between all the letters. Especially in terms of proportions and angle, or they would look like been written by different people.

After having all my individual letters clean, I put tested them by writing different combinations of vowels and consonants and see how they work together. This is a long process that requires to get them corrected again and again, especially the spacing between the letters. Another important aspect to keep in mind is how much vertical space the letters develop. Letters like T, L, J and G need a lot of care and attention so they won’t invade the upper and lower lines in the paragraph.

For building the font I particularly used Font Creator but there are other programs you may use to create fonts. I copied and pasted the letters from vector to this program and then got them adjusted and re-scaled.

Finally, when I got my font installed and full working, the next step was to make the font work in my web site. I have to say that my wife Naomi did this for me because she is the specialist in our design studio in these matters. Naomi used a script called sIFR that you can download and learn how to use at Mike Davidson’s sIFR. Basically, it works by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. The guys who developed it did a wonderful contribution to the web design for sure!

So, that’s pretty much how it looks, all you can see in the menu and headings in the web site are not images but actually html that is fully recognized by search engines. Pretty cool! And the most important, for me, is to be able to have my own signature and my own personality in my web site. Like a real footprint. After all, I think if more artists and designers would customize more their web sites the Internet would be a more exciting and personal place. The whole process was really long and it meant quite a lot of work, but I think it is really worthwhile since my calligraphy will always be the same and now I’m going to be able to use it in my computer for the rest of my life.

Note: The final design of this web site will be posted in a couple of weeks and you won’t be able to see the font working until the new design is up. Please be patient.

“Old Europe” by Koldo Barroso

This work is part of the project book that I’m preparing which will compile a collection of illustrations inspired by songs from different renowned musicians and lyricists.

For a long time I was completely fascinated by a song by Robert Wyatt that I would keep listening to over and over. The song is called ‘Old Europe’ and it was released in his latest album ‘Cuckooland’ in 2003. The lyric was written by Robert’s wife Alfreda Benge and it relates the love affair between trumpetist Miles Davis and French singer/actress Juliette Greco in Paris in 1949.

Sketch of Juliette Greco

Being a Miles Davis fan myself, I oftently listen to his recordings from the late 40’s. I like to imagine how the bohemian atmosphere in Paris must have been at the time, just walking down the streets of Paris and listening to the sound of Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie coming out from the tiny clubs. In the sleeve notes of Robert Wyatt’s album, there are some indications about the haunting legendary places portrayed in the song, such as Le Chat qui Peche in the Rue de la Huchette and St Germain in Rue St Benoit.

When I decided to get into this old love story between Miles and Juliette, I started seeing very clearly in my mind the picture of the ghost of an old love affair haunting the streets of Paris. I’ve never been in Paris, which is a pity since I’ve travelled across the country South to North. I tried to imagine how the atmosphere of the streets in those days were and tried to portrait a picture of Rue de la Huchette.

I did some homework research and found several posters from Paris in 1949, which I pictured on the walls in the final painting. This is one of my favourite parts of the work: researching and playing detective for a while, just to get all the elements I need to put together the final scene. I also watched some videos from Juliette Greco, whose music I didn’t really know very much before this and now I love too. So, I tried to portrait her body language for the romantic scene and I was lucky enough to find this beautiful posture of her hands laying on her neck: the gesture of a woman in of being love.

Sketch of Miles Davis

Apart from the delicious old school jazz thing that Robert created in this song, I love how the lyrics drive me to the love scene like in a little tour, making me feel like a voyeur who watches the ghost of an old romance from the shades. I wanted to capture this feeling in the painting. On top of it, Alfreda did a really descriptive portrait of the scene with her words, with hints to colors and shapes. I like the most the sentences: ‘The ghosts of two people in love’ and ‘Always dreams of yesterdays. Those days live on safely in my heart’. That is exactly what haunted me the most about the song and the story. I wanted to capture the way I’ve felt very often myself about certain places and past events. Sadly, the romance between Miles and Juliette ended when they moved to the US, that’s why the song is called ‘Old Europe’. Now, the remembering of this love brings me a strange feeling of melancholy, almost painful but pleasant. The same feeling that makes me feel mesmerised with the same 4 bars from the song.

Sometime after I finished this work, I posted it on a personal page I have in Myspace and then I got an unexpected message from Alfreda Benge telling me she had seen it. I got completely astonished. She was really nice and told me that she and Robert like the painting very much. She said I got to capture her words on the painting, which I consider the best compliment I could get. She also told me that she and Robert, although not together at the time, they used to go to Paris in the late 40’s and they both have really beautiful memories of it. That made me feel in a way just like if the painting was coming alive!

If you like old jazz or Robert Wyatt I really recommend you this album, ‘Cuckooland’ and I invite you to get haunted by ‘Old Europe’. I’m including the lyrics here so you can get into the story if you feel like it.

Always dreams of yesterdays…

Old Europe

Le Chat qui Peche,
Rue de la Huchette.
Paris at night,
and the strains of a ghost saxophone.

I’ll be dreaming again,
always dreams of yesterdays.
Those days live on,
safe here in my heart.

Words by Alfreda Benge, 2003

Here goes the 2nd step of the design of this web site. For the footer, I painted these collection of leaves inspired by a series of lucid dreams that I had many years ago. I dreamt I was in a garden where all the flowers and plants were made of energies and pure light. I can swear this is one of the most beautiful and breathtaking things I have seen in my life. They would glow in different colors and looking at them created a mesmerizing feeling in me. These recurrent dreams had a big impact on me. For a long time I have wondered about how to put this experience into images and music and it really changed my scope about the perception of the art and nature in life.

In a former post, I wrote about how I used some ivy leaves that I picked this winter during my walks. Other leaves were inspired by a picture of Alice In Wonderland’s ride in Disneyland that has been in my mind since I was a kid. I haven’t had the privilege of visiting Disneyland, but when I was a kid I used to read a book about it over and over. I still keep it at home. The picture in the book shows some beautiful leaves which I believe were based upon Mary Blair’s designs for the film.

In the next step I will talk about doing a font based upon my own calligraphy to use it on the web site.

As promised, here is an image of the first stage of the design for this web site. It doesn’t include the top header and menu yet and the illustrations for the footer are still missing, so what you can see so far is the background design and content.

When I first thought of doing the design for my own web site I decided to be the most honest I could. It’s something that happens naturally when Naomi and I work in design for other people, but when it’s about yourself is easy to get tempted to try look like someone cooler or better than what you think you are. My idea about this design is: “What you see is what you get”. So I’ve tried to create the atmosphere that really has to do with my art and persona.

For instance, for this web site, I have tried to create a feeling of the woodlands. All of the images and illustrations are on top of a background of black Conte drawing paper, since most of the illustrations are in (digital) Conte drawing. The image of the background is a scanning from a real paper that I did. The trees are intended to look like black ink on Conte paper. For these I was inspired by Eastern art and also some beautiful ink drawings that Roger Dean did in the early 70’s for the booklet of Yes album “Yessongs”. I’ve been trying to get the same feeling of half-hidden dark on dark drawing that you can only notice depending on the angle you look at it. Depending on the kind of screen that your computer has this effect may be more noticeable.

For the headings of the articles I tried several things but finally I decided to use this paper thing with Conte highlights and a classical mailing rubber stamp for the date of the posts.

The background of the content is this repeating image of long trees. My original idea was to draw branches, but it was not very practical in order to get the images repeating in the right way, so I decided to leave this minimalistic long silhouettes of trees.

In my next post I will show more about the customized font that I have created for the site.