“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

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.

It was time for another change in our Home at Intuitive Designs. Last month we already did some changes and the illustration of the chef quit whipping cream to hold a piece of chocolate cake, but the header with the old line “Let’s whip the cream of the crop together” remained and it was a little pointless.

Last week, we asked Naomi Dunford at Ittybiz what our unique selling point (USP) might be for our business. She does marketing and consulting for small businesses and she gives really great advice in a practical way for people who work from home on her blog. She came up with this idea for us: “Creative sites for creative people”. We thought it was really good. We love when we get feedback from creative people like Naomi. It inspires us to come up with something new for our business. So we decided to add the “cooking” theme we already have in place to the USP she suggested and finally got this: “Cooking creative sites for creative people”.

We really think Naomi had a point because we have always thought that creativity is what we can best offer to our clients and we really want to work with people who are especially interested in finding creative and customized solutions that are effective for their business needs. That’s one of the reasons we we like to be so versatile in this job. We don’t like to be stuck in one particular style and give the same product to every project because, for us, every project has different needs and needs a different style and a different look. We enjoy fitting to each project different design and illustration styles. Sometimes we even get a little disappointed when the clients presume we are not right to do a certain work just because the style they’re looking for is not in our portfolio. Obviously, we can’t have all the design styles in our portfolio but we do can work with any of them and we love to do it.

With the new tagline, it was obvious that we needed a new illustration for the header to replace the old whipped cream. I never liked the old whipped cream illustration very much and I think this new one re-enforces the image of design at first glance, which is good for us because sometimes people say our site looks more like a cuisine site than a design one. So I came with this cooking pan full of pencils and pens, and once again… Supper’s ready!

This is actually an article that I wrote at the blog at Intuitive Designs site in May this year. This week we did some changes at the site and I did a revision of the chef illustration to introduce a new area in the home with the latest features. The new chef is the one holding a cake with one hand. I thought it would be interesting to post here this article where I talk about the process of doing this particular illustration from scratch. I hope you find it interesting.

For the past few months, I have received some messages from other illustrators and designers asking about the technics I used to do the illustration of the chef at the home page of our web site. Personally, I subscribe to the words from Tricky (the English musician): ‘When a musician tells me about the way he did a song, I immediately distrust him’. I don’t believe in methods and I think each work should become a new adventure to figure out which techniques may suit it better. This way, work always becomes a fun game. On the contrary, without this sense of making mistakes and solving new problems it would become the most boring thing on earth.

So, I’m not going to write a tutorial for illustrators. For me, the best thing about tutorials is that by step #2, I get so lost that I skip the next 3 steps and by step #6 I find something cool of my own. On the other hand, I thought it could be interesting to show how my process was in this peculiar work. As I said before, I do not apply this same process in any of my other works, it’s just what I came with for this particular illustration. For me, the most interesting is not the techniques themselves but the beauty of how the things develop during the process until they end up becoming something close to what I originally wanted to express.

In this case, we wanted a welcoming figure of a chef, so we first thought of using the image of a Basque chef. I am half-Basque myself and I come from a family of Basque cooks. I love cooking and so does Naomi. That’s one of the reasons why we decided to use this theme for the web site: because we wanted to express our design work in relationship with something we love. So we decided to use this Basque cook archetype regarding how many Basque chefs are famous today. I tried to portrait the typical strong Basque man in a cartoonish way (see Fig. 1) and I have to say that many of my family members in Orduña they look pretty much this.

We decided we wanted something softer and more welcoming than the strong and straight lines of the Basque features. Then, I worked in a new version of a French cook (See Figure 2), which turned into something too much of a cliché. This new cartoonish approach allowed me to bring something more fun and welcoming, based on round shapes merged into dynamic curves. This could work, but there was not very much from ourselves in this version, which we always want to avoid. I still wanted to portrait something closer to my personal illustration style, but I wanted a compromise between my art oriented works and something design oriented and commercial that could represent the spirit of our work. This way, I worked in a new sketch inspired in my own art illustration, which has always had a big influence from Naive European painters and other artists from the early 20th century such as Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Tamara de Lempicka.

Finally, we decided to go for a mixture of a French and Basque character, which makes sense because that’s just what it is in the South of France. I first drew a preliminary sketch study of the geometrical shapes (See Figure 3), which I usually do in my artwork. The figure is basically based on two round shapes balanced towards opposite directions and connected by a curve axis that define the expression and movement of the character. In this case, I tried to look for a feeling of harmony in the body language and a gentle and warm feeling. That’s why I decided to draw the head slightly laying to the side.

This skeleton gave life to the final sketch (See Figure 4) where the expression of the drawing was developed and I played with the curves in elements such as the mustache, the hat and the bow. The version displayed here includes a new proposal with the chef holding a plate with a bottle which wasn’t used.

Once the main sketch was ready, I went to draw it in vectorial work, keeping all of the different parts of the figure separated in layers and using different working colors just to make it easy to work with(See Figure 5).

These colors would be later replaced by the real ones. Once the vectorial work is finished I usually like to export each layer to JPG image in the highest resolution as possible. No matter how small the work is, I always work in 300 px resolution because you never know what you may want to do with your work in the future. Also because this gives me the opportunity of working with more precision and in detail. As an artist who was taught to paint on canvas, I like to work with the image as big as possible on my screen. So I exported all of the elements separately and then put them in different layers in my painting program, which may be Corel Painter or Adobe Photoshop depending on the needs of the work.

Despite that this may look like painting by numbers, is not at all because I have all the freedom in the world to work on each layer individually and the result of any of them may affect the rest of them. It’s also a funny way to have the elements in sort of collage manner so I can play with them with independence. As you may see in the next sample (See Figure 6), I started correcting the colors for each layer in order to find the chromatic base for the illustration. At this stage, the illustration started showing up, which for me is always the most exciting part of the process. In this case, I started working in the shadow effects for the different layers and then added new nuances of color to bring chromatic richness.

In this particular case (See Figure 7) the result is a mixture between paper collage and volume pieces, which is just what I was trying to fulfill in the first place. Once this work (which is probably the longest part of the process) was done, I did a revision of all the parts to correct the color scheme and made the whole thing homogeneous. Then I worked with overall shades and highlighted the contrast of the different features to remark whatever I think it’s necessary, which you can tell by comparing this version with the final one displayed at the top of the article.

Now the work was finally ready to get merged, so… Kito!… I mean… Et voilà!… which is to say… Supper’s ready!

What more can I say?… oh, yes! Enjoy your meal!