Students & Faculty: We Are Floating In Space

Last week I received a call from the New York Times Op-Ed page (especially exciting as it had been a minute since we worked together) with a typically thought provoking and challenging piece. A favorite client for almost 10 years now, I'm almost always incredibly pleased with the finals from Op-Ed gigs. Blissfully this one was no exception.

The article (penned by the fantastic Claire Vaye Watkins, look her up) dealt with the issue of dwindling opportunities beyond high school for rural midwestern students: slighted by the standardized test bureaucracy and all but ignored by prestigious coastal schools, these students often take on enormous loan debt, turn to a salivating military thirsty for new recruits or simply self-short change their dreams and ambitions altogether. Though the writing was by turns poignant and humorous, the passages concerning the aggressive and almost greedy military recruitment practices were especially striking and seemed ripe with bold and graphic imagery. I produced the following sketches:

Though I believed the boot-on-desk sketch could be read as either specifically military related or taken as a more general metaphor for the trampled opportunities of these students, both editor and art director wanted something with a lighter touch that dealt with the remoteness and isolation of these schools. Also the headline had been added by this point, "The Ivy League Was Another Planet." Aha. Cue up Shatner, or you know what, and better yet,  Sir Patrick Stewart. There I said it. High school boldly going where etc etc... - engage (ugh)!

A quick gender flip for the student (credit where due: a subtle but inspired bit of art direction from Matt Dorfman), and voila, one of my favorite finishes to date for 2013:

Thanks to Matt Dorfman and the rest of the gang at the Op-Ed desk for the typically engrossing assignment, and as always, thanks for reading!

Every (Good) Illustration I Made About The 2012 Election*

Weeks later, we're still picking up the proverbial pieces. I'm sure I speak for a large number of folks the world over when I say the palpable feeling of relief that the election is just over has lingered well past the closing of the polls late on November 6. And now, as members of both parties, elected officials or not, begin to plant their fingers in their ears and run deaf and screaming headlong into the holidays, an increasingly unlikely Mayan Apocalypse and hopefully not off the "fiscal cliff**," here's a quick trip back into recent history, from the Republican primary through election night via a bunch of election related illustrations that I've scarcely had time to post - please enjoy:

Remember Rick Perry? A piece for Bloomberg View from Nov 2011 contrasting his general approach to that of eventual Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

The spectre of Florida circa 2000 as well as voter fraud and polling place catastrophe was raised by both parties as early as January of 2012. For Bloomberg View.

A favorite piece for the New York Times Op-Ed section about the art of spinning arguments and facts to reinforce any position. The New York Times, September 2012

A poster image for 30Reasons.org, a group of 30 artists and designers who contributed visual representations of arguments for re-electing the president. This was (loosely/abstractly) related to his stand on social issues, which for me was the single largest reason to vote Obama. 

A chart by Kim Bost and I as JMBOTRN breaking down the accuracy of some "non-conventional" national polls, including but not limited to a donut chain, 7-11 and bourbon distillery. For The New York Times, November 2012.

Finally, and you know, most importantly, which candidate would be best equipped to handle a zombie apocalypse? November 2012, Bloomberg View.

Though I'll miss the savory rapid fire illustration gigs like the above, again, regardless of party affiliation, I'll happily raise a glass to the election cycle's end. As always, thanks for reading!

*There were some stinkers too, but i'll leave that to intrepid googlers and schadenfreude aficionados.

**Hip-hop side project somebody? But make it cool. Please.

Seth Macfarlane For NYLON

I'm not always the best portrait illustrator out there, but for some reason whenever i do them for NYLON they turn out pretty alright. This one is Seth Macfarlane, creator of "The Family Guy" and professional bro behind Wahlberg CGI and dude humor vehicle ted. If i sound excessively snarky
about this right out of the gate, please know that it comes from years of childhood ridicule rooted in such late 80s/early 90s ted prefixed fare as "Teddy Grahams", "Teddy Ruxpin" etc, or public luminaries of the Bundy, Danson, Kazinsky and Turner varieties (i'll never forgive him for colorizing Casablanca). Gonna be damn near 100 outside today kiddies. For those about to rock...etc...

Pulled Punches: 2 Fer Flinchin' Trailer

Here's a quick trailer i made for a zine that releases next week. It's the first time i've ever done a follow up to one of those things so it seemed fitting to give it the summer block buster sequel treatment. The images from the original zine are below. Barbecue season is real.

 

Two Recent Posters For Union Pool

Happy Friday everyone. Real quick, here's 2 recent posters for i show i just played on May 16th and an upcoming one that some friends are playing on May 30th, both at Union Pool. Super happy with how these turned out. Cheers!

Holiday Mixerrr / Holiday Party

 Holiday Mixer 2 by ted mcgrath

Once again, somehow, the holiday season is upon us. 2011 has breezed by at an unprecedented pace, the sense of temporal dislocation only heightened by todays weather of 70º and foggy... on December 6. In Brooklyn. Spooky? You bet.


But in lighter news, here's another round up of holiday sonic chestnuts for your seasonal entertainment - some are well-worn favorites, songs long canonized by the gods of pop culture and half-remembered office party slur-alongs, while others materialize warbly and weird like Dickensian ghosts of 45rpm crate diggers past. As with last year's offerings, i think they stand up to the "proper" work of the artists involved, and somehow balance holiday novelty and actual listenability quite well. The amateur edits and fades are back too, but hell, it's still better than that She & Him record. Just sayin. 


ALSO: for those of you so inclined and in the NYC area, the cast and crew of The Pencil Factory Studios will be having our annual shin-dig at The Diamond in Greenpoint this very Friday, from 7PM-? Last year's party was a total blast and it'd be great to see any and all of you if you're around. The Diamond is located at 43 Franklin St. Brooklyn, NY 11222, G to Nassau/L to Bedford. 

Happy Holidays Everyone! And here's to fantastic and Mayan Revenge-God free 2012!

-t.

New One For Draft Magazine...

Here's a new one from my bi-monthly series for Draft Magazine, a story about an out of work writer who rides out some rough economic times by working at Upslope Brewing's cannery.

David Sokol Feature For Bloomberg Business Week Or "Yes, I Will Make Your Magazine Feature Look Like My Zines, Sure."

Once in a weird while you get called for what literally qualifies as a dream job - the kind of gig that you play out in your head every now and again that you know the odds of something like that actually going down are completely slim to nil. But once every election cycle or so (and i swear there must be a ancient and deeply uncool Aztec calendar for predicting this sort of thing somewhere in the seldom seen Stonecutters-esque subterranean vaults of the Society Of Illustrators), one of these assignments dings over your email and reminds you why you spent so many hours making endless revisions to that fascinating spot series about the evolution and mysterious disappearance of the spork for European mini mag Blaine Westway Presents: CUTLERY. That having been typed, somebody please, if you're out there, i'll draw yer sporks, actually sounds kinda cool...

Anyhow - in late April i received one such email from Richard Turley over at Bloomberg Business Week. Much and justifiably lauded since its relaunch last year, the new Bloomberg prefixed version of Business Week really is quite the wonder in this age of protracted panic about the future of print based media. Strictly from a design and illustration standpoint, they've been a complete joy to work for as i've seldom been hired for freelance projects where my role in the process and what i could bring to the table seemed so thoroughly and specifically considered. For this project, i was asked if i'd like to illustrate and embellish a feature story about David Sokol, the should've been heir to Warren Buffet currently suffering from a snowballing fall from grace that had finally started to captivate national news attention in spite of the best efforts of all parties involved not to make a scene. Richard had a copy of an older zine of mine called "Health & Science Center" and asked if i could apply a similar treatment to the pages pertaining to the Sokol story. Some images of the printed zine:

With this aesthetic in mind (black line on red background, hand lettered titles, xerox battered photos) i set about attacking sketches given the rough layouts and some photo options:

Originally the story was to be titled "The Latest Temptation of David Sokol" and the only real direction i was given was to avoid direct Biblical imagery to the best of my ability. Also, Buffet was to be shown as "protected" or "sheilding" himself from the fallout. Upon further reading of the story, Sokol was cast as a more ambiguous character than the initial headline suggested, portraying him as a generous philanthropist capable of ruthless and even bullying behavior in business deals, an honest and devoted family man very much in line with Buffet's own public persona but whose behind the scenes actions don't necessarily place him above a few minor crooked deals even though the actual financial gains would be a pittance to someone of his net worth.  

Given all of this i started thinking about the work of Max Beckmann (a long time favorite of mine who often painted from a personalized mythological vocabulary) and Rauschenberg's "illustrations" of The Inferno, works that communicated universal weighty themes by reconfiguring and recombining, or updating mytho archetypes. Corrupting black cloud ripped from Japanese woodcuts is certainly obvious enough, but i was really happy to get the accidentally toppled trash can full of vipers through. As for Buffet, couldn't resist giving him Odin-esque lightning bolt eye-brows (and for the record Thor was a great, stupid popcorn movie, way to make those Kirby costumes look totally believable) as well as a brickwall, moat, and psychedelic forcefield. Ultimately the 70s muscle dude bouncer and the dog got cut, but there was a lot happening in that shot already. With sketches approved, it was off to a 12 hour scanning and drawing marathon that ultimately incorporated scans from my sketchbook to fill in the margins and add to the zine-like feel. Finals and print version below:

Thanks again to Richard and the rest of the gang at Bloomberg for what was definitely one of the most fun and rewarding projects i've ever worked on!

"Super Flu": Undead Illustration #2

Last week i was contacted by The New York Times Magazine to do some illustrated type for a piece on fighting the super flu, a strain of the seasonal menace that's adaptable and resistant to conventional antibiotics. Over a few days i came up with 3 treatments, all of which i was pretty excited about and ultimately the client as well. Unfortunately, just as the art was approved the story ended up being cut altogether, so no ultra gross microscope type to ruin your Sunday brunch next week i'm afraid...
That said, it's always super fun to both flex the Ed Ruscha-worshiping part of my brain and work for the Sunday Magazine, as they're pretty much responsible for a large chunk of my career. Werd. Type treatments below, the bottom version is what would've appeared in the magazine. 

  

 

Panda Bear's "Tom Boy" for NYLON

Last month i got a call from NYLON magazine to do a full page illustration of Panda Bear from Animal Collective to accompany the review of his forthcoming solo album "Tom Boy." Not terribly accustomed to being called for portraits, i was thrilled that the direction was pretty open ended, the only real stipulation being that the piece feel "painterly." It having been a while since i sunk my teeth into some gouache, this was exciting. 

I was very familiar with Mr. Bear's "Person Pitch" album from 2007 and was given a one-time use preview stream of "Tom Boy" to listen to while working on the illustration. From what i could assess from that one listen, the new record dialed up the melancholy undertones and slowed the tempos a little from the previous release. More than ever, the music reminded me of a bizarro world post-Pet Sounds Beach Boys, which in turn set me scrambling through my record collection for the Beach Boys comp "Endless Summer," one of my favorite illustrated LP covers ever. I've attached a jpg below - how cool/creepy are the weathered Wilsons hiding in a psychedelic surf jungle?

Using this as inspiration/homage i concocted the following sketch. The other conceit of this design was that it would grant maximum leeway in terms of nailing the portrait by obscuring a lot of the face with psychedelic flowers. 

This was then translated to the final below:

Coming off the Fashion Week process and some design related work i've been up to, it felt really great to do something of the "hands dirty" painted approach again. Thanks for reading!

LOVE CITY

Happy Valentine's Day folks! Above is the cover of the forthcoming "February is for Loverz" themed zine i hoped to have out this week, but due to an extraordinarily busy few weeks doing some weird/awesome Fashion Week stuff with dear friends at the behest of Pepsi (watch for a forthcoming post), this baby won't "hit the streets" til early next week. I figure as long as i beat the St. Patrick's Day decor in drug and convenience stores i'm ok. Anyway, how about that weather?

Animation Time Waster

My good friend graphic designer Anita Chacinska dropped by the studio late yesterday and we devoted another 30 mins to a super short animation of an ex-president being struck with a food stuff in an exotic location. #2 in our on-going series is Richard Nixon being struck with a pineapple at the pyramids. Enjoy!

ZONE

During the last week of 2010 i had the distinct pleasure of ending the year with a favorite piece for a favorite client, The New York Times Book Review. The assignment was to illustrate the review of the novel Zone by Mattias Énard, a book comprised of an internal monologue presented as one gigantic run on sentence and containing only one period. Thematically the book uses this questionably reliable and fractured narrative voice to chronicle and embody the violence, confusion, suspicion and chaos of the 20th century's transition into the 21st. As such, the winding, circuitous "plot" covers and recovers a lot of ground and i immediately wanted nothing to do with a traditional "narrative illustration" approach for this assignment. 

Flash back a day before receiving the call from the Times. Back at the ancestral home for the holiday, my dad, ever a classic movie buff, graciously DVR'd Busby Berkely's "The Gold Diggers Of 1935" to show me from Turner Classic Movies (thanks dad). A gorgeous piece of arty, outlandish, deco musical cinema, its "Lullabye Of Broadway" sequence is completely breath taking, obviously for the lighting and super elaborate set pieces and choreography, but especially for the striking long shot of the singer's face framed alone in a massive field of black. Check it out below, it's incredible:

Inspired (obviously and very much so, heh) by Berkely's film i was already eager to try both something that went after a powerful minimalism and/or a dense and more maximal solution. I started sketching and quickly realized that to attempt something visually busy and loaded with detail seemed not to do justice to the review or the described tone and content of the novel. Reviewing the layout, i settled on the following sketch using the lone magnified period as Berkely's black void with a small slightly out of focus skull drifting in the background. Knowing that the "period" would be sitting in the center of the page i thought it would have a bold initial impact while inviting a second or third glance as the review unfolded. Also, as a piece of exaggerated punctuation, it would hopefully co-opt the entire page to bolster the concept. 

 

I also did the "safety sketch" below which is admittedly awful but kind of gets the same point across albeit in a far less interesting way. Blissfully the ADs were on board with the original idea.

From there the finish was a lot fun, mainly involving playing with textures that would feel like magnified print but also something evoking an abstract, out of focus sense of space. The final result was one of my favorite illustration pieces of last year. Thanks again to Nicholas, Catherine and Joon at the BR and Happy New Year!

4th Quarter Mood Board and Keeper Components

Holiday Mix...

 

   Holiday Mixerrrr by ted mcgrath

With Holiday Party season upon us, and as a result the annual assault of "Holiday Music" i thought i'd throw together a few of my own seasonal favorites (with amateur playlist edits and fades, apologies in advance) in the hopes doing my part to combat, in some small way, the ongoing popularity of shrieking sonic turds like "Christmas Shoes" or the better part of the Manheim Steamroller oeuvre.


That said, some of the selections are well worn favorites in their own right and others off beat nuggets by established acts, while a few others are less well known on any level. It's my hopes that the majority of the tunes, in spite of their seasonal subject matter, are selections that hold up against the "proper" work of the artists involved and are enjoyable in their own right (Marvin Gaye's "Purple Snowflakes" is just top notch and James Brown's "Let's Make Christmas Mean Something This Year" is one of the man's most powerful and unhinged vocal turns and has been known to move me to the brink of tears, no lie). Listen or download above, hope you enjoy, and most of all Happy Holidays.  

Animals of Finance...

Ok, puns are pretty bad but i couldn't bring myself to title this post "Recent Projects I Am Excited About" or something like that, it just sounds so dry and joyless...and anyway, somewhere Miles Southan is smiling. Moving on...

Last month i had the privilege of working for two of my favorite clients, both business magazines with stellar art departments, Plan Sponsor and Bloomberg Business Week. Furthering the feel-good vibe of both projects was the fact that each called for a different aesthetic and problem solving approach. 

For Plan Sponsor, i was asked to illustrate the concept of "sharing stories" for a piece about integrating blogging into your business plan. I turned in 2 sketches, the first with an Aesop's Fables direction, the second reviving the tiger-pelt clad weirdo from the abandoned "running shoe of the future" illustration from this past summer:

The client liked the first sketch (sorry again shoe-dude!), and it provided an opportunity to dig into some paint for the first time in a while, at least on for a commissioned piece. I was also super stoked that the eye-patched bear made it in.

For Bloomberg Business Week i was asked to do a photo illustration based on mounting cynicism surrounding the climate change conference in Cancun. The direction was an enhanced, slightly "defaced" post card, where some of the disasters and environmental issues would literally be imposed on (a consciously cheezy image of) the unspoiled and remote natural beauty of Cancun's beaches. Once the image was selected i turned in the following sketch:

Following a few compositional and layout i adjustments i proceeded to the following final image:

It was super fun getting to do both of these projects back to back as combined, they let me pretty much do everything i really enjoy about illustration with very little restriction or "toning down." Thanks again SooJin and Maayan!