Lee's Artlog

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2006- Digital Imaging 2 was a yawner at my local community college. Most of the work was in-class handouts that were rarely explained.  There wasn’t anything awe inspiring about projects until my instructor asked us to do a magazine cover. Naturally I parlayed this into doing a comic book cover and then put the same spin onto the work that I had done previously on Final Victory but came up with Political Takeover. (Once again it was a silent jab in-joke against the current administration as facists.)

I utilized the previous arrogant image from Manifesto and then incorporated many features from Photoshop that my instructor wanted us to use on our projects. I kept the glam to a restricted limit, and used very few stock filters and layer adjustments, (as the more you use the less professional it looks). In a nod to Lester Beall’s Rural Electrification poster I put an upside down American flag in the background.  (In nautical coding an upside down national flag indicates distress.) I then burned the Cobra symbol onto the flag, and gave the figure a slight fade to give its vacuous, yet foreboding appearance. 

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2007- We started around week 10 working on contour lines and styles in Composition and Drawing. Entailed are about 5 different styles here on this piece, including blind contour- which disfigured the leg. Regardless there’s a certain spirit about the eyes and a brashly driven air to the piece through the boldness of the lines. I didn’t hesitate when working with the micron, and placed no faith in anything as to how Reckless would come out.   

 

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2004- I was really fed up with everything in the world and my largest complaint was about our government. After being laid off and bouncing around, looking at misleading economic numbers and indicators, I built a series of political posters based on my Holloween costume of Cobra Commander to allieviate my absolute frustration.  (See Manifesto, Cobra Recruitment Poster, Breakfast of Champions.) 

I took the photo I previously used in Cobra Recruitment Poster, since it was an iconically evil pose and decided to use it for a comic book cover design for an old magazine I collected. I used poster edges to give it a more illustrated feel and piecemealed the logos together. I then added the Earth in the background behind Cobra Commander and saturated it in shades of ‘warning red’.  The font for Final Victory was selected after locating the clean, futuristic type ‘fightthis’. (It has an active quality to it.) Once this was done I placed a red line underneath to underscore the type and yellow paint daubs to give a dash of chaoticness.

Offhandedly part of the problem with the economic slump is the lack of proper advertising aimed at the X Generation.  The X Gen and following generations are commercially numb.  That being, they tune out commercials and advertising because they have been innundated with them all their lives. We only pay attention if it catches our eye. Even so it must be tailor made in a way that makes it nostalgic or inspires massive brand loyalty. Movies are only cashing in on comic books and toy products now which is instrumentally essential to Gen X’s pop cultural makeup; However, there seems a lack of innovation in advertising and TV to gestate towards other media outlet forms such as online games.  Where it does, the Gen X consumer is innundated, and becomes callous to it. Furthermore, if a product, message or politician is junk, and the message doesn’t get heard by that party, we move on quickly and tell our friends en masse how bad something is, because nobody wants accountability for our problems. 

 Fair warning: Generation X votes silently with its apathy and silence, but uses feet to show dissaproval.