(Over) 12 Days of Christmas

So did you guess from last week’s drawings that the thing that weirdly inspired us to draw an entire poster (not sure if it’s exactly a poster but that seems the closest) is the song “Twelve Days of Christmas”?

It was on our car Christmas playlist and since the kids insited we listened to the playlist a lot, we always got the song stuck in our heads (we’re talking the Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters version). Drawing it seemed like the most natural next step, didn’t it? Probably not, but we had, unusually, a little time after Christmas and chose to play with very traditional, very unpolished drawing that we rarely get to do anymore. Were it an actual job, we’d have chosen a very different style but this proved very relaxing. And time-consuming – but mainly relaxing.

If you like to know about technical details, the drawings were done with brushmarkers, and then everything was arranged on the green background on the computer. I watched most of The White Lotus and some more while doing it, just so you get some idea.

Sneak Beak

Hope your year is starting well and you’re full of energy. We have some doubts about the wisdom of starting the new year in January, arguably one of the least inspiring months of the year, but we’ve been working quite intensely all the same. In fact, we spent some time after Christmas doing something entirely for fun, which we hadn’t done a lot last year, and today we’re sharing some illustrations from that little project. We’ll show you all of it next week but if in the meantime we wonder if you can guess what the project was about.

Happy New Year!

May the New Year bring you joy and health – and whatever you felt the old one was lacking.

Merry Christmas!

May you have a wonderful Christmas time, joyful, peaceful and delightful!

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It was the longest hiatus that started with our summer holidays and lasted, well, till now. It didn’t happen for any dramatic reason, we just didn’t have enough time or organizational skills to make the life/work/social media combo work so only one thing of those could be put on a break. However. We’re back. We will strive for regularity and even if we slip occasionally, we promise not to disappear for such inordinately long periods. Back to Christmas celebrations now, thanks for sticking by us!

Love Is Love

Barely, but we managed to share this during Pride Month. Every month is Pride Month! Love who you love.

The artwork is by our son.

Skulls and Art and Death

Tomorrow we’re participating in a double event. It consists of a promotion of the book Fête funèbre or Art and Death, which is published by the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts and which we designed. The book follows an exhibition catalog that we designed a few years ago and includes essays on the subject of how death influences art. (We will obviously show you the book once we have it.)

The other event is an opening of an exhibition titled Hamlet’s Prop: Skull in Visual Arts and among some great works there will be also our modest poster from the Iconic Painters series, on de La Tour.

We also had the pleasure of designing the poster for the event: it combines a plant motif used for the book cover with a skull invoked by the exhibition’s title. You can see a simplified version above (with way less text than in the printed version but the same illustration). If you’re in Gdańsk and in a slightly morbid mood, come join us!

This used to be a guessing game but we already told you the answer.

Get Your Kicks

We feel that we don’t share nearly enough cool work that we come upon and just as this thought arose Google gifted us with a charming Google Doodle by Matthew Cruiskshank. As it was not featured worldwide (or even very broadly), we thought we’d share it with you.

The doodle celebrates the iconic US highway Route 66 that ran from Chicago to California and features so prominently in the culture that even us non-Americans are very aware of it. In a charming mix of painted illustration and animation Cruickshank captures the atmosphere of the states the road crosses and some particular attractions on the way. As this official website claims, the illustrations were developed outside, during an actual road trip along the Route. (You can see the whole animation there, too.)

The work charmed us with its mix of light-hearted painterly illustrations, collage and very simple animation that feels unforced and humorous. It has fun typographic (and other) details and is wonderfully matched with Nat King Cole’s “Route 66”. There are one or two moments when the vector elements in the animation style felt a bit jarring to us but they’re quite offset by the fragments of the actual sketchbook and the liveliness of the whole thing. Overall, it was a charming, little morning surprise in our browser that made us happy.

Paper Works Preview

Every two years we get a chance to play with paper birds, letters and poets and the time has come for a new version to emerge. This is, of course, only an in-work photo of the elements, with the actual art to follow soon.