Ken Featherston Posters from the Armadillo

This past weekend I attended an auction here in our little town just outside Austin. I was there to help work concessions, but as sometimes happens I also found something interesting to bid on. This time I hit the motherload. In among a variety of the usual household goods from someone’s estate was an envelope stuffed with classic show posters from the golden age of Austin’s legendary club scene.

All told the envelope contained about 15 posters from a variety of artists and venues, including many from famous venues which are no longer with us like the Armadillo World Headquarters and Soap Creek Saloon. Artists represented in the collection included some of the best of the era like Ken Featherston, Guy Juke and Michael Priest. Much to my surprise after a brief bid-off with an aging local hippy I won the lot of posters for just $50, a great investment if I planned to sell them, with some of the posters typically priced in the $75 to $100 range.

When I got the posters home and had a chance to go through with them I got a better feel for what I had won.  The unifying characteristic seems to be that all of the posters originated in 1974 which was pretty close to the height of the career of the Armadillo World Headquarters, which only lasted for 10 years, from 1970 to 1980.  During that era it showcased an amazing selection of musical acts, including the greats of the psychedelic 60s, amazing blues musicians and emerging rock and punk bands which would go on to greater fame.  Everyone played there from AC/DC to ZZTop.  The success — musically if not financially — of the Armadillo was the genesis of the vibrant Austin club scene of today and the large number of live music venues which make Austin the “live music capitol of the world.”

The artist represented most among the posters is Ken Featherston, whose career was closely linked to that of the Armadillo and who has more or less vanished in obscurity in recent yeas.  At the height of the era he was a revered figure, designing amazing and dynamic posters and considered on a par with the great artists of the Fillmore poster scene in San Francisco.  There were five Featherston posters in the package, representing some of his best work, including his Marshall Tucker poster which I consider one of his very best and also his original menu design which was used at the Armadillo for most of the decade.

Featherston’s work was always remarkably detailed and imaginative, and he particularly appeals to me because of his excellent lettering, which often drew on the styles of Art Nouveau master Alphons Mucha, particularly the styles represented in our Slava and Moravia fonts, although Featherston’s art was stylistically much grittier and realistic than Mucha’s preferred approach. Featherston was also a master of his medium, using clever techniques to provide texture and depth to his monochrome images.

I wish I could direct you to a web page for Featherston, but the page which was previously hosted by Threadgill’s restaurant seems to have gone offline. However,  if you want to see some nice samples of his work he’s heavily featured on fillmoreposter.com where many of his designs are available for sale or at least for viewing.  Tragically, he died in 1975 while working as a bouncer at the Armadillo, so although his output in the early 70s was prolific, it’s all we’ll ever have.

For someone working in the graphic arts and with a fondness for the music and visual vision of the 1960s discovering these posters was a real opportunity to look backwards and remember an artistic heritage which many designers are still trying to recreate today.  It was a discovery which I had to share, so enjoy these outstanding examples of Ken Featherston’s work and remember the music and the art which still live on.


This article originally appeared in a slightly different form on Blogcritics Magazine.

August 31, 2010 | Filed Under Articles, Found Art | Leave a Comment 

Heidelberg Archive of Jugend Magazine

One of the great expressions of the Art Nouveau movement was the magazine Munchner Jugend which became the focus of an entire movement of German art known as Jugenstil. Copies of Jugend are getting expensive and far behind, but in a recent search for something else I stumbled on an archive of scans of issues of Munchner Jugend from 1896 to 1895 available on the web from Heidelberg University.

The scans are of variable quality, but at high resolution. They were scanned more for reference than to preserve the art, but they do include every page of every issue, including advertisments. The problem is that even though they are scanned at a high quality resolution, many of the scans are distorted and discolored and little care was taken with making sure they were well placed or even flat on the scanning surface. There was also no effort to color correct or clean up the images. They make a great reference source, but would require a lot of work to make the images usable or up to the quality of those found in our Jugendstil Package of fonts and art.

Nonetheless it’s well worth checking out. The collection does not include earlier issues, and many of those in the first half of the 1890s included some excellent artwork. The quality of the magazine also declined considerably after the outbreak of World War I, so with a lot of material to look through, focus your browsing on the early 1900s and you’ll see some the best art without having to wade through too much junk.

August 28, 2010 | Filed Under Found Art | Leave a Comment 

The Design World of Ross MacDonald

As sometimes happens, my teenage daughter the design maven, pointed my attention to a very interesting website, in this case showcasing the work of printer and designer Ross MacDonald (not to be confused with the pulp novelist who authored the Lew Archer series). His specialty is producing antique looking original printed works using old technology and clever tricks. He’s designed special books for movies like the Bible featured in the recent movie Book of Eli and has also produced custom letterpress work for posters and book cover designs, and is the creator of a series of peculiar vintage-style cartoons which I had seen before in various magazines but never really looked into more deeply.

MacDonald documents much of his work very thoroughly, with images, videos and explanatory articles on his website. His latest article is on a really fascinating hand-designed book called Wapurgisnacht created for an upcoming horror movie project, though he won’t reveal which one. The details on the construction of the book and the aging techniques are really fascinating, particularly his use of material from other antique books scanned and reconfigured to fit his needs.

Also fascinating is some of the work coming out of his Brightwork Press, which is a collection of old printing presses and an amazing assortment of antique letterpress type located in a workshop behind his house. A good example of this work is his article on a letterpress print project he did to create a title page for an article in LA Magazine, which also includes an excellent and detailed video of his presswork. The article on the letterpress printing he did for the Bible in Book of Eli is also interesting. And don’t forget to check out some of the peculiar vintage-style illustrations and cartoons he’s done for publications like The New York Times.

My one complaint — aside from not knowing what secret horror movie he’s designing the Walpurgisnacht book for — is that I wish there was more on MacDonald’s website. I suspect he’s done many other interesting projects, but only a few from the last year or so are documented. I have high hopes that if we keep an eye on his webpage we’ll get to see a lot more in the future.

A slightly different version of this article appeared previously on Blogcritics Magazine.

June 13, 2010 | Filed Under Found Art | 1 Comment 

Hatch Show Print Exhibit in Austin

Austin Museum of Art for a month to see the Hatch Show Print exhibit. It’s a collection of historical posters from one of the most famous poster printers in the world. Hatch has been producing show posters since the 19th century and is still printing using traditional letterpress and hand-cut woodblock art. Their posters are iconic in the history of country, blues and rock music and have inspired generations of designers. I haven’t made it down there yet, but Sunday is the last day and I’m going to drag the family down with me one way or another. It’s a touring show and while they haven’t got other tour dates up on their site yet, keep an eye out for it coming to a museum near you.

If you can’t get to the show, Hatch sells their classic posters online through their very impressive website. Or if you want to make an oldstyle letterpress poster on your own, we can at least help you with the right fonts. We have a lot of fonts in that same letterpress tradition, particularly in our Wild West and Colonial Fonts collections.

May 4, 2010 | Filed Under Articles, Found Art | Leave a Comment 

Review: Flatstock 24 at SXSW

As an Austinite, no amount of effort can keep me from being aware of the South by Southwest festival.  It takes over the city for almost two weeks, makes travel impossible, and fills every coffee shop with unkempt hipsters with man-purses and Zach Galifianakis beards. I manage to avoid most of the activities, mainly because I can't see paying thousands of dollars and wasting hundreds of hours listening to obscure bands and watching amateur movies just so I can discover the occasional gem a month before the rest of the nation. I've got to have better ways to spend my time.

Despite the hassles, I do try to work in at least one or two of the free activities at SXSW every year. I was a panelist at the first SXSW Interactive festival and have caught the occasional great band or interesting movie, but I only get involved when I can avoid most of the crowds and cost. This year, despite crowds which were bigger and hipper than ever, my wife convinced me that she could find me the ideal birthday present if we went down to the Flatstock 24 exhibition which was being held in conjunction with SXSW at the Austin Convention Center. It was all about posters and poster art, which draws me like lice to dreadlocks, plus it was free, so how could I resist?

Flatstock is a series of poster conventions held at various locations around the world, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Hamburg and, of course, Austin. It's not at all like the collectible paper shows I'm used to, which specialize in antique prints and posters. Flatstock focuses on contemporary music and event posters with original art and mostly in limited print runs. It represents a modern revival of the 1960s era of silkscreened show posters which I thought was long gone, but which I was pleasantly surprised to learn is actually enjoying quite a renaissance.

The Flatstock show was not huge, just four aisles of vendors, but the quality on display was outstanding. It was all artists and publishers representing themselves, on the spot and eager to discuss their work and show their wares. Most of the posters were limited editions and silkscreened by hand, overruns from posters done for shows, or special limited editions done for sale. There were a few which were unusual, including one artist whose posters were done with spray paint and stencils and a couple who did high-end offset printed posters.

Some of the vendors were from out of town but a surprisingly large number were from Austin or at least Texas. Stylistically there was a trend towards the macabre and highly stylized art, but also a strong retro thrust, particularly towards variations of the psychedelic style made famous by the Fillmore in San Francisco and the Armadillo here in Austin.

One of the standouts and certainly the vendor from farthest away was Jacknife Posters from Bristol in the UK. They were representing the work of several artists, but their selection was dominated by the work of Chris Hopewell who was also at the show. Hopewell specializes in retro designs, mostly in two styles. He does art nouveau style designs which are clearly influenced by Alphons Mucha, but even more interesting were his posters which featured a retro 1960s exploitation film style with exaggerated scantily-clad women, old cars, guns, and dramatic type selections. Most of those posters were done for the bands Queens of the Stone Age and Dragster. Hopewell's style is kind of an ideal blend of vintage and modern design themes, hearkening back to the styles of earlier eras, but also unique and original. I also found it somewhat endearing that he has a penchant for using my fonts in his more Art Nouveauish designs, including the Mucha-based Moravia font.

Another impressive selection of posters was at Voodoo Catbox which had sprung for an extra-large booth space to house their huge selection of posters. In most of the booths I found great art on posters for bands I'd never heard of or have no interest in, but Voodoo Catbox had very nice posters for roots-rock bands I like a great deal, like Social Distortion, The Knitters, The Blasters, Nick Lowe, The Chieftains, and Los Lobos. In fact, I ended up buying a calavera-style Los Lobos poster there. All of their posters are the work of Gary Houston, who has a unique folk-art style, which shows many of the influences you would expect, but filtered through a personal style rather reminiscent of the woodcut illustrators of the 1930s. Although Houston does a lot of original lettering on his posters he also has good taste in fonts, including using several of my designs prominently, notably Hubbard and Butterfield.

Robert Lee of Methane Studios also had some very interesting posters on display. His modern punk style isn’t really my favorite, but I have to give him a little plug for using my Posada font in several of his posters and also on his logo and business cards. He has good taste in fonts at the very least.

I was also impressed with the work of a local designer named Rob Story. He didn't have business cards or a website or tubes to put posters in or very many posters and he wasn't set up to take credit cards, but he had done some very interesting work for local bands, and one of the few posters I actually bought to take home was his Posada-inspired poster for Chili Cold Blood which happened to make good use of my Posada font, which many of the artists at the show seemed to have a fondness for. He also had a very impressive double-sided poster for Motorhead done in the style of a playing card, and what was probably the best 3-D poster at the show, a triumph considering how downright nauseating most of the attempts at 3-D poster design on display were.

Also not to be missed were Mig Kokinda's spraypaint and stencil posters, Bryan Mercer's dark fantasy-themed posters for what were mostly obscure metal bands, Lindsey Kuhn's extremely vivid psychedelic and punk rock posters, the highly stylized posters of Furturtle Show Prints, and Nick Rhodes' unique and quirky vintage-look show posters.

Some of those exhibiting were more illustrators selling prints than strictly poster artists, but many of them were very talented, including Diana Sudyka whose work is reminiscent of Edward Gorey, the rather twisted Paul Imagine, and Flynn Prejean whose comic-book style art and posters were pretty eye-catching. Of the artists who were more illustrators than poster designers I think my favorite was David D'Andrea whose work reminded me a lot of the macabre illustrators of the 1920s like Harry Clarke, Frank Pape, and John Austin. He also gets points for a creative use of the Rheingold font which is one of my earliest adaptations of antique wood type.

I found it remarkable how high the quality of the poster designs at Flatstock 24 were. I assume the show was juried, but even so it surprised me that there were so many artists working in such a limited field and doing such excellent work. There was a lot of creativity on display and it was interesting to see how different artists brought together diverse poster design traditions and gave them a contemporary spin. I also liked the fact that so much of the stock was for sale and not just on display and that the prices were reasonably low. Prices were mostly based on rarity, but only a few posters I saw were over $100 and many were under $50.

If you live near a town which has a Flatstock show, take the time to check it out. Seeing them all the time, it's sometimes easy to forget that posters aren't just advertising. They can also be outstanding examples of popular art. So buy a few, frame them, and put them on your walls. There's something for every taste, from hip to humor to horror.

Some of our fonts were particularly popular at the Flatstock show. Surprisingly the one we saw getting a lot of use was Rheingold an older font which is past due for an updating. Also popular were Mucha fonts like Moravia, but unquestionably the most used font, which showed up in poster after poster was our Posada font based on the hand lettering of revolutionary period Mexican pamphleteer and charicaturist Jose Guadalupe Posada.

March 23, 2010 | Filed Under Articles, Found Art | 4 Comments 

The Gargoyles of Penn

On our recent college tour one of the most interesting places we stopped was the University of Pennsylvania. It’s a campus steeped in history, and I expected to see old buildings and hear a lot about Benjamin Franklin. What I didn’t expect was to see one of the most remarkable selections of gargoyles I’ve seen outside of the gothic cathedrals of England, and in a state of preservation which is unequaled among the monuments of the old world because they are so relatively new.

The largest number of these gargoyles can be found on Penn’s Quadrangle, a huge dormitory which is such a bizarre architectural anomaly that it’s worthy of a few comments in its own right. The Quadrangle was built in the early 1900s, but for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, it’s an exaggerated recreation of the Tudor-period architectural style most commonly associated with Hampton Court Palace. It combines a basic facade of red brick with decorative elements carved in soft limestone, including a set of over 150 gargoyles on every topic imaginable.

Hampton Court’s gargoyles are mostly common mythological creatures, but the Quadrangle features a much greater variety covering college life, academic disciplines, various crafts and trades and mythology ranging from the whimsical to the grim and foreboding, including several Danse Macabre themes, angels of death and paganistic foliated heads. Plus there are mermaids, football players, goblins and baseball players, centaurs and professors. It’s a mad hodgepodge which takes hours and a sharp eye to fully appreciate. I wonder if the students living in the dorms in the Quadrangle take them for granted or realize what a marvel they and the building itself are.

The Quadrangle isn’t the only place on Penn campus with gargoyles. Escellent examples appear on some of the older College Houses, and the Dental School building which was built a few years after the Quadrangle has the second largest selection. Its gargoyles include animals and birds and a selection of disturbing representations of people with dental afflictions and various physical deformities.

All of these gargoyles add an element of whimsy to the Penn campus which is very endearing — Franklin was known for his sense peculiar wit and the school he founded seems to have continued that tradition. Penn is an old college in American terms at over 250 years (4th oldest in the nation), but the unusual architecture and features like the gargoyles give it a link to even earlier times which makes you feel like you’re part of history and part of a grand academic tradition going back to the gargoyle-adorned cathedral colleges of the middle ages. Even if you don’t have a reason to be at Penn and just happen to be in Philadelphia, take some time to walk around Penn’s campus and check out the gargoyles. You probably won’t be able to find them all, but you’ll see more than an eyefull.

I had a great set of original gargoyle photos taken with my Pentax D20, but a bad SD card foiled my plans, so I drew these images from several sources. Several came from the Philadelphia Public Art program’s website, which is worth a good long look because Philly has some impressive public art. I also used some photos from a collection you can find on flickr.com. You can also find a fairly complete list of all the gargoyles from the Penn library.

July 6, 2009 | Filed Under Articles, Found Art | 3 Comments 

The Art of Howard David Johnson

Some years ago I had the pleasure of working on some publishing projects with Howard David Johnson a local Austin artist who I met through a mutual friend. He was a classically trained artist who was working as a studio photographer at the time and was interested in getting back into art. I was working as an editor and art director for a couple of different publishing ventures and his style was very compatible with my tastes, so I encouraged him to start doing some illustration work and threw a few small jobs his way. It was at a time when digital art was really coming into its own and I gave him a shove in the right direction with some suggestions of ways he could combine his traditional style and techniques with digital technology and got him started experimenting and discovering things on his own.

It’s now years later and I recently stopped by his website and discovered some impressive new works and really remarkable developments in his skills and technique. He’s living proof that in advanced middle age if the will and imagination are there you really can learn new things and grow creatively. David always had a remarkable facility for copying the style of other artists and illustrators, and was particularly influenced by the great illustrators of the late 19th century and the artists of the pre-raphaelite period. For example, you can see the influence of Millais and Waterhouse in the first and last images accompanying this article. As he began to explore digital media he began combining these classical styles with his interest in photography and digital art to produce mixed media images where elements were hand drawn, scanned and then finished as digital paintings incorporating photorealistic elements and figures based on live models, a technique which proved to be very powerful when combined with the themes of fantasy and mythology which he favors.

His online gallery is a remarkable resource and provides a history of the development of his technique, because many of his works are dated on the site. When I first worked with him there was an awkwardness in how he combined these elements, and sometimes the relative perspective wasn’t quite right or the different textures of hand-drawn elements and digital elements was jarring. By the time of our last collaborations his style had become more integrated, but you could still tell where he was working freehand and where he was working from photos or live models, and in works he did quickly like his illustrations like Reiner Knizia’s game Res Publica he still sometimes lapsed into a kind of two-dimentional cut-out style which was distinctive but less aesthetically pleasing. Then, sometime in 2006, several years after our last involvement he seems to have reached a creative tipping point. Works from that period on show a seamless integration of styles and a fully developed awareness of depth and proportion and lighting. You can tell that he’s still using the same combination of traditional techniques and photorealism, but the two styles have met in the middle, creating works which are realistic but clearly original and stylistically coherent. Many of these are just magnificent, like “Queen Cinderella” (above and left) and “Valkyrie Maiden” (to right), with subtle shading and use of light and a kind of altered realism which is very effective at making the fantastical seem real.

In his latest works he seems to have come full-circle, moving through digital art and returning to traditional media, but bringing his new techniques with him. Some of his most impressive new works like “Circe the Enchantress” (to the left) and “Athene” (top right) are done entirely without digital modification, in pencil and oils on canvas respectively. That he is able to work in both digital and traditional formats and produce such similar results is a truly remarkable commentary on how completely his skills have matured and what a great command he has over his tools. I find “Athene” to be particularly impressive, with the realism of the figure softened enough to fit with the more painterly background, and a really excellent recreation of the style of the pre-raphaelites with a result which reminds me a lot of the work of Sir William Russell Flint.

When browsing David’s art, be forewarned that he does take the occasional foray into the “chicks in chainmail” genre in the tradition of Frank Frazetta and he does have a fondness for beautiful and scantily clad women. The site even includes a section of erotic pin-up art, though he seems to have removed some of the most provocative images. There are also some disturbing religious themes if that kind of thing bothers you — both from a pagan and Christian perspective. He’s been very productive in the last few years and has managed to do detailed illustrations for the major themes of Greek, Celtic and Norse Mythology plus Arthurian legends and elements of other mythologies as well, all included on his website. He also has extensive samples of his fairy and fairytale illustrations included on the site, as well as articles on his technique and some of his subject matter and even a set of short art lessons for beginners. And just to beat my own drum for a second, he uses my font designs extensively on his site, particularly Stonecross, Brandegoris and Durrow.

If it’s not sufficient to view his work on the web — and it really isn’t the ideal format for this sort of detailed artwork — he has collected many of his images into two books which are available for purchase online. One covers mythology and the other covers fairies and fairytales. Original paintings are available for sale and you can also purchase prints of many of his works. And it looks like more and more you’ll be able to see his work on book covers and other publications, because as his work has improved his marketability has also increased and it looks like after years of hard work he may be starting to get some of the attention he deserves. Bravo!

Dave

June 28, 2009 | Filed Under Articles, Found Art, Review | Leave a Comment 

Art Encounters: So Inclined at Middlebury College







One of the stops on our ongoing college tour through the northeast was Middlebury College, a charming little liberal arts college on an enormous campus in northern Vermont. Middlebury has an outstanding academic reputation and is particularly known for its innovative arts programs and immersive language and international studies programs. One of the interesting decisions of the college’s board was to set aside 1% of their endowment for public art projects, with the result that the campus is graced with a variety of interesting art, including some large and very impressive sculptures.

Of these super-sculptures the one which really appealed to my imagination was So Inclined which is installed outside the entrance to the Kevin P. Mahaney Center for the Arts. It basically resembles some sort of primitive village of huts made out of maple and dogwood saplings and branches woven together into shapes resembling the hair of characters from Dr. Seuss in a way which suggests artifice and nature at the same time, as if wind or some other natural force compelled the branches to grow together and twisted them into a shape rather like an organic tee-pee. Each of the structures in the village-like cluster connects to some of the others and has a doorway and some have windows as well. You can go inside the structures and while I was there taking photos I saw a number visiting kids playing inside the structures which are perfect for hide-and-seek.

So Inclined really spoke to my imagination, conjuring up images from the more mystical works of Charles de Lint and Robert Holdstock, or the naturalistic fairy illustrations of Brian Froud. The sculpture is like a village where Froud’s fairies or a stickman from a de Lint or Holdstock story might live. It wasn’t really menacing, but it also brought to mind the use of the woods and thickets in The Blair Witch Project. Not surprisingly it also keys in really well to one of my own recent font designs. So Inclined does in wood very much what I was trying to evoke in the design of my recent Tangle font which also uses the theme of twisted wood.

So Inclined was created on site in September of 2007 by Patrick Dougherty who specializes in these large, stickwork installations and is currently artist-in-residence at the McConnell Arboretum near Sacramento. Samples of his 150 installations can be seen at stickman.com and it is remarkably diverse and creative given the limitations of a medium which essentially consists of nothing more than bent sticks. Dougherty produces clever and inspiring work made doubly appealing by its interactive character and accessibility to children (and playful adults).

June 21, 2009 | Filed Under Found Art | Leave a Comment 

Found Artist: Darren Minke

Earlier this month I got a chance to attend the 31st Annual Old Pecan Street Festival in Austin with my family. It’s a huge street fair with lots of live music and arts and crafts vendors which sprawls down East 6th Street and this year sprawled somewhat over to 7th Street as well. There’s always something new and interesting to see — along with some of the same old junk — and this year as the kids rushed me through everything way too fast, my eye was caught by the work of a local artist named Darren Minke.

The work Minke had on display basically fell into two styles, fantasy paintings done digitally from photographic source material and peculiar stylized images done on laminate siding with wood stain. The former seems to be his main oeuvre, but the latter is what really caught my eye. I suspect I was drawn to the wood stain works because I’ve been working with a lot of laminate siding in remodeling projects I’ve been doing and in finishing out our pool house, where I’ve decided to use laminate siding instead of drywall for a variety of reasons. With that heightened awareness of the medium, I found the work he did with stain to take the grain in the outer veneer of the wood and turn it into the basis for an interesting image. He even uses sheets with different types of wood veneer for variety. Some of the wood-stain pieces are rather abstract, some are more realistic, some are bizarre and grotesque and others are quite attractive. What makes them so interesting is that the nature of the work clearly stems from the grain of the wood, and if there’s an image lurking in the grain then Minke brings it out, but in others he just makes the grain itself into a work of abstract art. I found most of the erotic figures in the stain paintings to be unappealing, but the technique is fascinating regardless of the subject matter.

Minke’s digital art consists of highly modified photographic images with a lot of symbolism and a strong erotic content. Most of the images are of beautiful women, fantasized and combined with symbolic images to represent a mythological or spiritual theme. Some of them are very well done, some are more traditional. Some were quite reminiscent of the work of fellow Austin artist Howard David Johnson with whom I’ve worked on a number of projects over the years, though Minke’s work is more symbolic and less sophisticated than Johnson’s. There’s room for more technical development and sophistication in Minke’s work, but it’s got a strength of vision and a passion which is very appealing. Some of the fantasy pieces are very impressive and his integration of the photographic and illustrative elements is quite good, with an overall result which is both realistic and clearly original and creative.

Minke also does work in other media and custom work on assignment. He does very bold semi-abstract oil paintings, some of which I saw at the festival and more of which are on display on his website. He also does commercial photography and even some rather eerie animation work. He’s a hard working artist with a lot of irons in the fire, but I think he’s one to keep an eye on. His work may not show up at MOMA anytime soon, but that may be more their fault than his. He seems to be doing pretty well selling his originals at fairly respectable prices (I couldn’t justify the price for his wood stain dragon which I really wanted) and I think he has a lot of commercial potential as an illustrator as well. He’s very much an Austin kind of artist, combining high tech and tradition and fantasy with reality.

May 13, 2009 | Filed Under Found Art, Review | Leave a Comment 

It’s Trendy, but is it Art?

Of the various legacies of the Barack Obama presidency, the one which seized the cultural imagination first and may last the longest is the enormously popular poster image created by artist Shepard Fairey. The high-contrast, vertically split image has gone viral on the internet and assumed a place in the visual lexicon of American pop art alongside Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe triptych (from which Fairey kind of stole the design idea) and the Eugene McCarthy dove poster.

Fairey got into a certain amount of trouble for infringing the copyright of an AP photograph he used as a source, but his payback is that everyone on the internet has since pirated his design concept for icons of themselves, their girlfriend or their dog to use on the web as a subtle dig at Obama or a statement of support and conformity.

Making your own Obama poster icon has been made much easier by the folks at Paste Magazine who have provided a handy little Flash tool which will let you take any photo, turn it into an icon in the style of the Fairey poster, tweak it and customize it and add a new slogan to the bottom and make it your own. You can use the tool to parody Obama, iconify anyone or anything else, or convey some more obscure message.

One of my personal favorites is the icon of “TOTUS,” Obama’s teleprompter, but I have to admit to doing a few of my own, including an image of Aleister Crowley titled “Beast” and a couple of myself. It’s kind of seductive in a narcissistic way.

Getting good results from the tool requires a certain amount of practice and it helps a lot to have the right photograph to work from. Some faces just don’t work well at all. My face and to an even greater extent Aleister Crowley’s face have the problem that there are too many light and dark areas and too many variations in shade and angle. Other faces have too little differentiation and just come out kind of one color. It helps to have a high contrast photo and to reduce it to black and white before working with it. Plus you need a knack for pithy one-word tags for your icons.

The idea is kind of fun to play with, but in the 6 months since the election it has really already been done to death. You’re not about to see the icon to the left on my Facebook page. It may be the mark of truly successful pop art that in such a short period it has gone beyond a fad and evolved into a cliche. The fact that Fairey’s design concept can be emulated so effectively by a simple Flash tool raises the question which has plagued pop art since the era of Warhol; it’s trendy and it’s popular, but is it really art?

April 28, 2009 | Filed Under Found Art, Review | 2 Comments 

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    We've done a lot of fonts lately based on antique type and lettering, so here's something brand new, a font designed to look like the output of a rubber stamp. It's in the tradition of our Draughtwork and Roughwork fonts, with a sort of technical look. Stampwork has two versions of the uppercase character set. One set features over and underline artifacts like those produced by the edge of a rubber stamp which is pressed down too hard. The other set is plain. There are also alternative line artifact characters to add variation. Download and try out the free demo version of Stampwork (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.

    Woburn Initials Font

    It's been quite a while since we did an initials font, so here is Woburn, a lovely set of floriate initials based on an early woodblock design which uses late gothic characters and adds nice, clean floral embellishments. As a bonus we've added a full lowercase character set in a compatible style. It also works well in combination with our classic Cymbeline font. Woburn will be added to the next release of our Decorative Initials collection. Download and try out the free demo version of Malvern (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.

    Malvern Font

    Malvern is a new Celtic-style font with upper case letters which are an attractive variant on insular minuscule lettering but with a unique lowercase character set which is stylistically compatible but not really part of the Celtic tradition. It fits well with the style of the fonts from our Celtic Fantasy collection, which it will probably eventually be added to. The uppercase characters are somewhat similar to our classic Durrow font, but with some additional flourishes. Download and try out the free demo version of Malvern (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.

    Orford Font

    Orford is based on samples of hand lettering from a 1693 manuscript collected by Lewis Day in his classic book on historical paleography, Alphabets Old and New. It is stylistically similar to our Allegheny font, but cleaner and clearer. It has characteristic clubbed ascenders on many of the lowercase letters, and alternate versions of a large selection of characters. It's an excellent example of colonial period calligraphy and works quite well as a font. It will eventually be incorporated in an updated release of our Colonial Fonts package. Download and try out the free demo version of Orford (will work on Mac or PC). If you like it you can buy the complete character set with all the extra features from our Ordering Site.

  • Tangle Font

    Tangle is a fun font drawn by hand to have the look of twining vines, reminiscent of a grape arbor in the winter. The inspiration is from my front gate which is twined with an endless tangle of mustang grape vines. It was designed on a whim, but turned out pretty well. It has a full upper and lower case character set, plus numbers and punctuation and special characters. Maybe some clever vintner will notice it and put it to use on a wine label. You can try out the free demo version of Tangle for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the upper case characters. The full version of Tangle is available on our Ordering Site.

  • Valentin Font

    Valentin is an Art Nouveau font with an eccentric, stylized look. It has the same fixed-weight characteristics as Ganelon and Gaheris, but the character forms are dramatically different. It's clean and clear and very readable, very much the kind of lettering you'd have seen on 1920s vaudeville playbills. The graphic with the letter sample to the right isn't part of the font, but seemed to fit stylistically. It's a bit of decorative marginalia from a book illustrated by Clara Peck which is just full of Arthurian theme illustrations and decorative motifs which are going to be included in our forthcoming Arthurian Fonts and Art package. You can try out the free demo version of Valentin for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined version of Valentin is available on our Ordering Site.

  • Posada Font

    José Guadalupe Posada was a Mexican printer, engraver, cartoonist and illustrator of the late 19th and early 20th century who was enormously influential on the development of Mexican Folk art styles which continue today. Posada is best known for his Calavera cartoons and illustrations which satirized his fellow Mexicans as skeletons in the tradition of Dia de los Muertos. Many of Posada's cartoons were published as single-sheet handbills and included original hand-lettered captions and titles in a style reminiscent of period newspaper headlines. We've previously collected many of Posada's Calavera lithographs in our Macabre Fonts and Art Collection and now we're releasing our first font based on Posada's lettering, somewhat unimaginatively tagged with his name. It's a rough and bold all-caps character set with alternative caps on the lower case keys, with an offset positioning which Posada used in a number of his cartoons, as demonstrated in the sample to the right. You can try out the free demo version of Posada for either MacOS or Windows. It features just the characters of the standard set. The full combined version of Posada is available on our Ordering Site.

  • More New Fonts

    To see samples of recent font releases and older demo fonts visit our Featured Fonts Page.


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