Commission: Old Nerds Drinking

This is a commission I created a year ago for my friend Roejen –whom I first met at the first ParaMania gathering in Texas back in 2016 (holly hell does time fly!)– and his buddy John, who was setting up a podcast called Old Nerds Drinking (whose theme is pretty self explanatory).

I came up with the idea of using the old D20 dice as an ice cube (make that, ice icosahedron, amirite fellow Geometry geeks?) inside an old fashioned whiskey glass for the logo of the podcast, but unfortunately John pointed out that gimmick had already been used elsewhere. He specifically requested the Podcast title mimicking the classic Jack Daniels label, and instead of making it all nice and purdy with a vector-based design program –for all of you unfamiliar with computer design tools, a vector image is one which you can make as big or small and you want without losing any resolution, whereas raster images (think Photoshop) will eventually start to pixelate if you increase their size too much– I chose to go ‘old school’ and trace all the fonts manually to give it a rough appearance, which was further emphasized by passing through all the elements with a texturized eraser tool –there are many other ways to achieve that effect, including applying a clipping mask over the layer using Photoshop.

As for the banner image at the top of this post, the streaky background was a sort of homage to the cool Japanese product design renderings I used to admire when I was in college. Back in those days computer graphics were still in their infancy, and if you wanted to create a decent-looking illustration the easiest and fastest way to do it was with markers. They were relatively easy to handle and quick to dry, and combined with pastels or pencil colors you could do a lot of cool effects with them.

I kinda miss working with those ‘traditional’ art tools but when I see the price tag of Copic markers, I remember why I embraced computer graphics with arms open…

Old-school marker rendering. Notice how in this example the artist failed to control the ‘bleeding’ of the ink outside the border line. One effective way to avoid this was to simply cut the object with a sharp X-acto knife and paste it on a different piece of paper –preferably a colored paper with a nice texture.

Remember, commissions are still open –although if our soon-to-be-announced project is successful, maybe not for too long!