John Craig

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THE SMASHING PUMPKINS' career-defining 1995 double album MELLON COLLIE & THE INFINITE SADNESS has earned Diamond certification for sales of 10,000,000 discs and digital equivalent per disc. This news comes in the midst of EMI Music's extensive reissue campaign honoring the legacy of the iconic alternative band. It continues December 3 with the PUMPKINS' fourth album MELLON COLLIE & THE INFINITE SADNESS receiving the fully remastered treatment for the first time. This follows last year's acclaimed reissues of the band's groundbreaking first two albums, Gish (1991) and Siamese Dream (1993), as well as this past summer's Pisces Iscariot (1994). (PRNewsFoto/EMI Music)

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I came across an image of a collaged galaxy on Pinterest while researching ideas for my new tattoo and subsequently pinned it. Sometimes you see an image/artwork and you feel =a sense of familiarity… like you’ve seen something like it before. Anyway that bugged me and I couldn’t really find the artist who made it. Pinterest doesn’t really give proper credits for images. Later on, I collected some more images for my illustration references and I found out at last who made that fantastic galaxy collage. The illustrator is John Craig, who was the designer for one of my favourite albums Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by the Smashing Pumpkins. It’s a gorgeous album, a two-CD set with the themes night and day, so throughout the album art design, there are lots of planetary/astronomy references. I would say John Craig’s style is quite similar to Eduardo Recife: think vintage, ephemera collages. Craig’s stuff is slightly more surreal and kitschy.

I’m including him as a reference for my illustration. In terms of composition, I might go with a montage. John Craig’s collages look like they are composed using kitschy, dollar stickers and I quite like that look. My illustration style is quite feminine and pretty, and while it’s not necessarily a bad thing, I feel it might be rather predictable and safe. Boring even. Also, keeping in line with my main ideas of remixing and deconstructing, I’m also thinking about how I can bring that to my illustrations.

More analog zines

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Recipes I Love by Leanna Perry

Came across this project and I love the style of it. I’m still interested in this whole idea of using low-fi, analog methods to create a good piece of publication and this is another good example. Leanna Perry came across an old-school cookbook in her local bookstore, and she decided to ‘remix the book’, by giving it her magical kitschy touch. This reminds me of these Barbie magazines I kept when I was a little girl. I wish I still kept them now. Those magazines were made up of activities, like teaching you how to throw a slumber party, complete with some kid-friendly recipes, and even included some floral/Barbie logo templates you could trace and cut out as decoratives. Those were brilliant. Similarly in Leanna’s project, there’s this fun, DIY quality that is more nostalgic than Pinteresting.

 

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Here’s another zine made by Perry. Again, there’s a childlike, nostalgic quality to this style of design, photocopied mistakes, large areas of ink and gradient, cut & pasting, and those colourful motifs seem like stickers. Love it!

World of Lumpy Space

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Particularly find this episode of Adventure Time really beautiful. Slowly compiling these screen grabs to use as reference when it comes to compositions and colour palettes, especially the rendering of background.

Princess Bubblegum

 

 

 

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Trying my hand at digital illustration, I might want to do a big illustration piece that is influenced by Internet art culture.

Here’s an attempt at humanising Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Time. Did the drawing on paper, scanned and Image Trace-d it. I’m quite bad at colouring though. Might go black & white, or try and get better at it.

 

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