More Pieces!

Here is another piece of art I created for the OilCan Drive books. I was looking for a stylish way of featuring each issue's number and I thought a guitar running along each book's spine would work great.

I chose to base the art on a Gibson Es-335 style guitar. Of course, I fattened it a bit but the symmetrical style of the ES-335's body served my needs perfectly. And, instead of muddying the art up with strings (although I did try that out), I chose to put a racing stripe down the body to keep the neck's natural lines through out the piece. Add the issue number of each book to the lower body and the design is complete.

I started to draw this guitar by hand but, after a few false starts, decided to give my old school inner artist a rest and design the whole thing on the computer. So, a bit of work in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and the piece is more symmetrical and cleaner than anything I could do by hand. When I first started using the computer I thought it would eat my artist's soul but now it's just another tool among many I use to get the job done.

While I'll be using this on the mini-comics I plan to put out, I originally had the idea of the guitar on a graphic novel's fat spine. Something about the spine of each book being taken up by the guitar's neck, body, racing stripe, and number really appeals to me.

Now, I just need to draw enough pages of story to fill a book enough to deserve a fat spine. One step at a time, one step at a time...