Animal Collective (the band behind my favorite album of the year) just put out a five-song EP, Fall Be Kind. You can check out the cover art on the link there. I’m not a huge fan of blurry photography. So I made my own.

It’s a little retro, probably much more so than Animal Collective goes for on a day-to-day basis. But it was a fun exercise in Photoshop/Illustrator.

I drew the original in sharpie, which you can find after the jump.

So I drew that freehand, and then colored it digitally. I was trying to emulate Chris Ware’s style, especially the following cover:

(Images taken from the Carl Hammer Gallery’s website). Gotta love Ware! I was also trying not to incorporate outlines into the drawings, which I think succeeded in some parts (the trees) but could have been helpful with the text. Anyway, I just want to get past this without anyone suing me for copyright issues. But I think I’m in the home clear. Adios.

It’s about time for a new Lenny Dee-shirt! You can find the old, inferior one here. The new, improved one is below:

Here’s the front:

Aaaand the back (an inspirational quote):

New shirts are always exciting! Sorry for the late post but not the exclamation points! Catch you next week!

Lenny Dee commentary is coming, and probably soon. But since classes are finally starting to wrap up, this weekend is very busy for me and I don’t have the time to spend on Dee-rector commentary that I wish I had. So instead: a short update.

Last weekend Tim (my partner in Dee-recting for four wonderful shows) directed a play by the name of Los Politicos, written by visiting instructor José Ovejero. It was en español (in Spanish), so I probably understood a good thirty to forty percent of it, having not taken Spanish for four years. Tim asked me to design a poster for the show, and what I gave him was this:

I hadn’t done much poster design in a while, and though I prefer working with physical materials, it was pretty fun to make this one. The two actors on the right portrayed the right-wing politician, while the two on the left, the left-wing. The overall design concept was having the two politicians separated, which I chose to do by extending down the “IT” in “politicos.”

This was the design I submitted for my sketch comedy group, Lenny Dee. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s supposed to be Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, villain of the Coen brothers’ 2007 film No Country For Old Men. Lenny Dee doesn’t have much to do with Chigurh, except that we all find him pretty badass and thought that it would be great to have such an intimidating face on our T-shirts, especially for the annual sketch comedy vs. improv softball game.