::: CHRISTOPHER SILAS NEAL, ART AND ILLUSTRATION :::

8 / 2008

Lincoln, Obama, The Op-ed

As many of you may have heard, Brian Rea is leaving his position as art director of the New York Times Op-ed section. I've enjoyed working with him these past couple of years. I recently had the honor of working on his last page at the Times.

The piece, written by Doris Kearns Goodwin, recalls Lincoln's bipartisan cabinet split between Democrats and Republicans and, considers whether Obama could do the same today. Lincoln's cabinet is described as heated and sometimes vicious in debate but ultimately very effective in decision making. One of their greatest achievements being the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Kim Bost, assistant art director, sent me an old portrait of Lincoln and his cabinet as visual inspiration. Kim and Brian thought that a lion tamer was a good analogy for the President's role in managing the very strong headed, bipartisan cabinet.

In addition, I thought there may be a nugget of an idea in some of the old emblem and insignia designs from the era. I also thought fighting eagles conjured up the feeling of the cabinet's debates.

Here were my sketches:

Brian and Kim really liked the idea of the presidential portrait with two fighting eagles (see top sketch) but as it turns out, the Times was running another Illustration of mine that Sunday in my weekly column, "Modern Love", that also featured a framed silhouetted portrait. So, in the end we decided that the lion tamer would be the best direction.

I found a few old lion illustrations as inspiration.

In addition to the whip turning into a swash, I wanted to incorporate other design elements that spoke to government during that era hence the scroll, stars and eagle. Overall though, I tried to keep everything loose by letting go a portion of the literal "big idea" function of illustration and focusing more of my attention on self expression and making an intriguing visual piece. It's something Rea always encouraged and I think sometimes makes for more interesting art.

And the final:

4 / 2008

José González at The Fillmore

I recently started working with the Fillmore again which I'm really excited about. The posters we did in 2005 and 2006 are some of my favorite pieces. This work really encompasses everything I do as a visual artist; coming up with ideas, making illustration, working with typography and designing the final piece.

Art director, Arlene Owseichik asked me to create a poster for José González. His music is really great. I had first heard José González while working on a poster for Zero 7 a few years back. He was on the bill as an opening act.

González has a nice website with a full list of lyrics and a catalogue of music videos. I started here for my inspiration. My initial reaction after listening to the music is that the imagery should be melancholy, ethereal, slightly psychedelic and possibly involve some kind of night time imagery. The music videos on his site echoed my initial thoughts. They are indeed ethereal and a few of the videos feature night time scenery. Teardrop is animated and has a bible school/educational video/post-apocalyps/psychadelic vibe. Several of the of videos feature a half pig, half man creature who camps alone in a forrest at night and rides a motorcycle. The biography on the website mentions an interest in biology and the title of his latest album, In Our Nature suggests an exploration of human nature and the natural order of our environment. Considering all of these things, I thought that I could perhaps incorporate a pig into the poster. A simple and serene act such as a mother feeding her pups, for me, evokes a comparison between human nature and animal nature.

A fun image but, I felt it wasn't really right for this poster.

Though the videos were a great starting point for getting into the world of José González, I wanted to bring my own perspective into this piece and decided not to purposely incorporate any past band imagery. In fact, I wanted to do something that might be considered part of the same family but completely different from what was done before. In most cases, my posters have very little to do with any existing band imagery and simply exist on their own as a piece of ephemera unique to the band's single performance at the Fillmore. I left the pig idea behind.

I was still convinced that some sort of night time scenery accompanied by a solo figure or object would really capture the vibe of the music. At the same time, I had several samples of botanical drawings and floral photography hanging up in the studio for another job that was eventually killed.

The combination of the two things, night and flora resulted in the following sketches.

Arlene and the booker at the Fillmore liked the guy in the chair so we decided to take the first sketch to final.

While thinking about how to create the night sky for the poster, I remembered a music video from my teenage years, Smashing Pumpkins, Tonight, Tonight, the 90's alt-rock video inspired by Georges Melies's silent film A Le Voyage dans la lune. Some of the color palette from this video made it into my poster, I think...

Georges Melies...

I usually hand letter all of the type for the Fillmore posters but for this one, I wanted to try something different. I found a few typefaces in a dover catalogue that I scanned in, modified and set as the final type.

And here's the final result.

8 / 14 / 07

New York Times Book Review

I've done three jobs now for Nicholas Blechman at the New York Times Book Review. All have been fun and turned out really great. Blechman just recently took over the Book Review after Steve Heller stepped down. He has really done a lot with the Book Review and uses some of my favorite artists.

This assignment was a review of Jane O'Connor's "Dangerous Admissions, Secrets of a Closet Sleuth". The book reviews are generally short and very distilled which is nice because it saves me the time of having to cut through a lot of text to find some kind of meaning or metaphor. The book is about a copyeditor and divorced mother of two who gets caught up in a murder mystery at her son's prep school. One aspect of the story I found interesting is that the main character utilizes her skills as a copyeditor to solve the mystery. I wanted to do something with typography to illustrate a copyeditor's ability to sift through scores of letters, words and symbols to find hidden problems or in the case of the main character, to find clues.

After a few really bad sketches that I didn't even bother to scan, I had an idea. Keyboard art (images created with letters and symbols). I later discovered this was called "ACSII Art". I thought I'd give it a go at my own ACSII art by making a gun out of letters. I initially created the gun with question marks.

The question marks didn't feel quit right so, I decided to mix in various other characters. I set the type in Century Schoolbook. After I was satisfied that I could actually make a somewhat readable ACSII gun, I sent sketches over to Nicholas.

He liked the one with the girl.

After the piece printed, I ended up getting a call from the author, Jane O'Connor, which made my day. She was really pleased and thought the illustration was perfect for the review.

Thanks Jane. Best of luck with your new book!

7 / 5 / 07

Dwell

One of my latest assignments came from Suzanne LaGasa at Dwell Magazine. They needed illustrations for their essay section. This story is an autobiographical tale written by Davy Rothbart of Found magazine. When Rothbart published his first book, he decided to pass on Simon and Schuster's mini book tour and instead schedule his own cross country tour powered by an old van. A good friend joined him along the way. His essay focuses on the challenge of living out of a van, the interesting and unconventional living spaces he encounters on tour and finally, finding meaning and importance in your own home.

I'm not used to narrative illustration assignments but thought this piece was a good fit for my work. I focused on four events from the story: an opener showing the van and speaking to the idea of visiting various homes, a church converted into a micro cimena, peeing into someone's yard, and finally, crashing on a stranger's couch only to wake up to a dead cat.

Dwell decided to pass on the dead cat sketch but thought the rest were good. I went right to final and also came up with a fourth illustration to close the piece.

6 / 5 / 07

Nickelodeon

About a month ago, Nickelodeon called me to create some on-air re-branding for the Nick Jr. channel. The job fell through. I was kind of bumbed. Then just two weeks later, they called back with another on-air job for Nick Jr. The plan was to run a long segment of TV based on fairytales. It seems a lot of Nick Jr. TV shows have had a fairytale based episode at one time or another. Nick wanted to run these shows back to back as a special feature. They needed me to help create a few spots to advertise the program.

Art Director Jennifer Cast at Nick was hoping I could create a few borders or backgrounds that could house clips of the TV shows as well as some type. She sent a few images as inspiration.

I thought it would be fun to not only try borders but also something scenic with enough white space to function as a border.

The feedback from Jennifer was really great. She liked all of them. We discussed combining a few elements and adding more space for content. Based on our conversation, we went right to final. After I finished the first piece, I sent in a lo-res. She thought the color was a bit too dark.

I adjusted my color palette a bit and finished the other pieces.

Jennifer laid down some sweet typography and sent it over to Christopher Papa, motion graphics designer at Nick, to edit the work into a TV spot. He did an amazing job!

Here's the finished TV spot with sound.

Final Spot
(Quicktime file, 4mb)