Letterpress Promo Stickers

So my last project in my intro letterpress class was to make whatever I wanted. I decided to make sticker sheets after looking at my vintage labels book for inspiration. My sketches have been mostly just icon/logo/comics based while I was in class and my professor Bryan was very helpful with critique and suggestions.
Here are the plates from the wonderfully local photoengravers and diemakers at Owosso Graphic Arts:

 To be honest, the offset crazy prints were much more interesting to me. mis-registered things can be really neat. I plan to make more of these sticker sheets in the future and hopefully I can do more designs with more funny awkward themes.
 This weekend, I'm going to the Logan Center at the University of Chicago for the Comics: Philosophy & Practice Conference. Three days of amazing things and I'm definitely going to be scripting/sketching things for future comics/books. Hopefully I'll get to meet some of my idols at this event and even more so, meet fellow cartoonists/artists/illustrators/writers/publishers/etc- all the creative people who make up the industry from what it was to what it is to what it will become.

 I'll be updating more often since the summer has started, so bear with me and the slow updates since I've been working around the Student Exhibition at CCS (Illustration is on the 10th floor and it's open to the public until May 25th). Also a lot of life happened.

If my 3G works in Chicago, I'll be making tweets about my trip and more info about this blog, my art, and the people I meet. Please follow @wudanni if you want.

Always, Forever & Other Lies

I spent forever trying to figure out a title for my book, and came up with this. Still fixing some things to design a cover layout for the book, but these posts keep me motivated to finish this project! :D

More to come!

Thank You/Hugh letterpress project

My "Thank Hugh" cards are done! :)

HUGH is a housewares shop inspired by mid-century design and classic bachelor pad living that brings some old fashioned sophistication to contemporary spaces, a reference to Detroit's heyday and style (the architecture in the D alone is worth a trip!).

Since the success of its pop-up store inception in 2009 and 2010, HUGH has won the Hatch Detroit Competition ($50k 1st place prize!) to become a permanent retail venture right in my Midtown neighborhood, located at the new in-construction Auburn building down in the Cass Corridor area. Currently, HUGH plans to open in the fall after construction completes in August.

For the 3rd project in Letterpress, the goal was to produce something that would require multiple, consistent editions for someone/some place (like a real client job, falling under designing stationary, letterheads, business cards, labels, etc). As a student that now considers Detroit a second home, I wanted to promote HUGH because it represents one of the many positive additions to the development of the city and community.

The editions are done and trimmed, but I want to take this assignment even further in the future. In the process, I learned a lot about proofing. and proofing. and more proofing.

Here are some thumbnails and process shots of my printing. :)

more stuff from last weekend

More from last weekend! :D

This was set up by a former CCS Grad who's now teaching letterpress as well.

Beautiful design work by my friend Jacob at lovio george and their great design team in the Midtown area.

Ethan Nicolle, artist of AXECOP, gave me a free poster and drew a doodle in my sketchbook! :3

I was doodled by Matt Feazell and I drew a doodle of Ron Swanson from Parks & Recreation.

On a more serious note, this was sort of irritating to see at a comics convention. A vendor was selling cheap cardstock prints of DC artwork, directly cropped wrong (probably 'fit to page') and printed off of DC.com or the artists' personal websites. At SDCC, this would never fly because DC has a booth there and can watch copyright infringements like a hawk (no unlicensed goods distributed). Detroit Fanfare's in its 2nd year, and is not associated with the Comic Cons in San Diego and New York. For it to continue (I think it aims to be more about artists and comics), this is something to improve upon. Also the location at Cobo Hall is too spread out and the a/c is super cold.

I did send a note to a great artist I met at SDCC, Dustin Nguyen about this issue (I recognized his work from his blog in the prints), and unfortunately the only thing artists can do is send a cease and desist letter or threaten legal action.

And another book I checked out recently:

I really want to own this book and I highly recommend this to people looking at more graphic/comics approaches to illustration and concepts. Also if you're a fan of retro humor and black comedy, this is a nice book for your coffee table.

"I've been waiting for a book of Mark Newgarden's stuff most of my adult life. Somehow, he managed to retool the basic external elements of cartooning - big noses, panel gags, punch lines - into a sophisticated inner language of uncomfortably familiar self-mocking existential despair. Most everybody knows that 'funny' is really 'misery,' but his stuff gets as close to misery as it can without quite ever touching off the chain reaction that'll make you want to cut your head off - all the while staying hilarious. We 'youngsters' should be paying him reparations for stealing from him for all these years."
- Chris Ware

Detroit Fanfare and Tashmoo Biergarten!

Since school started, I have been super busy everyday working on classwork and student government and NYC trip stuff. I also got a job working as a waitress down the street from my apartment building at Byblos on Wayne State's campus. It's a lebanese restaurant so I tend to smell like chicken shawarma and falafel. Sometimes tabouli too.

That means I have to hold off on major updates and a layout change for this blog until I find some time to do this properly. As in, before October so I don't look unprofessional in front of artists and publishers I swapped cards with at the cons I attend.

This weekend I had the luck to get a free pass to Detroit Fanfare Comic Convention as CCS (College for Creative Studies/my school) had a table at the con for portfolio reviews and recruiting. As I haven't officially gone through Student Ambassador training yet for school info sessions/campus tours, I instead got a chance to see how to run a table at a con.

Thanks to Dave Chow, Zach Ares and Hannah Stockdale!

I got to hang out with Joe Foo, a professor at CCS and the creator of Desmond while he was sitting with another CCS alum, Mike Roll. Joe and Mike's tables were right next to Ethan Nicolle, one of the creators of Axecop (he's the illustrator, his 5 year old brother Malachai writes the stories). I sat in as an advertising asian while bothering them at their tables.

I also got cards from Top Shelf and spent major dough on some swag.... but it was worth it. A rare, out of print, complete 2-disc 20th anniversary Blade Runner soundtrack, digitally remastered and resubtitled 3-disc set of A Better Tomorrow Trilogy in a special boxed package, and an artbook of Yoshitaka Amano's concept art for Final Fantasy. I also got some more art supplies and talked major shop with some comic artists. I will make a separate post about some things I learned and some stuff I drew later this week.

Sunday, I woke up 3 times in the morning before getting up from my couch around noon with Futurama dvds on repeat. Then I went to the opening of this Sunday daytime biergarten in Detroit's West Village called Tashmoo.

The biergarten is open on Sundays for the next few weeks with a rotating menu of local brews and eats. I was really impressed with the crowd the neighborhood event created, and the design branding done by my good friend Jacob Hagen (pictured above) at lovio george communication+design was really sharp.

The end of the night concluded with a short film about the Detroit People Mover (which is finally starting construction to expand down to 8 Mile) and was art directed by Michael Burdick, a CCS Illustration Grad who currently works with Team Detroit. Music in the beginning of the film was from Of Oceans, the solo work of Peter Bosch, a CCS Photography student.