Atoms, Motion & the Void: "The Radio Ghost"

The last in the current cycle of Sleeves CD illustrations.

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "The Book of Privy Council"

I can officially allow myself to post to the blog again, since I finally got the next Sleeves piece done, months late!

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "The Numbers Station"

This was a fun one to work on. I was seriously creeped out to research the real-life phenomenon of "numbers stations", mysterious hidden shortwave stations that transmit cryptic codes, presumably for the benefit of spies. ("Lost" drew inspiration from them too, apparently.) There's a lot of youtube clips of recordings of the transmissions--it makes for creepy listening late at night!

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "On the Winning of a Wild Bed"

My latest cover for Sleeves' subscription-only CD series. I'm pleased that the final art is pretty close to what I saw in my head while listening to the story--that almost never happens. I wanted to try something with a whimsical storybook vibe, like Ezra Jack Keats with the added decorative element of the little fairytale images on the bedcover. I'm disappointed I couldn't figure out a way to identify Sherwin with his iconic hat, but it seemed it would make the image too cluttered.



















Just for fun, here's some initial thumbnails I did. I kept trying to come up with an alternate composition, because I thought I wouldn't be able to pull off the one I had in mind. I thought my idea for the bedcover pattern was hopelessly ambitious.






















My rough sketches for the characters on the bedcover...
























...and the final vector art rendering. I could have just sketched these out in photoshop, but I thought they needed the crisp lines that you get with Adobe Illustrator to distinguish them from the main drawing. There's a knight, a dragon, a castle, a princess locked in a tower; then from C.S. Lewis a faun, a lamppost and the White Witch; and it seemed apropos that Alice's rabbit make an appearance. After all my worrying that I would botch this, I knocked out the actual art in an hour or so.

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "The Dinner in the Dark"

An illustration inspired by another of Sleeves' stories, "The Dinner in the Dark". (Full episode list here.)

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "The Three Benches"

Cover art for the first limited-edition CD of my favorite podcast.

Atoms, Motion & the Void: "Sarro's Balloon"

I've been wanting for forever to do a series of illustrations based on my favorite podcast, "Atoms, Motion & the Void", by the brilliant Sherwin Sleeves. This guy is a one-of-a-kind talent: he writes, he voices, he makes music, and he pulls it all together into a singularly haunting listening experience.

The next couple of weekends he's putting up a one-man show in New Hampshire, and I only wish I had the luxury of driving five hours to go see it. But it inspired me to kick out what is hopefully the first in a series of illustrations, this one based on a beautifully sad tale called "Sarro's Ballon".

(iTunes podcast feed here, list of AMV episodes from Sleeves' website here).

UPDATE: Just for shits & giggles, and because I can never leave well enough alone, I took another pass at this incorporating some of the ideas I developed in the later illustrations.

Sleeves

I stumbled across the most marvelous podcast the other day.

Somewhere in the woods of New Hampshire, an elderly gentleman named Sherwin Sleeves sits in a log cabin, murmuring ghost stories in a profoundly resonant, English-accented rumble. Sherwin himself may only be a story--or a ghost, of a kind. But after listening to his work you may find your notions of identity to be... temporarily more fluid.

Since joining the mp3 generation, I've never come across an audio download that held me so spellbound. You have to give Sherwin a little time to work his magic, but trust me, he delivers.

"Atoms, Motion & the Void" episode archive