Tuesday Digital Doodle • Type of the Living Dead

Affinity recently updated their whole suite of desktop publishing applications to version 2.4 so I’ve been trying to catch up with some of the new features of these programs. I’ve been mostly playing with Affinity Designer which is their vector art program. I have used a number of other vector art programs like CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator, but Affinity’s is my absolute favorite. It’s what I’ve used to produce the Halloween Heads and my recent School Days illustrations. Recently I have been playing with type and textures which brings us to today’s post.

With the release of the new version of the Affinity suite comes a boatload of video tutorials that I am getting caught up on. At the beginning of the digital desktop revolution, one would have to rely on the massive instruction manual that came with a particular program or wait for one of those “Up and Running with…” books to be published in order to learn what to do. Now there is an army of amateurs and pros throwing their video “how-to’s” at the internet for free. I took a look at a number of videos familiarizing myself with what’s new and played with some of my old photos along with stuff cribbed from the internet.

Back when I was attending the Philadelphia College of Art, I was chided by more than one professor for dwelling on morbid or horrific subject matter as far as my illustration and design work was concerned. I guess they thought I would never get hired based on a portfolio built from my school work — not that I had any intention of building a portfolio from my school work. My school work was tentative and slapdash, and I was a complete disaster with wet media at the time. My true learning was to come after I left school. I assembled a more accessible portfolio filled with cartoons and editorial illustrations, and I soon found freelance work. The lesson was to give the client what they asked for, and if they were happy, they invited you back. I was invited back.

I never produced the work that teachers seemed to prefer, and I was never sure what they preferred. They always seemed to be somewhat obtuse and would rarely ever offer a definitive opinion. Maybe I am stupid, but I had a hard time translating their mewling utterances into colloquial English. I wasn’t raised on a farm. I never took nature hikes. I didn’t know who Beatrix Potter was. I grew up watching cartoons, praying that a Phillies game wasn’t going to preempt Dr. Shock and essentially basking in trash. When I was little, there was a cardboard box filled with comics that I would regularly flip through drinking in each panel. If I was really bored, I would leaf through a massive Philadelphia Yellow Pages fascinated by the exterminator ads featuring colossal cockroaches, towering termites and ravenous rats as well as the auto body ads featuring wrecked cars. I loved the combination of black ink on that terrible yellow newsprint. I loved trash. Yeah, I was a weird kid, and I probably should have gone outside to touch grass.

I’m still that weird kid. When I’m not working for a client, the old monster and horror stuff exudes from me as I doodle. I guess some things never change. Sometimes I wonder if it is like dreams. I always thought that dreams were a way to deal with the collected clutter gathering dust within our skulls. Maybe I am shaking up this dust, and it ends up on either the literal or virtual page.

Some things never change. Over my head is a Zombie type treatment I did in a design class back in 1982. I remember my teacher being less than enthused. I liked it.

Stay tuned for more doodles as well as finished work!