Young George Carlin

This is George Carlin appearing on the Kraft Summer Music Hall show in 1966. He looks nothing like himself!

Hades Art Piece

I'm designing some artwork for my sister's new colorway of yarn, titled Hades. Buy her yarn at Little Red Bicycle on Etsy. The colorway will be deep blue, violet, and charcoal, with specks of red. My task is to create something using those colors and the Greek theme that she can print on her labels.

My initial idea was to do some representation of Hades the god. Hades isn't the most interesting guy to draw, however. He looks like a hippie whose sense of fun and freedom have been seriously bogged down by dead souls and three headed demon dogs.

What's more is that Hades' signature thing in Greek mythology is his helmet of invisibility. No luck right? Additionally, there are fairly memorable modern designs floating around right now. There is the Apocalypto/Bane boss from God of War III:

And everyone's favorite:

Hades from Disney's Hercules movie is popular enough that he's the subject of plenty of fan art (and fanfic). In a word, Hades the character is untouchable.

But reading Greek mythology reveals that "Hades" doesn't simply refer to the god, but also the place. Hades as a place seems like a promising avenue with which to do this piece. Hades is different from Christian hell in atmosphere, but similar in hierarchy. Rather than being full of fire, Hades is misty and gloomy (Wikipedia).

There is Tartarus, an abyss used for torment, the Asphodel Meadows (flower pictured below), which is like earth but worse, and Elysium, where heroes and the virtuous go to die.

Finally, there are five rivers: Archeron of woe, Coctus of lamentation, Phlegethon of fire, Lethe of oblivion, and Styx of hate.

Right now my inclination is to go with a more abstract theme. Hades is a place vague enough to be thought of in lines and colors, symbols and shades. There is at once a transitionary aspect of Hades, from Tartartus to Elsyium, and a stark divisionary aspect of Hades, in the five rivers.

I always sketch first, this is my initial sketch:

This idea focuses on the rivers, which I will color according to the colorway my sister is working with.

Because I am focusing so much on color, I brought the design process into Illustrator. I'm experimenting with this tool called the Color Scheme Designer to pick colors to play around with:

This is the palette I've made for the project. Let's see if this thing holds up.

I figure that since this is a simple concept that depends more on accurate spacing etc I will use Illustrator for the project. Here is my first go at it:

This concept remains true to my original idea, but it is obviously not enough. While the rivers look like pieces of yarn, this doesn't really say "hell" or have dark aspects the way that it should. I have added red accents with Illustrator brushes that both make the piece look darker and express the flowing of rivers. I have also used art brushes on the borders of each color to make them grittier.

It needs more, though, so I am going to move it to photoshop to give it some more detail.

Additionally, I ended up changing every single one of the colors I had used from the Color Scheme Designer. I suspect that the tool is not for people who do design but for people who just want a quick color scheme.

This is what I came up with. I created a pattern that looks something like flaking paint or wood and overlayed it as a screen on top of the existing art. I think it adds a necessary element.

As a final touch I have put the names of the rivers in Greek below each one and cleaned up my pattern a bit:

I am not entirely sure about the names below the rivers, but I think that adding the names in Greek puts the piece back into context of Greek mythology while also giving it a strangely museum-art vibe.

Sephora Photoshop Fail

Clone tool.

Generation X Review

So the first artist I ever got into was probably Billy Idol. I know I'm not a girl and I know it's not the 1980s, but this guy is great and listening to his music again is cathartic. All the excitement of being in 7th grade and none of the embarrassment. I recently got into Generation X, the punk band he was in before he went solo.

Generation X is an original, 1976 punk rock band. I think they always got flack because they would play more pop stuff than others, but where are those other bands now?

Listen to this band, there's some great gems in these albums.

Generation X - Generation X

There were times when I was listening to this when I felt like I was listening to Green Day, and then I remembered that Green Day did their thing 15 years after these guys. "Ready Steady Go," "Kiss Me Deadly," "Your Generation" and "One Hundred Punks" stand out. I don't want to say the rest of the tracks are bad, but they're really similar to one another. You might not realize what song you're actually listening to.

Valley of the Dolls - Generation X

This is Generation X's best album. You can hear the band exploring like a lot of their self-destructing punk contemporaries never did. "Night of the Cadillacs" is hard rock. "Valley of the Dolls" is post-punk on the verge of new wave, and "The Prime of Kenny Silvers" 1 & 2 are songs I'd expect from The Who.

That said, "Running with the Boss Sound," "King Rocker" and the rest of the bunch are great punk music. "King Rocker" is something like "Ready Steady Go," at least in energy and awesomeness.

I don't really understand why this album isn't more popular than it is. Maybe "London Calling" was all the pop punk 1979 could take. I'd say this matches that album creatively, even if Idol's sneer couldn't match Joe Strummer's charm.

Kiss Me Deadly - GenX

This was released with a new version of the band, so it's got some pointless filler that I skip over every time I listen to this. But listen to "Untouchables," "Heaven's Inside," the live version of David Bowie's "Andy Warhol," and, of course, "Dancing With Myself" and you don't need to wonder why Billy Idol was such a success in the '80s. This is dancy goodness.

"Andy Warhol (live)" demonstrates what set GenX apart from other punk rockers, that they could listen to other genres (like The Clash did), and that they were willing to go back to the pre-punk scene forbidden by punk's declaration of 1976 as "Year Zero." "Andy Warhol" from Bowie's "Hunky Dory" is a great track, but this cover is so much better, with enough raw energy to do the song's guitar riff justice.

These are my favorites:

"One Hundred Punks"

"Ready Steady Go"

"Kiss Me Deadly"

"Your Generation"

"Running with the Boss Sound"

"King Rocker"

"Valley of the Dolls"

"Paradise West"

"English Dream"

"Dancing with Myself"

"Untouchables"

"Heaven's Inside"

"Triumph"

"Andy Warhol (live)"