Digitalcasm show poster

"On strange steeples, I stare at the silent square stars and moon.."

My ole creative cohort Abel Steans (aka 'Digitalcasm') will be having a show at a local coffeehouse in Long Beach called Viento y Agua. It's a smaller venue, but a great place for indie artists with a real cozy vibe. I've found musical talents I never would have heard of through the performances they have here. Great ice-blended coffees served in nifty jars too! Makes me want to catch fireflies (if only there were real...)

Aboot the poster:

One of my go-to artistic inspiration bookmarks I have on my browser is for Drawn.ca. I first saw this awesome little animated short on there called "MARS!" by Joe Bichard. I really dug the analog sounds and simple designs they used. 'Digitalcasm' has a decidedly 8-bit influence so I imagined there would be no better fitting shape than a square pixel hanging in the sky. And of course another short, "PIXELS", (which I heard is going to turn into a feature?) has made quite the splash. These are some neat ideas to play with now that our sophisticated machines can produce pretty much any type of graphics, we look backwards to remember fondly our bygone roots~

[EDIT: added the initial sketches!]

I decided not to pretty-up this scan and leave the sketchbook page as is... I've seen a few artists do this and thought it looked neat-- a certain honesty to it. Plus showing these will make me more mindful of composition on an analog page (as opposed to endless tweaking on Photoshop~)

I came up with these at a coffeeshop if you can't tell and the sketch of the guy did start off from an authentic, accidental spill.

The show is Fri. July 9th. Abel will astound with his amazing business card/sample track CDs and I'll have 11x17" prints of the poster available!