Chuck Rekow

Happy New Year!

2012-01-22T16:34:00.001-08:00

Had a little time for doodling this afternoon. I've always wanted to sketch my own version of a Chinese Dragon. Now I just want to make more.

Tonight ends the year of the rabbit and begins the year of the dragon —the luckiest symbol of the zodiac. In Chinese tradition, dragons are charismatic, aggressive and succeed at everything they do.

almost everything.

Here are a couple more:

Hahana Beach

2011-08-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

This logo was one of the more exciting projects I worked on last year.

Hahana Beach is a local restaurant, a bar and the premier venue for professional sand volleyball in Cincinnati. I was brought on by Parkey Design to inject some personality and primal savagery to their identity. Together we combed through images of retro tiki signage, tribal tattoos and authentic artifacts from all over the South Pacific.

The client wanted to include a sun/moon motif to emphasize the fact that Hahana Beach caters to leagues during the day and only gets livelier when the sun goes down.

My favorite attempts were based on Maori facial tattoos and had a real savage quality to them, I thought they were very descriptive of sand volleyball —especially the spiking.

After the logo was finalized, I was asked to design their menu —a rewarding task which allowed me to use some of the Oceanic design elements that didn't make it in the logo.

The menu has been changed a bit since it's creation. You can view the current version here.

Hahana Beach opened on Wooster Pike late last summer. Check them out now, and you can say you ate there during their first full season!

Sleeping Bear

2011-07-18T11:48:00.001-07:00

I recently finished another shirt design for Troop 820. (This year they are going to Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan.) I felt that including an actual sleeping bear was too obvious, but I didn't want to omit it either, so I made him drooling (a bit obvious again).

Once I came up with the utterly infantile idea of fish being lured away from the standard bait by the bear's dribbling loogie, I knew I was done.

Here's a page of brainstorming thumbnails:

More sketching and exploring the right expression on the scout.

final composite sketch:

Once again, I'll leave with a hearty recommendation for the

T-shirt Co. They always do a fantastic job!

Hairy Potter

2011-07-15T08:13:00.001-07:00

I wasn't sure I'd ever get around to posting this, but Potter-mania caught up with me.

This is a cartoon I did for the Spring issue of California Magazine. They have a running feature called "Twisted Titles" where they invite readers to put a spin on a well-known book, and then they pay illustrators to pile on added snarkiness. The winning title was Hairy Potter —Hippie Ceramicist. A parody of Ghost was indefensible yet inescapable. I just needed the perfect fill-in for Sam. Dobby seemed a natural choice —he has Swayze's eyes.

Here are some sketches:

First take: Harry as a stoner-type. I rejected this one myself.

concept 2:

Obviously, you can't do a tiki mug on a spinning pottery wheel, but who cares. Who wouldn't want a Voldemort tiki-mug?

Here's the chosen concept:

fixed up a bit:

The final page (click to enlarge):

The Smartest Things...

2011-02-03T17:24:00.000-08:00

Last summer I had the privilege of illustrating a book of quotes for Reader's Digest entitled The Smartest, Funniest, Dumbest Things Ever Said.

Each category got it's own chapter and each chapter was introduced by a humorous 2-page illustration. For the "smartest" chapter, I turned to the old cliche of the wise sage sitting upon a mountaintop, and explored the possibilities of rival seats of wisdom in the same range of mountains.

Mountainscapes are a joy to compose with. You can push and pull them around at will. No wonder Eastern painters used them so much.

The sketch above came together pretty quickly and was approved without much ado. I was sure I happened upon that rare instance where the idea simply "draws itself".

But as I progressed to the final rendering, I hit a block.

The main character was coming out less appealing than what I was hoping for.

I tried re-drawing several times, adjusting the facial expression slightly, while sticking roughly to the sketch. He kept coming out stiff and lifeless.

My intent was always to make the Confucian sage a bit more stoic and reserved than the rest, and I wanted the contrast to be pronounced. I had done some visual research, which told me that a stylized, symmetrical sage with broad shoulders would be a-propos.

Whether my rationale was correct or not, I was losing steam and tightening up. In frustration I ditched the research, put aside the sketch and just sketched a jolly man in traditional costume from memory, concentrating on creating a lively, likable personality.

A bit stereotypical perhaps, but once I loosened him up, it was fairly easy to transpose those energetic curves into just the sleeves of his robe, thus preserving the dignified demeanor the illustration required. The subtle expression change and the slight twist of his head, turned him from a meditating machine to a confident thinker —undeniably aware of who his competiton is.

Here's the final page:

Gators and Tikis

2010-11-21T16:37:00.000-08:00

A fun project came my way last spring. I was hired to help a local entrepreneur with a logo for a restaurant with a tropical theme. The project took several twists and turns with many name changes along the way —due mostly to the frenzied timeline the project was under.

I'm happy to say that I did take the logo to it's finished form, and it came out fine —although far less kitschy. I hope to post it at a later date. In the meantime, I'll share some of my favorite critters I've met along the way.

Happy Birthday, Carol!

2010-11-13T06:16:00.000-08:00

This is a relative quickie that I did for my daughter's birthday. She requested a hamster and unicorn. My first impulse was to to explain to her that unicorns and hamsters don't go together.

I was forgetting the cardinal rule of artists and children.

With children, everything goes together. It's the artist's job to deal with it, until the kid is proven correct.

Mammoth Cave

2010-08-04T12:18:00.001-07:00

This is a t-shirt design I created last month for my cousin's Boy Scout outing to Mammoth Cave. I had some fun creating it, and I'm waiting to post some commercial work, so I'll add some background info. about the process.

First comes the brainstorming and the sketches. I knew before I started that I was going to print a light color on a dark shirt, and that flashlights would be involved. I also knew that Mammoth Cave has nothing to do with the woolly creatures, but I've never been one to pass down the chance to draw a weird extinct animal, so I started with this:

This sketch was the first idea that entered into my head, and it was quickly obvious to me that it was too wordy and complex to make an effective design. I thought it was funny, so I sketched it up anyway, quickly hashing in some copy.

I then tried a simpler mammoth sketch. This was probably my favorite concept, and compositionally, I think it's the strongest. Even though the sketch is really rough, I felt it had a great deal of potential.

the sketch below was the one the scouts picked. —and in retrospect, a great choice.

I sometimes worry that my humor will be seen as trivializing the target audience, and let's face it —I am. Luckily, teenage boys have a sense of humor about themselves, so this concept moved on.

Once the basic idea was established, The first thing I had to do was get used to seeing the art as it would be printed: light-on-dark. A few minutes on Photoshop got me this:

Finally satisfied with the sketch, I started rendering the final art.

Some details were changed when I rendered the figures: I pushed the lankier kid behind the pudgy one and tilted him a bit toward the center.

Then I scanned in the new art and turned my focus to the text, attempting to replicate the type on the cave ceiling.

I played around with several creepy fonts, and applied a 3-D rotating filter to the type until I felt I had something appropriate. I was happy to arrive at a configuration that improved upon the sketch, even though that meant re-drawing some of the image to get it to work.

I also used the computer to add the goofy shadows to the kids' faces. I was a bit apprehensive about killing the kids' facial expressions, but I felt that the shadows added a lot to the humor, so I went ahead.

With the artwork 90% complete, I tried some color variations, exploring some trendier color combos before deciding that an acid yellow-green on plain black served the artwork best.

Before releasing the art, I added shadows to the stalactites in the foreground, re-drew the beams from the flashlights, and made some subtle changes to the bat.

That's about it —the final image is at the top of the post.

In parting, I'd like to give a plug to The T-shirt Company in Cincinnati who did a fantastic job with the printing. Thanks, Tim!

Doodles

2010-01-07T12:18:00.001-08:00

I was stranded in a waiting room at a service station for two hours yesterday. I brought a book and my favorite quad-pad and spent the whole time doodling.

I can't say every one of these sketches is a gem, but I like several of them , and the page as a whole has a lot to say about my personal approach to sketchbook-keeping —I don't keep one. I do keep a click-pencil handy though, and prefer to draw on whatever substrate is at hand. Ironically, the best ideas tend to show up on the most unlikely scraps. When something strikes me as interesting, I cut it out and pin it to a board in my studio. (These very pages will be sliced and edited in a day or two.)

Giraffe

2009-12-29T19:52:00.000-08:00

This is a (relative) quickie I did earlier this month. I think it's the first time I've created a piece of art to be simply hung on a wall. It's also a rare instance in which the first sketch and final art all occurred on the same piece of paper. Usually I have 12 sketches for each final piece. When this went out the door, it left hardly a trace behind. Thank God for scanners.

From the Brains of Babes

2009-10-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

In September, I created this half-page illustration for California Magazine. It accompanied an interview with Alison Gopnik who was discussing her new book "The Philosophical Baby".

My first instinct was to show an x-ray of a baby's brain, and the humor would come from all the crazy stuff packed within. This solution has the added benefit of letting the baby and the reader in on the joke, while leaving the medical profession somewhat in the dark.

Here is the original sketch, with physics equations.

Here is a second concept with a focus more on philosophy. I spent more time figuring out what to call this baby, than I spent naming my own children.

The editor liked the first option, but wanted to take the text from sketch two to shift the emphasis to philosophy. Sometimes playing mix 'n match with sketches gets dicey, but she was absolutely right. I gotta say that coming up with the infanto-aphorisms on the wall was half the fun.

Smart Seal

2009-09-23T06:31:00.001-07:00

This is a trademark character I created several years ago for a line of pool coating products.

When doing characters like this, I'm working in that grey area between illustrator and graphic designer, and it often becomes necessary to deviate from my typical style. In this case, the end-user is a contractor and predominantly male , so it wouldn't do to create anything that evoked cereal boxes or TV animation. I drew inspiration from industrial-looking characters from the 40's and 50's, and went heavy on the black.

Here are some early sketches:

At the eleventh hour, some concerns were raised about the design of the seal's face. Fortunately, the budget allowed for some experimentation. Number two below was chosen and then revised somewhat to arrive at the final character.

The response to the designs once implemented, was very positive, and I created three more versions of the seal in various poses. I give a great deal of credit to designer Cheryl Smith, who was fabulous to work with. She even provided me with the exquisite image at the top.

Click on any image to see a larger version.

Dia De Los Muertos

2008-11-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

All Soul's Day was yesterday, so this post is a bit late. I used to make a Day of the Dead skeleton every October (an activity I truly miss.) This is one I created in 2003 but never bothered to put on my website. No grand theme here, just a jaunty posture and a congenial expression —for a dead guy.

Vampyres

2008-11-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

Murnau's Nosferatu is still my favorite German creepshow. Every year at about this time I try to work a viewing of the original (or the Herzog remake) into my schedule. This year was a special treat because I added the Kino restoration to my video collection. Everything you may have heard about this new version is true. It's amazing and yes, it's like watching the movie for the first time. Lots of movies inspire me to think without inspiring me to draw. This one had me scrambling for paper. I made these as creepy as I could. Hard to beat Max Shreck though.

Fats Waller

2008-01-10T07:06:00.000-08:00

This a thumbnail sketch I did years ago. I liked the flurry of searchlines in the sketch, so instead of cleaning it up, I just threw a few photoshop effects in to get a sense of the period. That's as far as I got. Maybe someday I'll work in a few black and white ivories.