Birbig Time

I recently did an illustration of comedian Mike Birbiglia, for Royal Flush Magazine. I was pretty pleased with it, and really thrilled to find out yesterday that it went over well with Mr. Birbigs himself. Nothing feels better than hearing positive words about your work from a famous person you drew vomiting.

The full page illustration goes alongside an interview with Birbiglia. It, along with some other illustrations of mine (which I will post at a later date) appear in Book 7 of Royal Flush. This book is going to be the best one yet, with a super awesome dual cover– one side featuring Rob Zombie by Ed Repka and the other side featuring, my heroes, the gang from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia by Pat McQuade. The inside is chocked full of awesomeness that's sure to keep you entertained for hours.

To preorder a copy of Book 7 please visit http://royalflushmagazine.com/merch/

Otherwise it's going to be released October 12th, 2010... but a special lenticular hologram edition will be available exclusively at Barnes & Noble on October 26th, 2010 (limited to 1,000 copies)

Check out more about Mike Birbiglia and his upcoming book Sleepwalk With Me, also to be released October 12th, at http://www.birbigs.com/

Magazines magazines. Cortar cortar.

I did two magazine layouts for examples of how my spot illustrations would appear. I'm really just putting off redoing that building in the bear one.

I've been redoing my website again and again... as you may have noticed from the new page banner up there. I'll have a whole post dedicated to what a fiasco that has been. As it stands everything is figured out except the html. Big part to figure out eh? My goal is to have it edited and perfected by Memorial Day.

google translate: ra ra, lutdut daha, ga ga, oohla laha

I revoke my statement in the last post. This is my new Best Piece Ever. I really nailed the boobs on this one. And on that note, I'm going to use this opportunity to practice my professional artist's statement writing, while utilizing some sweet html I just learned to make my longer blogs more reader-friendly.
Ahem...

Lady Gaga, Royal Flush mock cover
Kristin Leigh Koefoed, 2010

For this personal piece I decided to make the illustration of a mock cover for the magazine Royal Flush. Keeping the general voice of the magazine in mind, I recognized that were this a real-world assignment, avid RF readers might at first be horrified to see a pop icon on their favorite alternative magazine. Due to this, it was especially important to make the headlines as clear as possible verbally, and as present as possible graphically. It is indicated that the feature article tries to analyze the nonsensical phenomena of modern pop music from an outside perspective, rather than glorifying it.

For the secondary text, I referenced previous issues of Royal Flush and compiled a list of people featured in the magazine, their occupations, and markets. I used the whole to develop a better sense of what RF's readers care about and from there, I only had to make a list of people and things I would write about if this were my magazine.

For the Royal Flush logo and the Number Foundation insignia, magazine editor Josh Bernstein was nice enough to send me high resolution copies. For this I am so thankful, because trying to use the pen tool to trace over a crappy scan would have undoubtedly bore horrifying results.

However, as I was unable to acquire Neutraface 2, the House Industries font family used by the actual magazine, I laid in a substitute font** that I felt had the same overall feel. Overall, I would like to see the piece done in Neutraface, but I think for the lack of $300 this version satisfies the needs of the assignment and my personal standards.


**–The font used is Telegrafico, one of my Top Five Favorites Free Fonts for the month of April 2010. The huge problem with Telegrafico is that there is no lower-case set. Luckily that was not an issue for this assignment.