Something I try to keep in mind when making art that looks vintage is keeping a limited color pallette. Digital art gives you a very wide, Crisp scope of colors, whereas traditional art– especially older traditional art– had a very limited and sometimes dulled use of color.
This is a modern riso ink swatch, but still you find a similar and limited selection of colors to mix with. (Mixing digitally as to emulate the layering of ink riso would be coloring on Multiply, and layering on top of eachother 👉)
If you find some old prints, take a closer look and see if you can tell what colors they used and which ones they layered… a lot of the time you’ll find yellow as a base!
Misprints can really reveal what colors were used and where, I love misprints…
Something else I keep in the back of my mind is: how the human eye perceives color on paper vs. a screen. Ink and paint soaks into paper, it bleeds, stains, fades over time, smears, ect… the history of a piece can show in physical wear. What kind of history do you want to emulate? Misprinted? Stained? Kept as clean as possible, but unable to escape the bluing damages of the sun? It’s one of my favorite things about making vintage art. Making it imperfect!
You can see the bleed, the wobble of the lines on the rug, the fading, the dirt… beautiful!!
Thinking in terms of traditional-method art while drawing digital can help open avenues to achieving that genuine, vintage look!
ALSO!!
YELLOWING!! Digital art is very blue-light based. Cold, clean, flat. But traditional art has warmth to it. Why?
Over time, paper gets yellowed with dust, oil, dirt, and nicotine from cigarettes! So colors got warmer. This makes art look pretty aged, on top of the slight toned papers and hand made/factory made inks they printed with.
Men and women with open books before them— and never turn a page: come merely for warmth not light.
Charles Reznikoff, from “Autobiography: New York,” Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down (1941), The Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918–1975, ed. Seamus Cooney (Black Sparrow Press, 2005)
it’s always wild to me how many people use social media exactly like the fake users they make up in tech demos do. just commenting on chipotle’s post about a new type of steak like “😍 can’t wait to try it!” and reacting to articles on mass death events with “😥”
At long last, here’s my investigation into how defense contractors use the DC subway to target government policymakers in hopes of greater profit.
The first thing commuters saw when stepping into the Metro station beneath the Pentagon in late August was a poster for RTX: the world’s second largest defense contractor, formerly known as Raytheon.
RTX made $30.3 billion in sales to the U.S. government last year, 45% of its total income. To advertise to its biggest customer, why not target government decision-makers in the places they visit most? Thus, the thousands of commuters entering the Pentagon station each day were greeted by more than 60 RTX advertisements plastered across the walls, floors, escalators, and fare gates such that it was physically impossible to pass through the station without seeing one.
This ad campaign wasn’t the company’s first rodeo, either. Ten years ago, RTX placed advertisements in the Pentagon station to promote a satellite control system. That same project is now seven years late and billions of dollars over-cost.
The catch is that, technically, advertisers aren’t supposed to be able to do this, as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA, which operates the greater D.C. metro system) forbids advertisements that “are intended to influence public policy.” But government contractors, reliant on public policy for their survival, are nonetheless allowed to promote their brands and hawk their products to the officials responsible for deciding whether or not to buy from them…
As the home to countless government agencies, Washington DC’s population is dense with people whose choices at work can affect the entire world. This has made the capital metro system a magnet for government contractors and other advertisers looking to shape policymakers’ activities.
Yet a systematic analysis of that advertising has proven difficult. WMATA does not make advertising data available to the public, and has yet to respond to multiple requests for the data. A similar request was denied by Outfront Media, the private marketing firm contracted by WMATA to handle transit ads.
So, I obtained what information I could the old-fashioned way — I rode the Metro, a lot. For five consecutive weeks, I visited 11 WMATA Metro stations and recorded the names of every advertiser. All were located within one mile of major policymaking institutions.
Click through to dive into my findings! For example: 100% of ads I spotted in the Pentagon station were from contractors.
ALT
