Conquering, Destroying, etc.

he studio's layout is a practical one, yes, but the big table in the middle sometimes juts out awkwardly with a lamp hanging from the ceiling at just the right place. The right place for what? Game night. More folks have been in the studio for game night than for business, honestly, as there are few things I'd rather fill a Friday night with than an evening with the pals and Risk or Axis & Allies. Or the above: Risk 1919.

See, when I was a kid I'd always invent games. They'd involve maps and graph paper and dice and stats, and for whatever reason it stopped in high school. I kept playing (Axis & Allies, specifically) but never making games, but in early 2007 I had a bit of a realization. Three realizations, actually: I had three unscheduled days, I knew the value of large format CAD printing, and I noticed that I was actually qualified to make a good-looking game board, given that I'd turned into an illustrator since the last time I tried to make a game.

So, I took those three days and made a giant collage of silhouettes of countries and bits of maps. I thought about the nature of Risk (anarchy, essentially) and called on my BA in European History to provide a plausible setting (immediate post-Great War Europe, with its Weimars and Bela Kuns and White and Red revolutions, etc.). I consulted with game-playing pal Jeremy "Der Kaiser" Franchuk, made a mockup, and played it. I had a few dozen copies made up at 36" square, framing one for myself. We tinkered with the rules, eventually arriving at something we call "Dieterman Rules," involving (if you're familiar with the standard game) fixed card values instead of escalating ones.

Other stats: the board seats eight comfortably, has 106 squares (versus original Risk's 42), 112 different pre-cut territory cards and 21 national bonus areas (compared to original Risk's six). The eight player configuration makes for absolutely astounding table talk and diplomacy. And, uh, I just picked up another dozen copies of it from the printer's today. Care for a copy? Either drop a line to pick one up for $60, or check Raymondbiesinger.etsy.com for more details. I probably can't ship it on time for Christmas, but January's just as good when it comes to commanding fake armies against other fake armies.

Ask the Sentry: A Question of Type

long while ago a certain Steve wondered aloud in a Sentry thread, "what's the condensed typeface you use on your Fifteen.ca website?" Of course, he's thinking about the tall skinny type deployed on the top portion of that wesbsite, and he'll get an answer: look at the Sentry's own nameplate, above, and note that it's hand type-set from a sheet of aged Letraset-ish type called "Graphique" from the French instant lettering company Mecanorma (if you don't know what I mean by Letraset, read this link). If you have that typeface, you're 2/3 of the way to having the Fifteen.ca text. You just need to invert it, black to white, white to black. Then pluck the flat black letters out of the white shadows. Then you've got it, whatever it is.

Gooma by Marc Bell (2002)

osh bought me the above when he was in Montreal a month ago, and it's a Marc Bell drawing found in a little linen paper pocket zine of his called Gooma. Note the tear-away track pants and especially note the "fiscal year" tattoo, because that's what time it is. Last night my old (and I do mean old; it was born in the summer of 2002 and was bottom-of-the-line at the time) 16" eMac gave me grief, as it's just not up to composing an image meant to cover a 10' wide swath of wall, 4'4" deep. I'm never the kind to pursue new for the sake of new, but the old machine was choking badly and, uh, with the fiscal year about to end it was time for a new machine. So, I'm typing this on a 27" eMac, nestled in the SE corner of the studio. It's fast. It's large. It's chawing on giant illustrations like a baby through Gerbers.

Coast to Coast to Coast

his is page four of eight of a kit Garrett and I are working overtime to put together for the Famines. Every X is a show, with provinces and cities subjectively but slightly accurately placed. Other pages include a cover letter, brief biography, touring details (venues, etc.), releases (both book and record), radio charting, press quotes, press bibliography, etc.

the First Polaris Music Prize and Breaking Kayfabe Illustrated (Sept. 2006)

n the mid 2000s a group of people decided Canada didn't have a proper music award, as per the UK's Mercury Prize. By the time September 2006 rolled along they had done a few things. They had a name: the Polaris Music Prize. They had a short list of albums picked by a mass of Canadian music journalists, and they were shortly going to decide which one was best. They also had paired every short-listed album (all twelve of them) with a visual artist from their own city, who would then make a commemorative silkscreened print reflecting that album. I was matched up with nominee and local hip hopster Rollie Pemberton aka Cadence Weapon aka the Poet Laureate of Edmonton aka signed to Epitaph Records and doing very well, thank you.

I liked this. See, Rollie and are are pals. And we both like being specific and local. And I also liked what I ended up making (see above). The details: it's from an edition of 30, of which I received two copies, the label and the Polaris folks splitting up the rest. Silkscreened two colours at Smokescreen Printing by good pal Evan at 17.5x22.5" on some heavy white paper. The nominated record: Breaking Kayfabe, slang for mask removal. The record's twenty-some minutes enjoyed a few dozen Edmonton-specific references the first a few lines in, the last a few lines from the end. Many referred to riding on the ETS (Edmonton Transit Services) to meet some folks at the soulless retail plaza Oliver Square, etc.

The thing to do, of course, was to collage together a map of Edmonton using ETS route maps using the usual means, making sure to use the North Saskatchewan River as Rollie's smile. I wanted more, though, and I needed it to be practical. I listened to the record over and over, noting every single Edmonton reference, in order. I plotted the location of every reference on the map portrait with a "needle" with a reference letter on the head of it (A for the first reference, B for the next, ect.). Given that I rarely drew pupils, the natural place for the reference legend was in Rollie's eyes. The end result: a fully functioning map of Edmonton with which you can tour the entire Breaking Kayfabe record.

I have a few copies in my archive, and the original printer's transparencies were framed and shown at a gallery show at Olio in Victoria, BC, this summer. I gave two away as Christmas presents in 2006, never had any more to sell. But, uh, remember when I mentioned Evan from Smokescreen dropped off some "overs" last week? Included were three of these, and you might be able to get a copy through Raymondbiesinger.etsy.com.

Avenue Edmonton (Dec. 2009)

venue magazine is a local glossy, one conspicuous in that it's local and glossy. Usually provincial magazines are either oil patch slick and corporate content, well-meaning and amateur, or fit into a very slim other category of well-put together and taking care of business. AlbertaViews fits into that category, and it explores provincial politics and living. Avenue's there, too, but exploring Edmonton life and largely non-political things.

In the case of the above illustration, Avenue was looking at something new to me: Edmonton's time capsules. I had a gap in my schedule, noted an AD I've wanted to work with for some time (Paige Weir), and we made it happen. The assignment: three square quarter pagers, accompanying a piece by journalist Mike Sadava (read it right here). Above is the third of the set of three drawings, and full set's on display at Fifteen.ca. Unfortunately, the Sentry's formatting wasn't being kind to the images.

But, uh, the drawings. Included in the article is Sadava family itself, that found itself contributing personal infos and effects into a City Hall time capsule in 1992. Time capsule aesthetics, too, were difficult to work with. I mean, a time capsule is by definition solid, featureless, and concealing its true charms (its contents) from exterior view. I needed something that preservative and transparent, and Grandma's canning jars seemed appropriate. Through the three images we'd establish a bit of a narrative: the capsule would be buried (under a very complete City Hall, right down to the Holomodor monument at left) and recovered (in 2092 by small family with servant robot). These book-end illustrations were to be very specific. In the middle, we'd get abstract and typographic, simply canning key dates in 20th-century time capsule deployment.

The first and last were complex; I needed to fake familiarity with the Sadavas, fabricate some municipal documents, and establish two different contexts. In the first illustration you'll find a column of photos of the "Sadavas." From top to bottom, you'll find my wife Elizabeth, my parents (holding my oldest brother in 1975), and my grandma, all given the traditional Xerox contrast treatment and with coloured layers inserted behind. The Sadava family tree, if you look closely, includes precisely zero Sadavas and much tiny garbled found text. The 1992 Approved Budget was collaged together from the 2008 Edmonton Municipal Budget, the Edmonton Bugle from various newspapers, and the Edmonton maps from a 1971 Edmonton Real Estate Board map.

Otherwise, the City Hall image, robot, and jars were made by mashing together various lines, photos, and geometric pieces until it looked like what it needed to look like. Especially challenging was the little family, eventually rendered with black ink and brush. I love the curve of mom's two arms, from hip to pointed finger.

the Molestics at New City (9 Dec., 2009)

here's a well-traveled man sleeping in our guest room, one that's also the author of the Belgravian Press title Confessions of a Local Celebrity. I'm talking about Mike Soret, of course, and he's playing as the dixieland punk Molestics tonight in Edmonton at New City and Friday night in Winnipeg at Ragpickers. Three sets will be played tonight, and he's put together a band of local ringers and players. As usual, you can read about the book here, should you live outside the ice-logged prairies or not know the scoop.