Mike Davis

Who are you?
I am Mike Davis.
twelvecarpileup.com
burlesquedesign.com


What do you do?
I'm a graphic designer and co-owner of Burlesque of North America, a global design and screenprinting corporation. I'm also a coordinator at First Amendment, the art gallery in our studio space here in NE Minneapolis. I'm also a DJ and I spin funk, rap, and dance music under the name Mike the 2600 King. Sometimes I eat and sleep.

Inspirations?
Early inspirations were (and still are) cartoons and TV shows like Thundarr the Barbarian, Muppet Show, and Spiderman. Then it was video games, but also the box packaging and other well-designed memorabilia that accompanied the games. Activision had that whole video game packaging situation on smash. In high school I got really into graffiti. I grew up in Nashville and was there while Revok, Sever, and Beno were just crushing everything, so I was lucky to get to see all of that. Nowadays I'm really into '60s illustratos and designers like Keiichi Tanaami, Herb Lubalin, Milton Glaser, Peter Max, Victor Moscoso, Bonnie MacLean, and Wes Wilson as far as 1960s stuff goes. Contemporary artists I'm feeling are Steven Harrington, Little Friends of Printmaking, Delicious Design League, Saiman Chow, and of course the other folks from Burlesque - Todd Bratrud, Wes Winship, Aaron Horkey, and George Thompson.

Musical inspirations include random disco rap, 1960s psych and garage rock, new electro and rave rap or whatever, Black Sabbath, golden era rap.

Please describe your creative process, or highlight a specific process used for a recent project.
1) I'd worked both with DJ Day as well as his label, Melting Pot Music, before, so they were familiar with my work and creative process and I was familiar not only with their great music, but also with the process of working with them. Client-designer relationships can be a huge hurdle in any design project, and I'm fortunate that these guys are great to work with.

Step one was listening to the music from the EP and discussing the initial creative ideas with Day and Olski (who runs the label). "Got to Get it Right" is a collection of instrumental hip hop with a socially-
conscious angle. We wanted to visually represent the idea of hope VS struggle. After I had soaked in the music, I thought I'd check out some other successful socially-aware designs. I immediately went to the bold and colorful posters of OSPAAAL. I picked out a few that really stood out and represented the style I wanted to work in and the clients were in accordance.









2) The next step was to create a rough sketch. I thought the idea of a yin-yang would be a good place to start in showing that constant conflict between harmony and dissonance. While the visual of a yin-yang on its own has been done to death, I thought it would make a great jumping-off point for a fully fleshed out design. One side would represent the hope in the world - beauty, nature, sunshine, bees and things and flowers. The other side would be filled with images of war, pollution, and corruption. I drew the sketch with a pen, scanned it in, and colored it in with Photoshop.













3) I base most of my illustrations on photographs and thought it would be great to set up a photo shoot for the main girl image. I called my friends Romeny, who was happy to help out and model, and my friend Skye, who was not mad at the idea of taking a bunch of photos of Romeny.


















4) After sifting through about 200 photos, I found one that really seemed to say everything I wanted it to say. I built the basic yin-yang frame in Illustrator, dropped in the photo, scaled it to the proper size, and began tracing certain elements with the pen tool.


















5) This is how I do all of my photo-based illustrations. I get a nice big photo, zoom waaaaaaay in, and just start clicking around the edges with the pen tool. The hard part is figuring out which parts to use and which parts can be left out. Often times it's showing less that can make an illustrations really powerful.












6) After finishing tracing the face, I started coloring in the different parts and giving them heavy outlines. I also added some "hair extensions" (sorry Romes) to carry the illustration all the way down to the bottom edge of the yin-yang and add some more color to it.














7) Using the same technique as above, I began drawing the elements that would fill out the rest of the album cover.




















8) Whew. All of the Illustratoring got wrapped up and I was pretty happy with the outcome. I made sure to keep the colors on the girl side nice and vibrant while keeping the colors on the Henry Kissinger side (oh yeah, I forgot to mention that's who that is) dark and dull.


















9) I imported the final vector graphics into a Photoshop document and overlayed a textured paper pattern. It's a piece of French paper we use for our screenprinted posters. I like adding textures like these to my projects as it gives them a nice tactile, aged feel... warms it up a little bit. I wanted to keep the type simple as not to compete with the illustration, so I used a bold and clean stencil face (Sheet Steel) for the DJ DAY letters and Bookman for the title. Clean and simple up in the corner. Booyaaaaaa.
















Please describe your average workday.
8 or 9AM: Wake up.
10am: Quick stop at the grocery store for an apple (usually Fuji), banana, and banana chocolate chip muffin. Get to the studio and check email. Figure out with Wes all the things we need to get done in the day. Try to get some things done around the office, answer phone calls, answer more emails.
2 or 3pm: Lunch. The deli down the street makes okay Philly cheesesteaks, but Jersey Mike's and Mesa Pizza are the real jumpoffs (jumps-off?).
4pm: Maybe get some design done? Download and BPM some MP3s, answer more emails.
6pm: People leave the office and I actually start getting things done. Some sketching, some Illustratoring, some Photoshopping.
8 or 10pm: Go home or to a DJ gig or both or neither.

What are things that you would like to do in the future that you haven't done already?
Create a fully hand-drawn animated cartoon.
Release a book of Burlesque's artwork.
Literally dig for fire.