Writer who stumbled into typesetting and the occasional cover wrap. Founder of King Shot Press, a micropublisher of radical literature. Currently in Portland, but also sometimes Athens and elsewhere.
Shop (Big Cartel)
SEP 12 2021: Feel Bad All The Time
This bookmark was a late-2020 ask from author Ben Arzate, to create a vaporwave-inspired bookmark he could include with his books. He’d sent along some samples of colors and artwork, and even though I’m not intimately familiar with the aesthetic, I researched it and put together some mockups (not shown here) to make sure we were on the same page, and then I contacted my friend Daphne, a pretty killer Greek artist, and asked if she wanted to collab on it—we’d lightly toyed with the idea of comics stuff in the past, but it’d never lined up.
Anyway, I put on Poolsuite FM at Daphne’s recommendation, to immerse, and decided to take an emotional approach to the prompt, while she came up with some striking riffs on the “crying girl” trope. Because it’s an intentionally lo-fi aesthetic, the struggle was in balancing it so it’d look eye-catching and unpolished. I placed Daphne’s crying girl at the foreground very little blending so it’d look like it was cut-and-pasted right out of a screencap, glitched up the backdrop, and threw in a random-ass dolphin hopping over a palm tree for good measure. I believe the text says something like “I Feel Sick,” to complement Ben’s Feel Bad All The Time branding. I don’t know how true to the vaporwave aesthetic it actually ended up being, but I adore that it’s campy/ridiculous and very melancholy.
This bookmark was a late-2020 ask from author Ben Arzate, to create a vaporwave-inspired bookmark he could include with his books. He’d sent along some samples of colors and artwork, and even though I’m not intimately familiar with the aesthetic, I researched it and put together some mockups (not shown here) to make sure we were on the same page, and then I contacted my friend Daphne, a pretty killer Greek artist, and asked if she wanted to collab on it—we’d lightly toyed with the idea of comics stuff in the past, but it’d never lined up.
Anyway, I put on Poolsuite FM at Daphne’s recommendation, to immerse, and decided to take an emotional approach to the prompt, while she came up with some striking riffs on the “crying girl” trope. Because it’s an intentionally lo-fi aesthetic, the struggle was in balancing it so it’d look eye-catching and unpolished. I placed Daphne’s crying girl at the foreground very little blending so it’d look like it was cut-and-pasted right out of a screencap, glitched up the backdrop, and threw in a random-ass dolphin hopping over a palm tree for good measure. I believe the text says something like “I Feel Sick,” to complement Ben’s Feel Bad All The Time branding. I don’t know how true to the vaporwave aesthetic it actually ended up being, but I adore that it’s campy/ridiculous and very melancholy.
