Recent Works
Contemporary “Garman” Versals
Garman’s twist on Versals, the embellished initials common in historical text as initials common Bibles and illuminated manuscript.
The full alphabet is a current work-in-progress.
Improving my Vector Drawing Skills
I’ve been working on my vector drawing skills in Adobe Illustrator as this will benefit my hand lettering for commercial works.
In a huge irony in career development, in the 80s I had my hopes on computer graphics to help me with my calligraphy and hand lettering.
In 1989, I was an early adopter of Aldus Freehand for those who remember Freehand before Adobe and Macromedia. In those days I had my head full of learning 3D with Wavefront on SGI Workstations. With a combined price-tag of over $100,000 USD, it wasn’t cost effective to split my brain between too many software tools.
I did purchase two Macs and loaded Aldus Freehand on one of them. But I found the tools slow and not giving me the ease of artistic expression that I could produce with a pencil.
But I always looked back with hope.
Now with my concentration on hand lettering and calligraphy for both art and commercial purposes, I’ve made a significant investment of time to see how these tools have improved.
In the “With Vary Two” example on the left, I’m learning to vary the line thickness around the center of the stroke.
Converting Traditional Materials to Vector Art
The image “Broken Vessels” is from my 1985 MA in Drawing and Painting work where I wrote my own Commodore 64 program. The screen images had only 16 colors and printed out only in black and white.
That alone was a big deal at the time.
I made photographic PMT prints (thanks Mom), mounted them on illustration board and airbrushed the soft colors and used color pencils for the line work.
In the irony of time, some of the professors at Iowa State thought I was committing art heresy using a computer to create art.
The two images on the left has the original print/airbrush/pencil original at the bottom, and the vectorized to 32 discrete colors at the top, with some adjustments to the stroked outline color.
It obviously lacks the brilliance of the original. But I’m learning, and trying to push.
Forty-plus years later, I’m still learning, trying to accomplish what the technology of 1985 wouldn’t allow.
Coffee Time Embroidery
Working with Lori Smith of her Etsy Smith-Harbor shop, we have begun to collaborate on hand lettered embroidery products. Very exciting.
Lori and I had worked together at Digital Domain in Venice California.
Original Art
You can see in Lori’s stitch (above) how my lettering (left) comes to life with her careful conversion to embroidery.
Roland History Works, In-Progress
Posters based on photographs my father, Haakon Herigstad, took in Roland, Iowa between the 1950s and 1980s.
This photograph was of the Stole Brothers Garage in Roland, used for the Roland Centennial History book.
This image is a work-in-progress as I’m hand painting this rough layout.
Title Animation and Trailer Graphics
Working with Zach Roozen I animated the movie title from their poster graphics and created secondary titles for the ending and trailer.
Truth Illustration Mock-Up Cover
While back in Grad School, 2018-2021, I created this carpet effect of as a mock-up for a Time Magazine cover illustration.
The carpet pattern is from Trump’s first-term Oval Office carpet.
Patterns from Hand Lettering
The image to the left came about from some hand-painted initials, POW and SUG on a snowboard rack.
These were drawn with a 1-inch wide brush.
I liked the shapes and digitized them. Using Houdini software I created layers and color variations from these simple letter forms.