Ear Worm – In Your Head

This wasn’t originally designed to be an ear worm. It’s an illustration I created for a sequential art project I’m working on. But I did sneak some song lyrics into it (and the song has been stuck in my head recently).

Earworm – Alone in a world that’s so cold

A little visual play on words to get the whole line from the song. Answer and explanation in the comments.

Earworm – All alone at the ’64 World’s Fair

Continuing the tradition started with the last earworm, I’m not going to be coy about the source. This is from “Ana Ng” by They Might Be Giants. Recently I’ve been watching a lot of videos about Disney theme parks, and references to the “Small World” ride always remind me of this song.

The obvious inspiration is Mary Blair’s design work for the ride and other Disney properties. But I wanted it to look cold and commercial rather than warm and human like her watercolors.

The text proved tricky. My original plan was to use Stenciletta, which has separate faces for the left and right sides as well as the full characters. But to my chagrin, I found that the sides didn’t match up precisely.

 

So I switched to Phosphate and did the slicing and coloring manually.

I drew the doll heads myself and used Adobe’s skin tone swatches to vary their colors.

Earworm – Frameless heads on nameless walls

Normally I like to be coy about the name of the song, including it in a comment rather than the post itself. Thus anyone who’d like to try guessing before learning the answer (especially for a hard one like this) won’t have it ruined for them. However, in this case it will be difficult to write about how I created the image without making the song title fairly obvious.

The beautiful paint strokes are a fine detail of part of the horizon from Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” I screen capped it from Google Art’s high resolution version. Then I hand lettered the text in Fresco and tweaked it a little in Photoshop.

The song of course is “Vincent” by Don McLean. Like “American Pie,” it’s a maudlin tune with a lot of effortful symbolism in the lyrics. And this one has the added bonus of romanticizing suicide. But as I’ve gotten older, my youthful dislike of Van Gogh’s work has mellowed into appreciation, which apparently leaves me vulnerable to getting this song stuck in my head.

Earworm – Beef Chow Mein

 

I’ve been meaning to do this one for awhile. Here’s the answer.

The background photo is from Wikimedia Commons. As it was going to be dark, I used a simple rain effect to add the requisite weather. For the corner ornaments I used Illustrator to trace a 19th century draughtman’s alphabet, another project I’ve been meaning to do for awhile.

The biggest challenge was the display font. I wanted something that would suggest East Asian influence without resorting to racist clichés. This article from The Print Authority recommended Zhi Mang Xing. The font was designed by Wei Zhimang based on the work of calligrapher Wu Changshuo. It did the job nicely. Indeed, I like it so much that I may use it for other projects in the future.

The only part of the illustration that I didn’t like was the water damage effect. I used a watercolor brush in Fresco to create it. Though I’ve used the tool successfully elsewhere, here it looks more like the junky edits they do on videos to blur logos when companies don’t pay for placement. The edges are too hard, for starters. Hopefully I’ll get better results the next time I attempt something like this.

Earworm – Cold Tea

 

Photo plus Photoshop. I had some fun making the edges of the tea bag ever so slightly transparent to show the lettering layer underneath.

Answer in the comments.