http://www.threadless.com/ Fri, 01 Jun 2012 11:14:39 -0500 Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:12:40 -0500
I was fortunate to have been given the opportunity to create the cover for the October 10th issue of Time magazine. Many people were curious as to how something like this comes about, so I thought I would share this particular process here.

Last Friday I was asked by Time to submit some art for an opener about how Americans spend.
The working headline for the article is The Great Divide, which gets at the division between upper and middle class spending. I was told that there is a potential that the image could be used for the cover.

After reading that, I decided that I would concept ideas that are contingent to being on the cover. I realized that could be risky, but if I really want my idea to have a shot at the cover I should just proceed as if I'm already doing the cover. Thinking about the headline "The Great Divide", I thought it would be cool to actually create a literal divide right down the middle of the cover itself, cutting through the red border, the logo and my photograph...which would be a stack of cash. I wasn't sure if they would like the idea of a big slice ripping through their identity, but thankfully, they didn't mind. In fact, they loved the idea and gave me the go ahead to execute.

I only had a few hours to shoot and composite the entire image, so the stress was high. I thought about the execution in my head and I started putting my plan together. The toughest part with the execution was figuring out where and how I could get stack of cash that large. I decided to cut about 2,500 sheets of copy paper to make the stack. I wasn't sure how to color the paper so that it matched the hue of money. I didn't want to do it in photoshop, as I felt it could look fake. I ended up using some of my kid's sidewalk chalk. I took a hammer and crushed down some green, yellow and white chalk. I mixed the powder until the hue matched. I then took my wife's blush brush and dusted the powder over the stack. It ended up looking pretty good, so I took the shot. Then I made the slice. I had photographed my gray background by itself and printed it out. I then glued it to an old issue of Time. I created the slice with an X-acto knife and frayed up the slice to give it some depth, I lit it from the side to give it some dimension in shadow and shot it. I sent the final image in at 9am Wednesday morning. 3 hours later it was printed.

This is the first sketch I sent:


I revised the sketch, to further put emphasis on the differentiation between class spending.
They liked this one:



After shooting the images, Time sent me this work-in-progress cover to use as a guide for placement:



This is the final cover. They ended up changing the headline on the cover, which I think is a little softer to the concept, as well as a few other small changes, but it still turned out pretty cool:



Time editor Richard Stengel unveiled the cover on MSNBC's Morning Joe yesterday morning. The issue will be in newsstands next week.
]]> Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:12:38 -0500
So back in 2009, a friend of mine went to a party wearing my "I Scream" shirt. A buyer from Target was at the party.
She saw the shirt, was familiar with Threadless, went to my profile page and asked me to submit 25 designs for the little boys dept. Those were culled down to 11, and a year later, they were tested in a handful of stores. The shirts tested well and on May 1st, the first design, Cheeseburger on a Trampoline, will be available in all Target stores.
I'll also be selling some shirts online at http://brock-davis.com.

It's amazing to me how opportunities like this can come about, how one thing can lead to another. I realize that none of this would be possible without Threadless and the community. You never know where opportunities will come from and who will see your designs. Threadless cultivates and fosters creativity that makes designers and artists want to push themselves and that makes the work awesome. Hopefully that gives people something interesting to look at and talk about. Anyway, I haven't been able to hop on the forums in a while, but I felt like I should give thanks where thanks is due.
So thanks, Threadless!

Brock
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P.S. I also have a new design pending, just a bunch of fruit I chopped in half and photographed.




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