Fortunately, Murphy Design has worked for some amazing artists over the past twenty-two years. Clint Eastwood, Brandon Boyd, Green Day, Clayton Brothers, Hanna-Barbera and most recently, Cartoon Network. Every book is a custom design and production exercise that tries hard to leverage the tradition of book making into a modern object.
The Cartoon Network 20th Birthday book features 168 pages of original artwork created by 79 world-class creatives from 15 countries featuring the best in contemporary painting, animation, illustration and printmaking. The artwork is amazing too.
Travis Louie recently submitted Young Herriman Before The Crash of 1929, and shared: “Like most kids from my generation, I grew up watching Warner Bros. cartoons, old Popeye The Sailor animated shorts produced by Fleischer studios for Paramount Pictures and Tom and Jerry cartoons produced for MGM. I saw them on television from the local broadcasting stations long before cable television even came to town. Even as a small child, I could tell there was a significant difference between the production value of these older film shorts and the cheaper cartoons made for broadcast television in the 1970s. They had better movement, more complicated backgrounds and were even written better. The gags and jokes in those older shorts reflected the time that they were made and were like a time capsule for the era. It’s probably an early influence for me to have the timeline of these characters in my own paintings to be in the 19th century.
Every book project deserves its share of special touches in the production department. The Cartoon Network 20th Birthday book will feature a unique, fold-out poster that doubles as a dust jacket. Almost every artist is featured on the cover in the hopes of inspiring the reader to page through, one page at a time.
The book will also feature spot varnish on the dark printing areas throughout the book, and if you look closely, new characters will appear with the careful examination of the pages in the light. You can see the preparation of the varnish plate, that will be applied to the color section, featuring Jack Teagle and Jules Julien.
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