The Birmingham Free Press, along with Stephen Smith Fine Art, is a full service art and publishing company.
Illustration
I’ve been doing commercial illustration all of my adult life. Being around printing and publishing, there is always a need for drawings and paintings. Books are basically just pictures and words.
I used to work for a big publishing company as a full time illustrator. They had scores of publications and someone always needed a picture of a kid flying a kite or a map, or something. I’ve always freelanced, too. Someone asked me recently what advice I’d give to a young artist. I answered, “learn to draw,” and I couldn’t have been more earnest. People that can’t draw will hire you to draw things for them.
I’ve always liked to draw and paint landscapes. These have always worked well with outdoor magazines. I also enjoy illustrating animals.
Usually with an illustration for an editorial, there will be some metaphor used in the text that can be taken as a guide to further explain the point of the article.
One of my favorite things to do is political cartoons. My style is pretty traditional. It kind of fits with the philosophy behind The Birmingham Free Press. Most of the work for a political cartoon is coming up with the gag. It has to be current, it has to be funny, and it has to make a political statement. After I come up with the gag, the rest is a cakewalk.
The challenge with working on technical magazines and academic journals is to take jargon, which can sometimes read as dry, and make it as interesting and as clear as possible. Working in fields that an illustrator might not be familiar with, it is important to make preliminary sketches and make sure the author, usually an expert in the field, approves it ahead of time.
One of the reasons I’ve been able to keep going is I’ve always been pretty versatile. Seems like I’ve done everything at this point, at least for print. The internet stuff changes so quickly, and now there is so much being produced for gaming and animation. Everything is digital and it feels a little like cheating. Photoshop is kind of a necessity in illustration, but I always try to keep it to a minimum.
I also hate to use correction fluid. Almost all of my comic strips and line drawings are 100% black ink, no white-out.
One of the toughest industries out there is children’s books. The quality is so high, and the competition is brutal. I’ve done a number of children’s books, but I was always hired as an illustrator. Comic books are competitive too. They can be fun, but they are a tremendous amount of work. It can be hundreds of drawings.
People have asked me to work in a multitude of styles, and they are always pleased with the results. It also helps to be able to come up with ideas. I usually give a client a number of quick sketches based on what they need and we go from there.
My modus operandi is that I am contacted by a client with an idea (often rather unusual) and I will respond with a quote or questions. Once the idea is fleshed out I provide 3 or 4 rough sketches for feedback. If it’s particularly complicated, there might be several refinements to the original draft. The finished work is either delivered digitally or available at the gallery for pickup.
Publishing
The Birmingham Free Press is a multi-service publishing company. We offer illustration, layout, work with printers, and specialize in Print on Demand in cooperation with Amazon.
The flagship publication of the BFP is the Broadsheet Newspaper that has been published periodically since 1997. More a art project than a commercial venture, The Birmingham Free Press is a place where writers and illustrators can showcase their work. As a commitment from the beginning, everything published in The Birmingham Free Press is copyright by the individual creators.
The Broadsheet has a typical print run from 5000 to 10,000 and is distributed, free, throughout the Birmingham municipal area.
Aesthetically, the BFP is designed to look like newspapers from their heyday. It is always printed in black and white with a traditional masthead and a full page of comic strips. The content has always been politics, crime, arts and entertainment, satire, and, when we can find someone to write it, sports.
Newspaper publishing in America is protected by so many laws you can comfortably put boxes in almost any publicly owned location and print anything you like, as long as its not libelous or obscene, by community standards. Really, anything, if it’s true, can be printed, even if it’s just true that someone said it—as long as you source them.
Newspapers are extremely cost effective, too. Newsprint is cheap. I like the look of the black and white. Color takes something away. There is a loss of gravitas. The New York Times didn’t have color on its cover until 1997. As far as I’m concerned, it was all down hill from there.
Most newspapers aren’t even broadsheet anymore. A broadsheet is about 15 by 23 inches. Today’s newspapers are usually tabloids or Berliners. Smaller paper sizes that just don’t have “it.” They look silly in those old newspaper boxes that they don’t fill.
A gothic font header is important too. If you are going to make a newspaper, have it look like a newspaper. You wouldn’t make a wedding dress that looks like a pair of overalls.
We followed the same formula with The Jones Valley Sentinel. The Sentinel was a community newspaper with positive information about the Fairfield area of Birmingham. The paper was free and made money through advertising.
Interested in the newspaper game?
Explore your options with The Birmingham Free Press.
When I first started exploring print on demand the typical startup cost for a new magazine could be around $100,000.00. Looking at the new technology, it seemed it might be possible to do it for nothing. That’s a game changer. Just to test out the formula, I decided to start a magazine.
I have always loved masterful painting and in the past few decades, representational art had really made a comeback. There are people living today creating some extraordinarily complicated and beautiful paintings.
The idea behind Post-Modern Times was to send out inquiry letters to artists from around the world to see what their philosophy of art is. I requested a brief statement and some print quality images that I could run in the magazine. Almost every artist I contacted agreed to contribute. So I had all of my content without spending any money. And it was good content. All of these artists were incredibly talented and thoughtful.
I did end up hiring a philosopher from Bosnia to write some essays on aesthetics. I paid him $300, but he had offered to do it for much less. I couldn’t pay him less than $300. The guy is brilliant.
There are a number of print on demand programs out there. I tried Post-Modern Times on several. It takes a lot of time and effort to format things right. Eventually, I decided that Amazon is the best overall. Mainly because it is so seamless to get a product from conception to a reader’s hands.
Interested in publishing a magazine?
Explore your options with The Birmingham Free Press.
The advances in technology has allowed everyone to be a publisher. The only thing that stands in the way of someone and their dreams is a little know-how.
Once I had figured out the formula, making books and magazines became rote. Like so much technology, what was once the product of a team of experts has moved to the hands of creative individuals. Developing content is the work now.
Under the umbrella of The Birmingham Free Press, I started producing original and public domain books.
The internet went crazy over the discovery of a Victorian children’s book with the intriguing name of Little Baron Trump and his Wonderful Dog Bulger. Supposedly it has a bunch of surprising coincidences that reflect the bizarre presidency of Donald Trump. It didn’t. But it is a delightful and imaginative tale of a genius kid that has a lot of exciting adventures. Very much in the tradition of Oz or Alice in Wonderland.
Public domain works are easily available online. It is just a matter of downloading the text and formatting it in InDesign. Tedious work, but necessary. Creative Suite has made publishing much easier than it was when we worked with production cameras, zipatone, and rubylith, but the final product looks just the same. The biggest difference is everything is toner now and not ink.
In addition to Little Baron Trump, I published a version of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.
Most of the work for both of these projects was the illustrations. Coloring books, children’s books, cookbooks, comic books, fiction, nonfiction, biographies, memoirs, histories are all easy to publish today with little budget and effort.
The Birmingham Free Press provides all publishing services for authors. We can take a manuscript and format it for Amazon, filling in any missing skills in the creation of a book. We provide illustration, layout, editorial services, formatting and production. As much or little as an author needs.
After publishing Post-Modern Times, I began to realize how much aesthetics, as a philosophical tradition, had largely disappeared. There was still a lot of work on the philosophy of art, but it was just answering the question of “what is art?” with the answer of, “pretty much anything.”
Aesthetics used to mean the study of Beauty with a capital “B.” Kind of a tough nut to crack when nobody really believes in it anymore. There was a time when philosophers wrote tomes on this stuff. Most long enough ago to be in the public domain. David Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste is one of the most digestible and concise examples of this. Since it is in the public domain, I was able to downloaded it, use wiki commons to gather illustrations, and produced a tidy edition of the work in a weekend. I also publish Kant’s The Critique of Judgement, which is a lot more dense, and written in German. Amazon gave me a hard time about the translation and I had to prove the translation, itself, was also old enough to be in the public domain, too.
Today is a great time to be an author. Print on demand is the standard. All the big publishing companies provided was distribution and publicity. That’s the job of distribution firms and publicity agencies. There are so many opportunities for publishers today. And, unlike before, if you see a typo, it can be fixed.
Over half of all book sales, online and off, are through Amazon I’ve produced portfolios, chapbooks, catalogues for the gallery’s exhibitions, etc.
If you have a book you would like to publish, contact The Birmingham Free Press and we will make it a reality.
Murals
Painting murals is always a challenge. If they are indoors it is a lot easier, but indoor murals are less common. You have to work around the weather, figure out a way to reach all of the surface, and the surfaces are always very large.
When it was fashionable in the 50s and 60s to tear down cool, old buildings and replace them with soulless glass boxes, the city of Birmingham decided to demolish it’s Terminal Train Station. By then it was a bit run down, but it was still a showplace. Today the plot the station was on is mostly undeveloped land, refuse and undergrowth.
Saab Automotive has a building on the location where the station once stood, and contacted me about painting a mural on their 31st St. side wall, the main entry to Sloss Furnaces Historical Park.
They took down their signage, and were thinking about putting a substrate one the ribbed metal siding. I suggested against the substrate. It would have been easier on me, but It wouldn’t make enough difference from a distance to justify the expense.
I started out by sketching a few ideas and presented them to the client.
We got it down to 2 and I did some more refined sketches.
When we settled on a final design, I tried some color treatments.
The mural is about 50 by 25 feet. It’s held up pretty good, even though it was painted on that metal. It just has layer, after layer, of acrylic paint on it. It’s thick. I do murals pretty much the same way I paint on canvas, just bigger.
Interested in a mural?
Inquire to discuss your options.
The Yankees Mural is about twice the size of the Terminal Station. I had to hire help for it and we needed a lift, rather than just scaffolding. It’s right downtown close to city hall. When I was first asked about the project, I thought the idea of a New York Yankees mural in Birmingham Alabama would never happen. But it did. The owner of the building has a world-class collection of sports memorabilia, and is a huge Yankees fan.
I’ve bid on a number of mural projects. Some never came to fruition. There can be a lot of moving parts, particularly if there is a group of people involved. It’s a lot easier if someone just owns a building and hires someone to paint a mural on it.
I’ve bid on a number of mural projects. Some never came to fruition. There can be a lot of moving parts, particularly if there is a group of people involved. It’s a lot easier if someone just owns a building and hires someone to paint a mural on it.
I like the idea of doing a “seek and find” mural. I think it would be fun for kids. Hopefully there can be a home found for it.
Art Commissions
I get all kinds of requests for art commissions. The other week a lady got my number and had me come over to her house to look at her wallpaper. It was really ornate, but had some kind of corrosive stain on it that washed out the color in a small area. I came back with a set of acrylics and reproduced the design. I guess that would qualify as faux finishing or restoration. Either way, I was proud of the result. No one could ever tell.
Art commissions can range from painting a particular subject on a particular object, to portraits, paintings of people’s houses, pets, architectural renderings, art for publication, or just about anything.
I recently did a map for a guy contesting a traffic ticket. I studied that map, and the guy was totally in the wrong, but that’s what he wanted, and that’s what he got.
Some people have unique requests. Maybe they want a dream visualized, or a memory. One client asked me to do a group portrait of a group of his friends dressed as their Dungeons and Dragons characters. Everything was extremely specific, and it took dozens of preliminary drawings and required a small stack of snapshots to get all the figures and portraits right.
Sometimes people will want a reproduction of something they’ve seen, but can’t find. There is usually a way to reproduce almost anything, within reason.
Preliminary sketches are a must with any project with vague instructions. I try to gather as much information as I can before starting. Sometimes, if an idea is particularly obscure, the client may want to sit with me and explain what they are looking for as I draw.
I love getting commissions to paint in a hyper-realistic manner. It’s particularly challenging and satisfying.
One interesting assignment was from a development company that wanted to build a cemetery. I asked them what they were looking for, and they basically answered, “we don’t know. Can you come up with something?” So I did, and they went for it.
It’s always easier to be able to work from photographs. If someone has a photograph they want reproduced in oil on canvas, all of the discussions are made before starting. The more it looks like the original image the more the client will be satisfied. It’s not uncommon for people to want some change, though. They might want a family member added from a different photo, or have some distracting object removed.
Caricatures make a fun gift. I have a pretty traditional style, but I can adjust, depending on the needs of the client.
Because I’ve been involved in revitalization efforts in the Birmingham area, I’ve done a number of architectural concept renderings. My place is usually at the very beginning, the pre-planning stage. My clients tend to have a good idea of what they want, but need it visualized so they can move forward with the nuts and bolts of the project.
Once a toy company contacted me about designing a series of whimsical dolls.
Portraits are always a challenge. It’s a lot easier to work with someone getting a portrait of someone else. That way I can paint them as they look. If someone commissions a portrait of themselves, it takes some time to capture their self-identity. There is usually a lot of back and forth, and since portraits tend to be oil, there is also the drying time to take into account. Finishing a portrait in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months involves everything being planned out right, and sensing the cleats needs before starting.
Logos and corporate branding is usually more graphic design than illustration. But no matter the concept, the process is the same. Even if a logo is just text, I’ve found it is better to start out with a pencil and flesh out a few ideas before beginning with Creative Suite.
If you have a request for any art project, no matter how ordinary or unusual, reach out and we can discuss it and see what might be the best way to satisfy your needs.