Janet in Cartoonland!

This past weekend I had the pleasure of working on a really cool project for one of my favorite musicians and dear friends, Janet Klein. I'm working on the artwork for her upcoming album, so for the inside, in keeping with the style of her music and our mutual love of vintage animation, we decided to create a vintage black and white cartoonland set.

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To give it an authentic 1920s animation feel, I wanted everything to be stark black and white, no grey tones. While I do realize that there were some grey tones in animation in the 1920s, it was used very very sparingly. More detailed and fully rendered backgrounds didn't really start appearing in animation until the 1930s. Also, I wanted everything to be 2D and have a forced perspective feel to it. Here's some detail shots of the set pieces and props. 

The inspiration for the concept came when Janet found this vintage 1920s photo of Alberta Vaughn.

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Additional inspiration for the design of the set came from one of Janet's and my favorite cartoon characters, Felix the Cat. I borrowed heavily from Ottos Messmer's work as well as Walt Disney/Ub Iwerks "Alice" cartoons on this project

Here's a few additional behind the scenes shots.

Stay tuned for cover art and liner note illustrations as we keep moving forward with the project!