Eject Rejected Work

I teach art in the Charles County public school system in Maryland. I deal with teenagers who’d rather be on Facebook than reading textbooks.

So when I was asked to do a pro-bono poster for a local annual hip-hop music festival featuring De La Soul, Miguel, and J Dilla, I welcomed the respite from writing curriculums and navigating politics. And let’s be real, hip-hop and me have been together since I was a young pup, in and outside of the recording studio.

My idea for the piece came from a conversation about music that’s released on digital. It doesn’t have the grittiness that you hear on cassette tapes, and record albums for that matter. There’s a level of authenticity that’s missing that we used to get from those analog formats.

Boom! The poster was born.

And bam! It was rejected.

Months later, a friend got me talking about that experience. And then it hit me.
“Hold up. I want to do a book on my original concept that never took flight.”

The thing is that things you think are imperfect become part of your stylistic fingerprint. The analog world doesn’t mask who we are and how we express ourselves be it our sound or our look. It’s who we are at a raw and vulnerable level. When we let it come out in our work we show the core, and sometimes, the grittiness of our point-of-view.

Stick around as I build my Blurb book, Eject, from concept to fruition.

#ArtistWorkflow

Robert Generette III is an illustrator, teacher, and vector art monster based in Maryland. He is sharing his workflow to create and build a Blurb book, Eject.