I'm Luke Johnson

I live and work in Vancouver, BC
I write about research and other interests here

Elevator Music

Posted on in Art • 306 words • 2 minute read
Tags: Illustration, Discorder, Krita
A cartoon-style elevator scene framed by the opened doors. The environment and a pair of men in business suits are depicted with little detail and in greyscale. A young woman with an afro is centred facing the viewer with her eyes closed in contentment. She is wearing headphones and apparently levitating about six inches off the ground, while around her head an imagined scene of colourful clouds fills the elevator.

Every so often here at UBC (about twice a year) I’ve contributed illustrations to Discorder magazine, the print wing of the student radio station CiTR. I’ll be the first to admit my illustration skills are hit and miss at best—it’s a good thing I don’t get paid—but I was digging through old files and realized I’d never really shared them. That’s about to change!

I’ll start with one of my favourites, which dates from December 2022. This accompanied a review of Elevator Music, a work by Vancouver-based artist Ketty Zhang. For the cover art (above) I decided to be quite literal, although with a more modern idea of how someone might listen to music in the lift than the bossa nova stereotype. Maybe I was too literal for this artsy rag, because the cover image didn’t end up being used!

I had a lot of fun with the spot illustrations (below), stylised elevator button with some standard and some not-so-standard labels. Instead of a plain metallic background, each one has a unique and colourful pattern. Finally, in a nod to the importance of the lift to accessibility, I overlaid thematic words written in white Braille on top of each button. These weren’t explained in the original article, but I’m feeling generous here and have deciphered them in the image captions.

An elevator button with the label "1", a background of upward-pointing orange arrows and the braille for "win" overlaid in white.

“Win”

An elevator button with the label "2", a background of downward-pointing blue arrows and the braille for "lose" overlaid in white.

“Lose”

An elevator button with the label "G" and a star indicating main level, a background of a green root pattern on a brown background and the braille for "roots" overlaid in white.

“Roots”

An elevator button with an alarm button label, a background of radiating red exclamation marks on a beige background and the braille for "SOS" overlaid in white. The dots in the "O" are stretched out like the dashes of "O" in Morse code.

“SOS”

An elevator button with an open doors symbol, a background of wavy blue, green, pink, lilac and brown stripes and the braille for "parting" overlaid in white.

“Parting”

An elevator button with a close doors symbol, a background of wavy yellow, green, magenta, red, and blue stripes and the braille for "meeting" overlaid in white.

“Meeting”

An elevator button with a "0" symbol, a purple background with tiny white stars sprinkled in a band, and the braille for "empty" overlaid in white.

“Empty”

An elevator button with a fingerprint symbol, which extends into the background with red ridges on a pink background, and the braille for "touch" overlaid in white.

“Touch”

An elevator button with an x-shaped cross symbol, the background is a plaid-style cross hatching of red on pink, and the braille for "do not" is overlaid in white.

“Do not”

An upward-facing triangular elevator call button containing an opened eye symbol on yellow sun rays. The braille for "arise" is overlaid in white.

“Arise”

An elevator button for the pi'th floor, the background is a green and orange spiral, and the braille for "return" is overlaid in white.

“Return”

A downward-facing triangular elevator call button containing a closed eye symbol and moon on blue light rays. The braille for "settle" is overlaid in white.

“Settle”

In the end, only a handful of these spot illustrations were used in the published article. The rest of them and the cover image never saw the light of day… until now! I’ll be posting some other Discorder illustrations and miscellaneous art from the past soon, and hopefully can keep up with adding new art as it comes too.

Find the online article here and a PDF of the December-January 2022-3 issue here.