As I said earlier, the management of Paco's Tacos asked me to do music-related menu boards for their Kenmore Square location. I respected all genres of music, though the snobs at the nearby New England Conservatory wouldn't (at least back then). The Beatles were a natural for a Kenmore menu board and this was one of my most popular designs. For those who don't recognize what this is a parody of, it is from "Meet the Beatles," released in early 1964, which was their second American album. The Beatles were known as the "Fab Four" in their day, and this album photo did wonders for black turtleneck shirts as hot fashion items.
Restoring these faded old slides is a painstaking process which involves not only saving the degraded image but restoring white areas which have turned a murky purplish blue. Photoshop has a fantastic tool called the "Magic Wand" which finds edges in your image and selects the area around them or, in "inverse," only the area which is a similar color like lettering. I used that tool everywhere in this piece, restoring the original white background by filling in the selected areas with white. Kind of like digital whitewash or bleach. At the same time, I enhanced the contrast of the black areas so they would be clearer and stand out more.
I still have the old vinyl album somewhere in my collection, though it might not play any more due to 48 years of record rot.
Markers on posterboard, 21" x 13", early 1980, restored in Photoburrito.
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