By now, Johnnie Cluney is good at reading faces.
He can tell a lot from the details: the dimples on a cheek, lines on a forehead, a slight curve of the lips. You can’t always describe a twinkle in someone’s eye, but Cluney knows when to draw it.
“You can see it when someone has really lived a long life or a long struggle or when someone isn’t burned out on their job yet and their eyes are all bright,” Cluney said.
“Your face tells a story — it’s so much of who you are and where you’ve been.”
Over the past decade, Cluney has drawn more than 5,500 faces, or “cartoony portraits” as he calls them, to accompany recorded sessions on Daytrotter.com, an independent music website, as the group's full-time artist.
After at least three drawings a day over the past 10 years, the faces become routine.
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But in February, when Daytrotter opened its venue on Brady Street in Davenport, Cluney’s job changed. Or, maybe it reversed.
The new venue and lineup of concerts brought back the show poster — an art form Cluney hadn't tackled in more than six years and one that has become somewhat obsolete with email invites and Facebook events for concerts.
“I sat down to draw them, and I kind of forgot how to do it," he said. "It had been so long and it seemed old-fashioned almost."
Suddenly, the artist with thousands of portraits under his belt was starting back at zero.
Setting the site apart
When Cluney was 24, he showed off his drawing style for his friend who was starting a music streaming website. That friend, Sean Moeller, didn’t want to pair “boring and stock” press photos with the online sessions.
“I remember being really nervous to show my drawings to Sean," Cluney said, “because if I didn’t cut the mustard he probably knew five other guys who would do it."
Cluney played in local bands, but would ask around to draw friends' tape covers or flyers. He always considered himself more of an artist than a guitar player.
And in Daytrotter’s first month, Cluney was hired.
From there, he illustrated every band that did a Daytrotter session.
“The way I draw them doesn’t look like anything else on the Internet,” Cluney said. “When a band does press photos, you see those over and over again for the life of the band, but the illustration has a certain element … it has that spark.”
Cluney has perfected his style, full of bright, almost tropical, colors and a flowy cartoon hand. He still uses white paper, pens and markers, and makes minimal edits on Photoshop.
Scroll through the pages of illustrations online and you’ll see Cluney's renditions of Carly Simon, Bon Iver, Mumford and Sons, The Lumineers, Cage the Elephant, Waylon Jennings, Ed Sheeran, Jason Isbell, Norah Jones, George Strait and Amos Lee.
“I don’t really get nervous for the big bands, because I know everyone is going to see it and it’s expected,” he said. “For some bands though, a Daytrotter session is the biggest thing they’ve ever done and might ever do — so I take extra time on those.”
Thinking back to 2006, Cluney can’t remember any websites like Daytrotter. Now, he says, there are probably hundreds.
“Sean made an early decision to set Daytrotter apart from any website that would come after it,” he said. “There are only a few things that set us apart now.”
One of those things? Cluney’s drawings.
Marking a memory
This week, Cluney finished his 14th show poster.
He was keeping count, because it had been a while. He hadn't created show posters since 2009 when they used to host live shows at Huckleberry’s Pizza in Rock Island.
He had to relearn what spacing and lettering and colors work best. And he had to relearn the whole point of a poster.
He wanted to believe decorating a thin piece of paper — detailing the same information you can find on a website — was worth it.
“A lot of them probably go in the trash or get forgotten,” he said.
But, he thought about all the posters he saved over the years from his favorite shows, serving as souvenirs from road trips with friends and birthday celebrations and those moments where he met his heroes.
Cluney wanted a way to mark those shows in his memory.
An archive
For the past few months, posters have lined the front window of area storefronts. Stacks of them are on sale at live shows.
Cluney takes each one seriously, because in a a year or a decade, that poster might be the only tangible evidence that a specific show happened.
“They promote our upcoming events, but they are more to archive Daytrotter as a venue,” he said. “So, I am forced to think about the art as representing an entire block of time instead of just as an advertisement."
And he thinks about how one day, the poster might serve as someone else’s souvenir.
“When I’m making them, I’m thinking I want somebody to frame them,” he said. “That’s the ultimate compliment and that’s the ultimate goal of making something — that it would be held on to."