Sweet playing card illos.

nevver:

Card Games

A recent piece for ModernFarmer.com for a story about some goats ransacking a farmer’s house. Top one is the one they ran, bottom one is my preferred abstraction.

Thanks to Jake Swearingen for the assignment.

National Public Illustration: Author Mark Bittman spoke about his new “Vegan Before 6pm” or VB6 diet and how humans don’t need cow milk for calcium.

An old coworker from a summer job during college used to always say “milk is for baby cows” and that phrase has stuck with me ever since so here it is (not a Mark Bittman quote).

Doing the string dance: drawing with paracord. Goofing around with stuff I had left over from another project.

Cheers to Saul Bass, a design an illustration legend who would be 93 today! I would not be the designer and illustrator I am today without his influence.

You can purchase prints of this piece here. Free shipping until May 12th!

National Public Illustration: pieces inspired by the news I hear on NPR when I wake up. Today it is about how researchers are trying to develop computers that can read our thoughts and predict our emotions. Welcome to the future y’all.

Some late sketches from the news last week about Jason Collins.

The start of my new National Public Illustration series … stay tuned for more newsy concept sketches.

Sneak peek teaser of an illo I just finished. Coming soon to a newsstand near you (if you live in the pacific northwest that is…)

Nice piece by Justin Gabbard. SF illustrators unite!

jgabbard:

New Piece for the Sunday Business section of the NYT. Thanks to AD Minh Uong. I think it turned out strange and fun

NEWS FLASH! This is not a real New Yorker cover but I wish it was

A recent piece inspired by NYC that I did for my Hartford Illustration MFA program.

Prints are available HERE.

Art Spiegelman cover from 1993, when kids with guns was an ironic exaggeration.

via: blowncovers and toon-books.

Who is gettin’ it done? This dude is. Business time.

GRAD SCHOOL CATCH-UP: ROUND #2

Following the traditional paint and brush work of Robert Hunt (earlier post here) was Craig Fraizer, a traditionalist of on the opposite side of the spectrum from Robert. Craig is a conceptual, graphic illustrator with a background as a designer and art director; a background I share and why I was very excited to hear Craig talk about his work.

Craig’s traditional process involves using amberlith, a masking film used in the days before computers when pages where laid out by hand (paste-ups) and then shot with a stat camera. He uses an exact-o to cut out pieces by hand, working at a very small scale. He said that most pieces for his figures are no bigger that 3/4 of an inch long. Working this small forces him to simplify everything down to basic shapes and captures the happy accidents of cutting things by hand. Seems kinda crazy to me to work so small but, hey, he makes it work quite well.

Craig then scans and vectorizes the shapes before compositing them in the computer, so not all of his process is so old school. When scaling the shapes and repositioning the pieces to create the illustration, Craig says he always leaves the edges as is, never cleaning up or modifying what came from the original cutouts so the hand work comes across in the final. This approach made me think that I could probably benefit from getting a bit looser in my own work and not over think the construction of things.

As you can see from his samples above, Craig’s work is always very clever and uses surrealism to engage the viewer in the conversation. I am very excited that he has a full collection of his work online, as it is such a great source of inspiration and great reference for all kind of optical illusions. I know I will continue looking back to this whenever I am hitting a wall when sketching on a new piece.

Be sure to read other updates from the Hartford Illustration MFA over on the school blog, SQUINT.

Who wants to get high? These crazies do. Trapeze time! #fridayflyday

GRAD SCHOOL CATCH-UP:

Whoa nelly! What a week! It’s taken me nearly two weeks to recover from the amazing, mind-openeing experience of grad school (and a sinus infection). Where to start!

Robert Hunt was our first presenter of the San Francisco contact period. I’ve met Robert a few times before when attending guest lectures at CCA, where he teaches and was invited to speak to his class once to talk about art direction (back when I still worked at SF Weekly). He’s a great guy and an asset to the illustration community.

Robert is the opposite of me. He uses oil paint, not a computer, he’s focused, not all scatter-brained, and he has somehow got over the fear of starting (and finishing) things. He is constantly producing work, stating that he spends about 50% of his time on personal work. That’s a great ratio if you can manage it.

And his work is beautiful. Maybe it’s more amazing to me because I’ve never once put oil paint to canvas, but he is a true master. Just see for yourself over on his website.

What stood out most to me about his work was not how he applies his immense amount of talent a wide range of subjects and the subtlety of styles within those, but was his branching out into to animation, doing film-house logo intros in particular (the original DreamWorks logo). What was most fascinating to me about this was how the majority of his process remained traditional, doing multiple, sometimes hundreds, of finished paintings to then be used as a sequence of images, morphed from one to the other to create the animations. Robert definitely has more patience than I to pull something like this off but the result is obviously worth the effort.

View his examples of the above examples here.

Thanks to Robert for coming by and sharing his process and knowledge with the Hartford Illustration MFA posse.