Sneak peek! Just a sliver of the latest cover illo I finished today for an East Coast rag.

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.

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

Forgot about this one … runner up in Graphic Design for Creative Quarterly 31. Check out a different color version over on my site .

Cover illo for the Houston Press story about how chemically altered drugs sold online killed the teenagers who bought and tried them. The bottom image is my after-thought reworking of it.

Thanks to AD Monica Fuentes for the assignment!