Gone Fishin"

This is from a job I did last summer with Bruce and Dixie Hornstein of Pyramid Studios for the Louisiana Childrens Discovery Center. They were tasked with creating a simulated balloon ride.
Being that the exhibit is geared towards kids 4 to 10 they wanted the illustrations to have a childrens book feel.

It was a rather large job that took the better part of the summer to complete. It involved drawing 3 large topographical maps, each one from a higher distance than the previous one. Each map had a different area that it focused on. The first being the immediate neighborhood around the museum itself.


          Detail of Hammond area map.

The second was the larger surrounding metropolitan area and the last was the swamp-bayou-bay area. Being that they wanted the overall sensibility to have a kids book feel it gave me a bit of leeway when doing the maps. Having said that, the map of the Hammond neighborhood still required a lot of heavy lifting. In the process I became very familiar with google maps.

I was lucky enough to have an assistant on this job which is a very rare thing for me. Luckily Bruce and Dixie were aware of the amount of work involved and time allowed to execute it and allocated some of the budget for this. Originally my assistant, Lorna Yarberry was just going to lay in the flat colors but she asked if she could take a crack at applying some textures and modeling which knowing the time constraints we were working under I was more than happy to let her give it a shot. Lorna ended up doing a fantastic job, we worked very well together, her contributions ended up making this a much more mangable job.

                                           Detail of swamp area map.


While flying over one of these areas a window or view finder would pop up.

It was designed to have an industrial, steam punk sensibility. I'm not really sure why it had a steam punk vibe but it provided a nice break from the maps. On the left hand side of each view finder are 3 icon buttons, clicking on one would take you to a scene from that particular map. For instance the view finder that opens with the swamp has an icon of a Shrimp boat, a pelican and a tree. Clicking on one of the icons takes you to it's respective scene.

                                           Detail of Shrimp Boat.

                                             Detail of Pelicans.

                                            Detail of the Swamp.

Drat! Foiled Again

This is the 5th. and final illo. form the Dr. Hedge Fund assignment.  As most of you probably already know, crime doesn't pay. In this case the good Dr. is finding that out the hard way.

Meanwhile back at Dr. Hedge Funds...

Here's a larger version of one of the spots from the Dr. Hedge Fund story. Omega Woman is on her way to the rescue of Equilibrium Man and Regulator boy.

Here's Omega Woman just before taking off to rescue the boys. Again being that they were after an obvious and fun sense of kitsch I was more than happy to do my best in giving it to them.

Here are the sketches for Omega Woman's costume change. In the 1st sketch I thought the cropping of her head within the star burst panel would be clever but once I got a bit of distance from it I realized it just looked clumsy and awkward. Also in the second sketch Omega Woman has undergone a slight breast reduction at the request of the client. In my attempt to convey the super hero kitsch of the time period I thought the portrayal of the super herion as a strong well endowed woman seemed perfectly in keeping with the mood. The client, not so much.

Here she is in the process of saving the boys bacon. In the sketches below you can see how much I had to rein in Omega Woman's voluptuousness. I was originally going for a Wally Wood, Mad Magazine type of gal, thinking that would be perfect for what we were doing. But the clients thought, and they were probably right, that this could be seen as being offensive to some. So we made her look a little more modern and athletic, sports bra and all.

The Return of Dr. Hedge Fund!

This was a job I did last fall for Communication Design, a design firm here in RVA that has been doing award winning design work for national and international clients for the past 25 years. This was the 2nd time I worked with them on Dr. Hedge Fund for CFA magazine which is a magazine for the financial industry. I know, it sounds deadly boring but I have to say they've been surprisingly fun to work with. For this particular job they wanted to give the material a 1960's - 1970's kitschy Marvel comics sensibility. That happens, for better or worse, to be a sensibility that I'm all too familiar with. So when Bil Cullen called to ask me if I was available to for a second go round with the good Dr. I was more than happy to oblige.

Like the last time I had the pleasure of working on Dr. Hedge Fund, the scope of the job was rather large. They needed a full page illo or in this case a splash page and 5 spots. It's always fun when as an illustrator you get to work on a job that's this involved.

Here are a couple of the sketches for the splash page. The first one being the roughest and the 2nd a bit tighter with a the basic placement of the word balloons and captions. In the final they would adjusted even further.

Here's the finished illo minus the type placement. To see it in it's proper context follow this link it will take you to the Z mag, essentially a digital version of the magazine where you can see the entire job. Also if you look at the bottom left hand corner of the splash page in the digital version, there's an explosive text/caption box, it's a link to the previous Dr. Hedge Fund story with all of the corresponding illos.

In this case I wanted to give it a more retro feel so I played with the halftone effects and in some areas of the illo made it look like the registration is out of whack which was an all too frequent occurrence in the comics of the 60s and 70s.

It's been a long time...

... since I've posted, no need to bore anyone with the reasons. I've done quite a bit of new work and it's about time I put some of it up. This one was done for Richmond Magazine. Something about some ex-punk rocker now a middle aged house wife trying to work up the motivation and energy to clean her house. So she does what any self respecting ex-punk rock chick would do, she put's on the Pretenders and commences to clean.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Below I have a break down of my process on this particular job in it's most basic form. There are quite a few steps I'm leaving out. In this post I'm going to cover the initial sketches, the  second, tighter sketch. Then on to the inked line work and the final finished image.

1st. go round of sketches. They liked the 2nd one but asked me to make her less Grandma and more middle age Mom. So I did...

2nd. Sketch. Here's the revised slightly more youthful middle aged ex-punk rock Mom with a slight tilt to the illo. to give it a stronger sense of motion and energy.

Inked Line Work.

Finished Illustration. Get out of the way Mom's got some cleaning to do.