Secondhand Outdoor Smoke

Heres a piece I did over the weekend that's appearing in todays Wall Street Journal. It accompanies an article on the second hand effects of outdoor cigarette smoke on people in the immediate vicinity. Thanks again to Pete for the work.

Fund Raiser for Kerry Talbot

Patrick Godfrey owner of Velocity Comics has put together a fund raiser for local artist, illustrator and cartoonist extraordinaire Kerry Talbot.

The Christmas before last Kerry was diagnosed with a brain tumor, He's doing much better now after some serious medical procedures but being that he's a freelancer and an adjunct faculty at VCU's school of the Arts he's not exactly rolling in it. He's now looking at some very big medical bills. For more in-depth information please read this.

One of the ways Pat thought of to raise money was to get a bunch of comic books from Marvel with covers made of wrap around illustration board adorned with only the interior comics title and then he passed them out to local artists to do their take on the characters and then auction them off.

I selected the Hulk.

As a kid I always loved Jack Kirby's work and this was a perfect opportunity for me to channel my long simmering inner Kirby and hopefully help Pat raise some $ for Kerry in the process.

Along with many RVA illustrators, cartoonist, photographers and fine artists I've also donated a painting and a handful of prints. If you're interested in supporting local artists and potentially getting a great deal in the process this is the event to attend.


It'll take place Monday evening 7:00 at Ghost Print Gallery, 220 W. Broad St.

Mamma'Zu Anniversary Card

This was done for Mamma'Zu's anniversary party this past January. I'm not sure what this image had to do with Mamma'Zu's anniversary, that's one of the things I love about Ed and working with him.

Keswick Horse Show

These were done around 5 years ago for Tyler Darden when he was still at Virginia Living Magazine. Tyler was always great to work with and as I've stated before I attribute it to him being an illustrator as well as an Art Director.

Tyler thought it might be fun for me to take a journalistic - sketch book approach on this job and attempt to make it look like I drew them on location at the Keswick Horse Show which is just east of Charlottesville, Va. and takes place every May. However I didn not draw them on location. I took my camera and snapped a bunch of photos.

I then selected a few and drew from them directly with a ball point pen so as to preclude me from being able to make corrections in the hopes of giving them a sense of immediacy that you might get from drawing on location.

The ones that are colored were done in photoshop.

What we were trying to do with these was to give the viewer a behind the scenes look at what takes place at a horse in the barns, before the horse and rider make their appearance in  the show ring.

One of my brothers is the course designer and technical adviser for this horse show and this provided me with easy access to anything I needed for this job which I appreciated. Thanks Blake.

Is it Summer yet?

This job was for Justin Vaughan of Richmond Magazine for their summer camp supplement. I did a cover for it that was your basic depiction of kids at camp engaging in fun, innocent outdoor activities and playing pranks on each other. It has an intentionally sweet, retro, sensibility.

A few more pages in there's a corresponding illustration for an article titled "Camp Culture; Songs, Ghost Stories and the Great Outdoors." which provided me with some elements that we're a bit more loaded to play with. Being a kid who loved telling and listening to ghost stories whether or not it was around the camp fire, I decided to focus on the ghost detail and luckily for me Justin was OK with it.

Thanks for taking a look.

Garden City or Bust

This is a spot I did for Lee Hawkins in the most recent issue of R-HOME magazine. The article, by Sara Jackson, is about the "frightening decline of pollinating insects over the last 30 years in the U.S." It states that in Va. alone the  "bee population has fallen nearly 70 percent in the last 30 years, from nearly 100,000 in the mid-70's to around 35,000 in 2011." She then offers 5 suggestions that we as back yard gardeners can implement to lure the pollinators back.

First rough sketch.

Second tight sketch.

Inked line work.

Colored line work.

                                            
                                                                                                                         

Finished spot.

                                               

                                                Thanks for taking a look.

Gesundheit.

This is a piece I did for the Wall Street Journal' with Pete Hausler for the Personal Journal section.

Because of the time demands of Newspaper publishing the turn around was short. I got Pete's email asking about my availability late Thursday, because of other work I had I didn't get him the sketch until late in the day Friday.

I was given a short synopsis of what the article was going to be about which was basically treating hayfever with a patch. Pete had a few suggestions,  have a couple of scientists in a field of flowers looking at a flower through a magnifying glass. Done.

He promptly called me back to say we needed to nix the magnifying glass because there was another illo. in the same section that prominently featured one. Also, the editors thought the female scientists was too plain.

Being it was so late in the day I didn't get him the revised sketch until Sat. morning. Pete got back to me mid-day Sat. the revised sketch was a go. He needed to have the finish by lunch, Mon. I got it to him by 2:00 Mon. afternoon and it was in the following days paper.

From previous work I've done with Pete  I knew that printing on newsprint was going to de-saturate the palette so I pumped up the colors to a somewhat ridiculous degree to compensate. Which turned out to be a good idea because in the printed piece the colors were a bit more subdued and I really wanted the color scheme of the flowers to have a chaotic quality.

Love Gone Wrong

I was asked by my old friend Santa De Haven to take part in a show she was curating for Artspace with the theme of Love Gone Wrong. She has paired 10 short stories by local writers with images by 10 local illustrators. I very rarely do work for galleries and I rarely get assignments where I'm asked to illustrate short fiction. Once upon a time having illustrators provide images for fiction pieces was fairly common place, not so much anymore, so I was more than happy to be a part of this.

I was given a Story titled The Wedding Horse by Angela Apte. After reading the story I immediately jotted down a couple of quick very rough thumbnails just to get an idea of what my approach would be.

Nothing too realized, just some visual short hand to get me going. Then I collected what references I thought I'd need and worked up a tighter drawing.

Once I felt like the piece was coming along I tightened it up further still.

It's generally at this stage where I would then begin inking the drawing but since this wasn't for a client I decided to try something a little different. I wanted to keep the rough unfinished feeling of the pencils so I played around with Levels-Adjust and then worked back into the drawing in Photoshop.

In order to create the sense of atmosphere I was after I took some graphite dust from my pencil sharpener and an old brush and applied the dust to a sheet of paper and again played around with Levels-Adjust until I was satisfied with  the overall texture.

I then assembled the texture and the drawing and began the coloring. My intent was to keep the coloring simple and mostly confined to the line work. In this piece I was much more interested in the quality of the pencil work and not so much the quality of the painting.

Detail 1.

Detail 2.

Final.

Santa told me that the writers will be reading their stories at the gallery Sat. Feb. 11th. I'm not sure of the time but if you're interested contact the gallery.