Here is a small illustration I did for Calabash. I think I painted this in 2007. That year I was freelancing for Pogo, got to work on a Spiderwick video game, and painted a lot for Calabash Animation on Trix and Lucky Charms commercials.

Calabash asked me to take the sketch below and illustrate it, bringing it to a more detailed and clean rendering. Normally I do not like to take on freelance work that has been sketched out for me entirely, however in this illustration I felt there were challenges in the rendering that I wanted to take a crack at, such as stone countertops, a mirror and running tap water. Given that I only had a day to paint this, it was probably a good thing that the sketch was already worked out.

Trix Color Script panels

I found a few color panels from a color script I did for Calabash Animation back in...hmmm...maybe 2007. This was for a Trix cereal commercial that was done for the Mexican market. I had fun painting these.

little experiments

For anyone who reads my blog, you might have noticed it's all over the road. There is a little of this and a little of that, some observational paintings, some from imagination. I feel like I have been on this directionless art journey, creatively lost in sketchbooks and other media for some time now - immersing myself in various schools of thought to see how it feels.

Lately, I am finally feeling like I'm coming out the other end with ideas that I am excited to bring to life. These tiny little watercolor experiments, which I did last summer, gel some of the ideas I've been thinking about - not completely, but just as little snapshots I suppose. I like the idea of archetypal characters, some realism, some stylized, and also a bit of fun with the format of painting. I think I prefer to work in oil, and I like the idea of making very small paintings. I am working on many more in my cozy art cave... self doubt abounds, but I try to just blow through that and keep working. I think it's good.

Here are some packaging illustrations I did for a tea company about five years ago. The rendering is a lot tighter and more detailed than I would prefer; the client asked me to make sure they looked as realistic as possible while still maintaining a painted look. I'm not sure if I pulled it off. I'm also not sure about those ellipses. The illustrations have been sitting in my archive for a long time, so I thought I'd give them some fresh air. There are a few more in this series, but these are the best.

Koi Ranks for Mahjong game

Here are some koi illustrations I did in 2003 for the online game Mahjong developed at Pogo.com, where I currently work. These fish are 'ranks'. When you move up a level in the game, you earn a fish. I illustrated many more (like 20 in all), but only saved these samples for myself. I did the line work with black india ink on rice paper, then scanned the line work and painted them in Painter software using the watercolor brush. The effect could just as easily be done 100% traditional, but since these were for work, they needed to be digital. I enjoyed experimenting with this technique and, incidentally, love the game!

Study of a Leafy Sea Dragon + Some

I recently visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see the amazing Seahorse Show. Wow... I did so many sketches, took photos and afterward obsessed over these tiny leafy sea dragons. I did this little study and added some fantasy color - I scanned in my sketchbook drawing and added some Photoshop color to it. 

Here are some of my sketches. After awhile I tried to draw them from memory. I'm not sure if they are accurate but I think the spirit of them is there. I studied Leafy Seadragons, Weedy Seadragons and plain old Sea horses. Such amazing creatures!

This is a leafy sea dragon with some fantasy coloring using colored pencils in my sketchbook.

Plain old seahorse, but just as fascinating. They seem to almost have exoskeleton forms, very angular, more than you would think by looking at their silhouette. 

This page is a mix of both Leafy Sea Dragons and Weedy Sea Dragons. You can tell the difference by looking at the amount of decorative fins. Weedys have much more elaborate fins than Leafys. 

A portrait I tried from memory of a Weedy Sea Dragon. I could study these guys forever!

Sketch Comps/Greeting Card illustration

One of the first clients I found right as I left art school in the early 1990's was a greeting card company called Prudent Publishing, whom I still work with from time to time. The process in working with a greeting card company involves working up several comps, which then go into a review meeting. Typically, Prudent Publishing would have some ideas in mind when they'd ask me to generate some comps. So I would quickly paint them up and wait for the review. Sometimes the comps would be approved, and I'd be asked to work one or two of them into fully rendered illustrations. Here are several Christmas/Winter themed comps from several years ago (copyright Prudent Publishing Co.):

Santa! This one never made it to a card, but the comp was really fun to paint!


and below are a few cards that I illustrated:

Strawberry Shortcake and Reader Rabbit 2D Environments

These are all for the Learning Company's, "Strawberry Shortcake", "Reader Rabbit" or "Katie Kadet" cd rom series, painted around 2002, I believe, all in Photoshop.

In early 2000, I moved out to San Francisco. When I arrived here, the dot com crash had just about begun, leaving a lot of artists around town clamoring for freelance work. It was not great timing on my part, but despite the struggle, I did not regret moving to this beautiful California city. Most of the freelance work I found the first few years in living here was not local, rather it was either for Calabash back in Chicago, Celluloid Studios in Denver (which was bought by Will Vinton in recent years), greeting card and book illustrations in NYC. I considered going back to school at the Academy of Art in downtown San Francisco, but as it turns out, I was busy juggling various projects from various companies, leaving me little time or money to reinvent my career. I made a choice at this point to continue what I was doing and see where it would lead me. Over time I gradually built up as many freelance projects I could in order to customize my portfolio for the bay area, which is heavy in video game work and film. Try as I might, I finally found some good steady and rewarding freelance work through the Learning Company, who at that time was making educational cd games.

Given that this was still an animation based production, the work flow had a similar pipeline: layout was done by a layout artist, then colored by a colorist, which in this case was me. The drawing was done by [the great] Marcello Vignali. I painted it in Photoshop.

I'm not sure who did this drawing. I colored it, trying to make sure the palette and lighting was consistent from scene to scene.

This is a little spot illustration I did for a Reader Rabbit board game. I wish I could find more samples from this particular project. It was a fun one!

I only have a few backgrounds in my archives from all the Lucky Charms commercials I worked on in the 1990's. Here are a few. As you can see, this style and color palette is very different from the revised and updated palette in the two previous posts.

This background is a four foot long painting used in a pan camera move from left to right. Lucky was flying through the air in this particular scene. I think it took me a week to paint it. Too bad I can't show you a larger version. I think I had scanned it in sections and put it together in Photoshop.