Another piece for Mighty Mike Kooiman over at City Pages. This was a fun one: an international film festival is running this week in Minneapolis, and apparently many of the Middle Eastern films recall the feeling of 60′s American cinema. So, the brief was to try and create an Arabic version of James Dean/Natalie Wood riding on a motorcycle, with a bright optimistic vibe to it.

Mike requested a fair amount of bleed on this one, so he could have some flexibility with the typography. I love how the final cover turned out, but also thought I could use my blog to show the entire artwork, to justify the effort that went into painting that motorcycle.

Here are a few pieces I did this past month.

Poster for Westmont Repertory Theatre, for a punk-rock musical version of Animal Farm.

Another cover for Mighty Mike Kooiman at City Pages, this one using a parody/homage of the Land O Lakes butter packaging to address some malfeasance on the part of the dairy industry.

And one more homage commission, this one referencing Norman Rockwell’s iconic “Runaway” painting. Thanks to AD Jane Sherman for my first Seattle Weekly gig.

Just got informed that this piece for Stocks & Commodities Magazine was accepted into the Society of Illustrators Los Angeles 50th Illustration West competition. Looking forward to seeing the show when it’s up at Galley Nucleus!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

This is an image I painted as a promo piece, to show clients that I can do political caricature. And given the time of year, it seemed logical to go with a Halloween theme for the image, so put politics + Halloween together and in my head, at least, you get Michelle Bachmann as the Wicked Witch of the West.

Mike Kooiman over at Minnesota City Pages was nice enough to want to publish this piece, so it’s in the issue on stands now, as well as on this fun post on their blotter.

A grim illustration for a grim topic: the drug epidemic of so-called bath salts, which are legally sold in head shops as a bath product but in reality are ingested by drug addicts for a particularly lethal kind of high. While the addicts aren’t likely to be taking baths while high on the drug, it seemed the appropriate visual metaphor for representing the damage it does. Thanks to Christina Fuoco-Karasinski for the job.

My friend Angela gets her Latina groove on

Some people spend their Saturday nights going out on the town and having fun. Me? I spent my Saturday evening shooting photo reference for a music-themed cover due Thursday morning.

I’m a member of the art faculty at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and our new art museum is having a fundraiser show this November. They sent out almost 1000 sheets of 5×5 BFK Rives paper to artists all over the country, and asked them to do a drawing or painting on the paper and send it back. The goal of the show is for these donated works to be offered very cheaply—my understanding is that many pieces will be priced as low as $25, to entice people to become patrons of art at a really affordable price.

Given that I work at the college, it was definitely expected that I contribute a piece! But, I’m actually very honored to be a part of the show, as we’ve received pieces back from such illustration luminaries as Milton Glaser and Mark English.

I prepped the surface with two coats of clear gesso, sanded between the coats, and painted the piece with oils. Click on the piece to see it larger and you can see the ridges of the gesso. Stylistically, it’s an homage to my good friend Kenton Nelson, a wonderful painter of nostalgic scenes. I was trying to think of an image that someone would want to have on their wall at home, and this is what came to the surface.

Been a while since I’ve done a process post, so here are the steps for a job done two weeks ago for art director Todd Bates at Creative Loafing Tampa. The cover story was a fairly straightforward one: the Republican National Convention is coming to Tampa Bay next year, and the city is already looking ahead to it.

In total, I submitted six sketches for consideration. The one above and the chosen sketch below were my favorites of the bunch.

The chosen rough sketch

First step: thumbnail sketches. Todd sent me a jpeg of the cover template, and so I did my thumbnails digitally to ensure I was working within the exact confines of their layout. The reverse-L live area created by their logo proved to be tricky to work with, as I wasn’t sure how comfortable the client would be with me partially obscuring it. Todd asked for an elephant lumbering powerfully towards the viewer, and my additional concept was to color the elephant to look like a living version of the RNC logo.

With the concept approved, I gather up photo reference and get to work on a tight drawing that will serve as the foundation for the painting. I like to do my drawings in drafts on tracing paper, lately using Prismacolor pencils. The orange drawing is a loose, rough first pass and the blue drawing is the more finished drawing. This second draft gets scanned at 400 dpi and then I’m ready to work on the digital painting.

Work in progress. Here you can get a glimpse of a typical layers setup for my paintings, which is pretty straightforward. The legs and ear have been rendered, but the rough block-in can be seen on the head and trunk of the elephant.

The final illustration, painted in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and completed in about a day and a half. Thanks again to Todd Bates for a fun gig!

The Wall Street Journal iPad app version of the article

Here are two recent assignments. First up was a job for Pete Hausler at the Wall Street Journal, for an article about women’s summer shoes that will destroy your feet. The night before it published, I was up late reading and it suddenly occurred to me that 1) the WSJ has an iPad edition and 2) since it was past midnight where I live in California, that meant the piece had probably published on their online and iPad editions. Pretty fun to check out the issue and take the above screenshot.

Since this job was painted digitally, it only took a little more work to turn the shoes into spot illustration “mug shots” for the article. Probably one of the odder stories I’ve illustrated in my life, but it was a real honor to be able to add the prestigious Wall Street Journal to my client list.

I was also commissioned by mighty Mike Kooiman over at Minnesota City Pages, for a cover feature on evangelist/hair metal drummer/loudmouth Bradlee Dean. Dean made the cover due to the controversy he deliberately stirred up with this opening prayer at the MN House floor. One of the privileges of being an illustrator is you get to do critical caricatures of some truly deserving people.

If any readers of this blog will be attending this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, then please come find me over at the Society of Illustrators Los Angeles booth, #2616! I’ll be doing an oil painting demo on Thursday at 2pm and a digital painting demo on Saturday at 2pm right at the SILA booth, located across the aisle from the Dark Horse pavilion.

In honor of the Captain America movie opening during the convention, I thought I’d do Cap characters for the two demos. Above is my demo sketch for Cap’s nemesis, the Red Skull. Come by and watch me turn this drawing into a full-color rendered piece. Hope to see you there!