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!

Had a busy Memorial Day weekend doing work for some great new clients. First up was a cover and interior for Peter Storch over at the Phoenix New Times. The article was about Supreme Master Ching Hai and her chain of vegan restaurants called Loving Hut. The article notes her self-proclaimed status as a being who has reached total enlightenment, and of the evangelistic zeal with which Loving Hut establishments promote the vegan lifestyle. It also raises questions about the belief that she heads up her own cult, with her followers working at the restaurants without pay. For the cover, we went with portraying her as a Chinese goddess, a comparison she’ll undoubtedly find flattering, but note the glowing eyes.

The glowing eye motif is repeated on the inside with an illustration of a Loving Hut worker, completely under Ching Hai’s spell.

Also completed this past weekend was a cover for Mike Kooiman over at Minnesota City Pages. I have a friend who grew up in Minnesota who tells me that the City Pages is a grand institution over there, so I was happy to work for a weekly with such a following. The article was about the ruthless corporate tactics used by Minnesota Public Radio owner Bill Kling that have cemented MPR’s complete dominance of public radio in the state. They initially wanted to do a photo shoot with Kling for the cover, but his assistant turned them down. So Mike came to me instead and we used the opportunity to editorialize a bit with the illustration. I imagine his PR assistant might regret refusing the photo shoot when they see the cover!

Thanks to both Peter and Mike for the respective gigs and for being great guys to work with.

I always enjoy sneak peeks into the studios of other artists, so thought I’d finally post my own contribution to that meme. These photos were taken by the masterful Brad Elliott last summer. The curious can click on the photos for a closer look.

My computer workstation. Macbook Pro laptop on the right, powering the Apple display in the middle. Harman Kardon soundsticks, some backup drives, and an Epson C88 for letters/light printing round out the desk. I also use a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet here for digital painting. In the far right can be seen an Epson 2450 scanner and my guitar case, holding a beautiful Taylor 815.

One of my studio totems is this Michael Jordan McDonald's collector cup, that I got sometime in the late 80's when I was in high school. It's been my watercolor/acrylics water cup ever since. I honestly think I'd be heartbroken if I ever lost this.

I have a ton of friends who are skilled carpenters, which comes in handy since I have zero carpentry skills. I commissioned my good friend Lloyd Johnsen to build this taboret/painting table for me, and he not only delivered on my exact specs, but built a truly gorgeous piece of studio furniture.

My studio room has a closet and drawers built into one of the walls, where I store extra supplies. But for paints that I want to have immediately on hand, I keep them stored at the base of my palette table in this old shower caddy. Another item I've had since high school.

To the left of my computer desk are these two shelves, left there by the previous owner of our house. Seemed like the perfect place to put the Darwyn Cooke-designed "New Frontier" versions of the Justice League of America. I'm a huge Cooke fan and love the retro stylings of these figures. As I tell visitors, how am I supposed to be able to work securely without the Justice League watching over me?

Studio bookcase from Ikea. I need about three more of these to hold my ever-growing artbook collection. Scattered on the shelves are various family photos, and a Superman snowglobe given to me by my good pal Richard Hilliard as an MFA graduation gift. The shelves themselves are stocked with graphic novels and tons of art books of all kinds. The top of the bookcase is my Jack Kirby tribute: three "Fourth World" action figures and one Captain America statue, all based on Kirby's artwork. To the right of the bookcase can be seen my Epson 4000 printer on its own special printer cart. J.C. Leyendecker poster on the wall to the right, and a Peavey bass amp (collecting dust and used as a magazine storage surface) down on the lower left.

And this is where everything comes together. I've had this same drawing table since I was a kid. Just beyond it is a nice thrift-store easy chair that I use for reading breaks. The only part of the studio that can't be seen here is the wall off-camera to the right, which holds one of my most prized art collection pieces: the painted cover to Sleeper #5 by the great Sean Phillips, and some nice built-in closets. In front of my drawing table up on the wall is a Dean Cornwell poster and to the right of it is the framed original and tearsheet for my first national publication illustration, a spot illo for Hispanic Business Magazine.