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.

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!

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.

Detail shot of a magazine commission I just wrapped up last week. Probably my last post for 2010, so happy holidays to all, and I hope you’ll visit the blog again in 2011. I’ve already got my first post all planned out: a tour of my studio with amazing photography from my good friend Brad Elliott. Cheers!

Last week, I had the opportunity to illustrate the cover for SF Weekly, for a story about Nancy Pelosi. It’s almost a cliché these days for illustrators to publicly praise art directors on their blogs, but in this case, I really mean it: Art Director Andrew Nilsen was amazing to work with, and his excellent direction really made this cover all the better. If all my gigs went this smoothly, I would be a happy man indeed.

Working with an uncertain headline (due to last-minute attempts for the writer to wrangle an interview with Pelosi) meant that we had a strong chance of revisions or tweaks to the art, so digital paint was the way to go for this one. Done entirely in Photoshop CS4 using my well-worn Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. I’m doing enough digital painting these days that I’m getting sorely tempted to buy one of those new Cintiqs. Maybe someday…

Here’s a detail from my latest illustration for Stocks & Commodities Magazine. Thanks as always to AD Christine Morrison for the work!