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 [...]

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 [...]

Everyone’s favorite Scottish art director, Christine Morrison, called me back in December to do a cover for Stocks & Commodities Magazine. These articles tend to be dense, complex financial reports, so we always look for a hook within the text to base the illustration on. In this case, the writer made note of how the [...]

For the third year now, I had the pleasure of illustrating and designing the poster/theme art for the Westmont Christmas Festival series of concerts. Yesterday, they experienced a new record: two of the three shows completely sold out the day the tickets became available! It all begins with the sketch. Ballpoint pen on post-it note. [...]

Time for some art. Recent painting done for fun, a few brushstrokes at a time over the course of several months. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 8×8 inches.

It was a pleasure doing this pro-bono job for my buddy & colleague John Blondell at Westmont College. When John asked me if I would be interested in doing the poster for a series of six short plays by Samuel Beckett, I had only one condition: as long as it could be a portrait of [...]

Here are a few figure drawings from recent class sessions, all of them 2-minute poses, using charcoal on smooth newsprint. I live by the Conté a Paris Pierre Noire combination charcoal/conte pencils, sharpened to a razor point with a single-edged blade. They’re getting harder to find these days, but you can still get them here.

Studies for an illustration I’m working on right now, done with prismacolor on vellum. I love drawing with prisma pencils, they glide on the paper in a way that is really appealing to me. Rare that an illustration deadline will allow for the time for such luxuries as exploring different head options, but I have [...]

The issue containing this illustration has now seen print, so I can now show it in its entirety, as well as show the process steps. Above is the final illustration as it saw print. The article was simply about reversals in the NASDAQ market. With that basic concept in mind, I set about trying to [...]

I was asked by friend and colleague Mitchell Thomas at Westmont College if I would create the poster for their next production, a play written by one of our own college students, Diana Small. Muéveme, Muévete (Move Me, Move You) is written in the tradition of Latin-American magical realism, and concerns a young woman and [...]