Tetris

I got a call to do the September cover of Game Developer magazine. They specifically wanted a portrait of Alexey Pajitnov, the mastermind and creator of Tetris. For me this was one of those great jobs I would probably do for fun anyways. An avid fan I grew up playing tetris on my old monochrome, 286PC. Tetris, King's Quest and that old video game called "Space Wars" I'm not sure if anyone's ever played that.

It was fun to do a portrait for a change, especially because Alexey has such a great face. These are the sketches I sent out.
I think the first sketch is really funny and weird for some reason. I really like the third comp the best and in retrospect I should have pushed harder for it. It would have been nice to do a portrait without going too literal with the actual tetris pieces. Though, the editors were concerned that this image had to easily be recognized as "Tetris" so in the end they went with an easier read.

Would-Be Timeline

Here's a piece I did recently about Asian-Americans in music. This original sketch was for a two page illustrated timeline with red lines acting as a placeholder for the text...


...but once I received the final text and started writing it out, it turned out to be a bit overwhelming...


...which brought me to this solution. Interesting maybe, but not so fun to read.


Finally, I got word from the AD that the spread had been reworked to address the text problem. The text was taken out and the illustration resized, so I started doing sketches which were strangely reminiscent of my earlier angry sketches. Still, I wasn't happy with any of the sketches until I brought back the red lines from the original sketch, which helped tie the piece together while suggesting both time and music.

Mind numbing pattern #45

I love patterns, and have been obsessed with drawing them recently. The first job is for Plansponser. I just had to illustrate the words "Play Ball!" I came up with these ideas, one of the rejected drawings inspired my next project.




This poster is for Cramer Krasselt an agency in charge of the annual Croquet Ball, Children's Benefit. Once again I had a lot of freedom to work out my ideas. I just had to incorporate the type as well as some sort of croquet reference. These posters are going to be printed rather large...around 40" tall. I had a lot of fun working on this...I think I'm going to get a bunch of these posters that I will put up somewhere on my site. Many thanks to the type whiz (art director?!) who I owe my firstborn child to. This guy did a poster for the benefit as well.