Quick Turnarounds

Congratulations to Josh for picking up a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators last night! Anyone in the New York area should go by the Society to check out the Sequential/series show, it's pretty awesome.


* * * * *


I had two quick-turnaround assignments keeping me busy last week. The first assignment was seven illustrations for Nick Rhodes at Radar Magazine about prank phone calling military recruiters. You can view the full articles here.


Here are my working sketch and final inks that lead to this illustration.

In addition to deciding on a unifying color scheme for all the illustrations, one of the first things I did was to draw my version of the camoflauge in use by American soldiers in Iraq. The same pattern is used in all the pieces in the series.

Some of my favorite pieces didn't run, such as the one below, but you can see them on my updated website.








* * * * *





At the end of the week I got a call from Lou Vega at ESPN magazine for a small piece about Chinese basketball players. You can see the changes made from my initial sketch to final piece. It's scheduled to run in next month's issue.

Thanks for viewing!

Bears and Beasts!

Welcome to my first post of 2007. Now, don't get overly excited or anything...

*******

First of all, for those of you in Los Angeles tomorrow night, Josh and I will be joining a slew of estimable artists (Jordan Crane, James Jean, Souther Salazar, Ron Kurniawan, etc...) at Thinkspace Gallery for a BEASTS! booksigning. Come talk to us so we don't feel neglected and unpopular. We'll probably be sulking somewhere in the shadow of James Jean's crowded table.

*******

Not too long ago, I received a job illustrating a book review about the overcrowded prison system here in California. I decided to go with the imagery of the California flag, making use of the grizzly as my main subject.



The deadline for this one was a bit tight, so the sketch phase was delightfully short (it's usually excruciating for me). Basically I just had to make a rough doodle to give them an idea of where I was going. Once it was sent off, I went to work beatifying it.



After simplifying the drawing and bringing it closer to the imagery on the California flag, I figured it would be smooth sailing from there on out. Of course, it wasn't. In mid painting, I was asked to extend the border of the illustration to fit the column of text on the right and have the landscape trail off the page. Unfortunately, at that point I had already finished painting the slant of the ground going the opposite way.

Thank God for Photoshop.



Cut out the old background, painted a new one, digital cut and paste, and BAM! Like magic.



Here’s a detail of the massive bundle of prisoners. Because I’m such a self-absorbed egomaniac, I try to sneak a self-portrait in whenever I drawing large crowds. This one was no exception (I'm hanging upside down on the far right).

2007 Comics Anthologies

Happy 2007 everyone,

I'm going to be a part of some really cool anthologies this year, one of which is for the next meathaus.

Here are two pages from a comic I drew a while back called Hamburgers for One.

For the colors I'm working with a limited palette and trying to see how far they can be pushed. So far it's been a really exciting and worthwhile challenge. The coloring of the title was inspired by the work of one of my favorite artists, Chris Ware.

One of the challenges I enjoy about comics is how not only does each panel have to look good on its own, but also work with the page as a whole, and the entire story as one composition.

When I design a story I try to keep a steady rhythm of panels. For Hamburgers, the entire story is built on the grid of 12 square panels.

Also I'm sure to include a place for the eye to rest on every page--staring at 12 equal-size panels for 24 straight pages would be visually strenuous and would make for over-all boring compositions.

I try to keep all these things in mind as well as emotional impact with the natural beats of the story, and I always try to set up page-turns to have some kind of story event with them. Thanks for looking!

The Year That Was

Happy New Year! A look back into the year of 2006. Entertainment Weekly asked me to create 3 spreads as openers to sections in the magazine. I had an idea to draw a race that would link the spreads together, but ultimately I was asked to stick a little closer to the initial concepts. Some of my earlier doodles...



After a bunch of frustrated drawings, I found some old children's books and I re-watched Tron that really inspired me in a way. I'm not really sure how it helped directly, but it really jolted me out of a rut I felt like I was in earlier.

+++The Year That Was+++



+++The Entertainers+++



+++The Best And The Worst+++



p.s. I think the actual print versions of these are slightly different colors...more pink to tie in with the magazine format. Might still be on newsstands this week. And I still like the looser sketch on this last one better than the final. I think maybe I lost a little energy when I went to finish this.