GOP meltdown

For the Boston Globe

Tea & Jam

Logo for a cool new grainless bakery. Tea & Jam 

For the Boston Globe

I did two versions for this one. I never got the story, just a paragraph, so I wasn't sure of the tone. It was about letting people drive in the HOV lanes for a toll.

Bonus passengers

Getting around the system

Sketching at Society of Illustrators

I've been going to sketch nights at the Society of Illustrators. They have a bar with a big Norman Rockwell illustration above it. Drinking and drawing. You have to love that. Here are some of the sketches. I think that whatever style an artist works in its important to always sketch and work on the basics. It's like weight lifting for a football player - it's not the game of football but its necessary to playing well. I've always faced harsh criticism for drawing in this style but to me its just the practice for bigger and very different styles. I've heard the criticism loud and clear and even agree with a lot of it. The world doesn't really need more well drawn pictures of flowers or reclining figures, but an artist can learn a lot by looking at something, ignoring what you know about it and just drawing the lights and darks (or whatever catches your eye and somehow comes out representing the model). In the end it's not that you want the sketch for anything, you just need to go through the process to build that brain muscle.

Gift guide

For the Oregonian

Weekend magazine cover

Fish oil

For Conservation Magazine. This was the sketch but I like it better than the final. Don't really like the sharp edge around the outside.

A NY crowd

This isn't my usual style but I used to paint illustrations back in the day. I did this just to practice. It's like an earlier post of a sketch I did of a crowd. Mostly I'm just interested in the lights and darks and the patterns a crowd makes.

Sunshine crowd

Writing about cancer

Another one for the Chicago Tribune. This is about the healing and coping qualities of writing about cancer.​ This one was painted by hand with acrylics.

Writing about cancer​

For the Chicago Tribune

This one was for the books section about "why it’s important to give the victims/participants in human rights crises a voice and how their voices have been used to influence changes in policy".

A voice​

Tileable art

I used that previous sketch to make this tile that can be repeated on every side. Not totally refined here yet, but I'm going to work more on this idea. Seems like if we can have tileable textures we can have tileable art too. I've made a Flash example of how this works and I'm going to make other tiles and add a new page of these to this site. Soon. Seriously.​

It's all vector so the colors and scale can be anything you want.​

Sketch of people on a sidewalk

Spent some time on the couch watching football and baseball today, so to avoid feeling lazy I sketched these people from photos I took. I added the color in Photoshop. I'm still a little obsessed with all the bright sunlight in the mornings. Thanks to the Yankees going 14 innings I had more time to polish this.

New York

Here's a Photoshop sketch of NY. I walk to work with my wife in the mornings and walk back through Times Square. The weather has been great and the sun is really bright in the morning. This is a sketch of the occasional open space you'll see with all the busy-ness and harsh shadows around it.

Cartland

​This was for a piece on Portland's best new foodcarts. The editor wanted a gameboard but the trick was to find a way to add all of the carts (photo or their logos) and tie it all together with the same look. The photos and logos wouldn't have worked so I loosely sketched the logos myself in black and white. The whole thing was made in Illustrator. There was some text added above the black rooster explaining the story.

New news

​You may notice this website has lots of new stuff and a completely new look. I've switched hosting and am trying out squarespace, using their templates. In keeping with the "new" theme, I will also be moving to a new town with my awesome new wife KB. We are moving to NY and are very excited about it. We hope to live in or around midtown. We'll know more about this in a week. In the meantime I'm packing up all of my art supplies and leaving everything else behind.