Long Overdue Art Update

by

I’ve been super-duper-crazy busy lately with freelance work. I’ve had several large projects on my plate for a while now, and the deadlines are all converging within the next two weeks. With freelancing everything seems to happen at once. Illustrator Tom Richmond put it well on his blog:

“Part of the problem with freelancing is that you never know when the next phone call will be your last for a while. As a result, you tend to take on more work than is good for you, for fear of a possible dry spell just around the corner.”

I’m getting better at dealing with it though. In the last couple of weeks I’ve actually turned down a couple of projects, something I very rarely do.

Here’s a few of the many balls I have in the air…

First, some spot illustrations for a children’s book I am doing for Living Waters Publications:



Some character design concepts for a bumbling pig character:

Turn-around drawings for a rubber pig promotional toy:

Some character design concepts of a smart cow for a dairy company:

And finally, some character designs for the re-design of a hardware store mascot:

In addition, I’ve got three other projects in the works. Two are still in the very early stages and the third has a Non-Disclosure Agreement attached, so I can’t show you anything….yet.

PLAY! Promotion

by

I’ve taken out a two-page spread in the upcoming 2007 version of PLAY!, a sourcebook and website for artists targeting the toy and game industries. The deadline to submit a page was Friday, and since I’ve been so super-crazy-busy I threw this together at the last minute. I would have liked to have done a more creative and energetic design, but this will have to do. In the mean time, you can view my page on the PLAY! website here.

Character Design Sketches

by

I’ve been pretty swamped with freelance work, but here’s a peek into one of my current projects. It’s a children’s book for Scholastic. I was asked to totally re-design an existing character, a young boy shark. Here are a few of the exploratory sketches I did that led up to the final design on the right. This one is a bit of a challenge because the shark has to be able to stand upright like a person, but also swim horizontally like a real shark. Also, since the shark is a lemon shark, I thought it might be fun to give him lemon-ish colors. But ultimately the client asked me to use the same colors from the previous artist’s design.

I’ll be finishing up the book in a couple of weeks and will let you know when it is available for sale.

Attention Comic-Con Attendees…

by

If you attended Comic-Con this year, I’d like your help.

There were a ton of great seminars this year, but there was one that I couldn’t get in to. “Web Comics: Finding an Audience” had one of the longest lines I had ever seen, stretching down the hallway, around the corner, down another hallway, around another corner, and then down the hallway some more. Needless to say the room filled up before most of us could get in.

If you are reading this and you managed to get in to that seminar, would you please let me know? I’d love to get my hands on any notes from the discussion, or at least hear the gist of what was said. Pretty please? Thanks.

PS–To sweeten the deal, I’ve posted my notes for the seminar on Character Design here. Enjoy!

DrawerGeeks: Cereal at 3am

by

The current theme over at DrawerGeeks is “Breakfast Cereal Characters”. So I did a take on the Lucky Charms guy. Not bad for a sketch done at 3am. Not great, but not bad.