Haunted Mansion for Kid Stuff Marketing

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Kid Stuff Marketing creates happy meal-style toys and games for restaurants. They hired me to illustrate a “flashlight find” game with a haunted mansion theme. It’s a simple but very clever toy. Here’s how it works:

The artwork is printed on transparent plastic, then glued into a cardboard sleeve over a black background. When the transparent image is laid over the black it’s almost impossible to make out anything. (I was asked not to make the colors too bright to aid this effect.)

On the back of the frame is a punch-out “flashlight” with a white circle at the end. You slide the white circle into the frame, between the art and the black background, and boom! You can see the image.

I made this TikTok video to show it in action:

On the back of the cardboard sleeve are several questions (“How many cobwebs are there?”, “What is popping out from behind the couch?” etc.). It’s a simple but super fun gimmick! My kids loved it and said it blew their minds. They couldn’t figure out how it worked without any lights or batteries.

Kid Stuff Marketing does a lot of fun work and I’m honored to help them out. Here’s a few details from the illustration I submitted:

Happy Halloween!

‘Crib Notes’ Book Cover

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Recently I was hired by an author/therapist to create a cover illustration for Crib Notes, an upcoming book for new parents. The client wanted me to illustrate a grid of baby faces showing various emotions and ethnicities. The book is still being edited so I don’t know exactly how the illustration will be used but they gave me permission to post the artwork. It was a fun project, and when I know more about the final result I’ll share it here.

Country Critters

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Kid Stuff Marketing approached me with a line of characters called Country Critters. They had previously used the characters in a line of placemats, paper bags, and toys that were licensed to a variety of restaurants, and decided it was time for a refresh. I was told I could draw the characters in my own personal style as long as I didn’t deviate *too* much from the existing designs.

Also, the illustration had to be designed in such a way that it could be used as a placemat but also so that the top 15% or so could be chopped off and the rest printed as wrap-around art on paper bags. That meant the characters had to be strategically placed to avoid being printed on a fold line.

The creative director, Jay Thompson, sent me a rough sketch of an approximate layout, which helped a lot. It was a super fun project and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Weegos Packaging Illustrations

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Alley Oop Toys asked me to help them with the expansion and rebrand of their Weegos toy line. Weegos are small animal characters that can clip onto pencils, backpacks, etc. They also wear mix-and-match shirts with fun slogans on them that you can collect.

The only character the client had was the sloth, but they wanted to expand into a line of additional animals. They hired me to design five new characters, including finished vector art for packaging and promotion.

Here are the characters I designed and illustrated for them:

I also illustrated a “money shot” of the sloth attached to a pencil…

…and Alley Oop toys sent me the Weegos logo, asking me to illustrate the characters grouped around it:

Here’s how the final packaging turned out:

Weather Cartoon: Clouds

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A few months ago I was hired by Spider Magazine to do a full-page comic based on the theme “weather”. This is one of several ideas I submitted. It’s not the one they chose but I liked it enough to finish it up anyway.

Weather Cartoon for Spider Magazine

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Spider magazine is published by the Cricket Group for children ages 6-9. They hired me to illustrate a full-page comic for the inside cover of their May-June 2019 issue. The theme of the issue was “weather” and they gave me freedom to come up with anything I wanted related to that theme. I’ve always admired artists who can do wordless or mostly-wordless stories so I thought I’d try my hand at it. Now that the issue is out I can show what I did: