Create Play Connect is an event marketing agency near Minneapolis. They wanted to pitch an inflatable snowman concept to Fiarlife Dairy and hired me to sketch something up to help the client visualize the idea.

Red Bag Ministry is a Christian ministry based in Pennsylvania. Every year on Christmas Eve teams of volunteers go door to door giving out thousands of red bags containing free food, inspirational gifts, and a Bible. Their goal is to share the love of God and point people to Jesus, no strings attached. They hired me to create a short mini-comic to include in this year’s bags. They gave me a few parameters (for example, they wanted it to start and end with volunteers at someone’s door) and I worked with that.

Read the whole thing here:

You can learn more about Red Bag Ministry on their website.

When I was young I would often redraw an image from comic books. I could learn a lot from copying what other artists had done. Why did they draw this muscle this way? Why did they put this line here? Why did they include this detail but not that one? Why this pose? Studying a professional artist’s work is a really great way to improve.

I haven’t done that in years, so for my latest sketchbook session I thought I’d give it a try. My dad collects old cowboy western comic books from his childhood. Some of them have some really great covers! So I googled “cowboy comic book” and chose a cover that I liked. Now that I’m a professional illustrator myself I didn’t want to just copy it line for line. Instead I thought I’d try sketching it in something closer to my own style.

I still learned a lot.

Here’s the original. Unfortunately the artist isn’t credited:

Generations is a Christian organization focused on ”biblical family, discipleship, and education”. They hired me to illustrate a cover for a phonics textbook they were publishing. They had some existing mouse characters (a boy and a girl mouse) and wanted me to illustrate them in a family scene with the word balloon, ”Teach me to read God’s word”. It was my job to design a mom, dad, and baby that matched the existing characters.

Below is a peek into my process: Rough sketch, detailed sketch, and final illustration.

The curriculum is available here.

When people want to buy a snowmobile, whether it’s at a retail showroom or an event, they sometimes bring their kids along with them. Polaris decided to create an activity/coloring book for kids that they could give out to their littlest customers. They hired Six Speed marketing to create the book, and Six Speed in turn hired me to illustrate it.

Here’s a couple of the finished pages:

Spypoint is a Canadian company that makes trail cameras for deer hunters. To help promote their FLEX camera they hired me to illustrate a tough-looking cartoon dear in a muscular flexing pose. They’ve given me permission to show the work I did for them.

I started with some rough thumbnails exploring possible poses:

Based on their feedback I worked up a tight detailed sketch with rough color:

Here’s the final design:

I don’t think the art has made it out into the real world yet but the client has given me permission to share. Once they release the finished design with text I’ll post it here.