Illustration Tag

07 Jul

Posted at 00:00h in Art & Business, Character Design, Illustration, Just for Fun

A couple of weeks ago I announced my new finger-puppet business cards. I designed them to serve several functions: To demonstrate my abilities as a character desginer; To stand out and be a good conversation starter at networking events; To display not just my contact info but list past clients and quotes/endorsements from satisfied art directors. So far the cards have been a big...

31 Mar

Posted at 09:11h in Character Design

On Saturday NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! for which I did some character designs. The plot centered around a malfunctioning time machine that sends the penguins' space ship into the future where they meet their future selves. (The lesson for kids was about respecting the advice of our elders.) The original penguins were designed several years ago when...

18 Mar

Posted at 00:00h in Illustration

Recently I was hired by a publisher of Christian music curriuclum (Praise Hmyn Inc.) to do a spot illustration for a children's song, "The Tick and the Flea". My instructions were to depict a tick and a flea having a picnic on top of a Shitzu's head. Here's the final illustration, sketched, inked, and colored in Photoshop. The client asked...

03 Mar

Posted at 00:00h in Character Design, Illustration

On Saturday NBC aired another episode of 3-2-1 Penguins! which I did some character design work for. This was a funny episode (directed by Tom Bancroft) with a lesson about the importance of inner beauty and character as opposed to vanity. One of the characters I was asked to design was a cheezy George Hamilton-type alien with his own line of...

27 Feb

Posted at 00:00h in Art & Business, Illustration
As a freelance illustrator I often use reference photos for my work. Not to copy or trace but to study in order to help me understand the subject matter as I draw. My friend and fellow illustrator Tom Richmond recently wrote a good post on the proper role of reference photos when creating a piece of art. He compares it to a writer using a thesaurus, and warns against relying too heavily on reference imagery so that it becomes a crutch. When I was in art school the internet was brand new and there was no such thing as Google, much less Google Image Search. Back then we were taught to scrounge old magazines from friends, relatives, and recycling centers so that we could pour through them and rip out photos of anything and everything we thought we might be asked to draw someday. We were taught to organize them into what was called a "swipe file" or a "morgue". Over a period of several years I eventually filled two-and-a-half filing cabinets with photos. Google has made much of my "morgue" irrelevant, but not all of it.