Star of the Show is done and done!

Alright! "Star of the Show" is complete! I just received a jpeg of the cover from my publisher, Shenanigan Books. It's my first picture book, written by the amazing Della Ross Ferreri and it was quite a ride. Never having done a book before or a series of paintings outside of 3, I never would have considered how difficult it might be to find excitement in painting the same two characters 26 times. But by the end, I had a better understanding of them than any character or painting I've ever done before. Definitely a worthwhile experience. Lookout for "Star of the Show" in September. You can find it on Amazon.com.

Now that's what I'm talkin' about! And so what started out as an attempt to create one post became three.

Color Crazy

Okay....this is not remotely close to the original colors, but it's kind of neat. Anyways, it's a self-promotional ad for the Directory of Illustration using the same image from my first post, but with some subtle tweaks to color and modeling. I'll see if I can fix that right now...

Easy Pickin's

Just a quick drawing in photoshop.

Brawn without Brains

Just fiddling around with photoshop brushes and clipping masks. While I feel I normally approach my work graphically, I usually end up losing some of the hard cut edges when I go to paint. The clipping masks really help maintain the edges. Plus editing is much easier.
Originally I just had two bulls pushing the blocks, but it didn't feel engaging, so I gave them human faces, cropped the composition and added an overseer for balance and human presence.

The Night Shift

Here's my first blog post. I had this cool idea inspired by Vigo's henchman in Ghostbusters 2 and also by my family's evil black cat. Talk about night vision. Very spooky.