I got an email on Friday morning from the art director at the Seattle Weekly, Boo Davis, asking if I might be available to do this week’s cover. As if there was any hesitation. It was a quick turn-around (due Tuesday afternoon), but they already had a pretty good idea of what they wanted. The cover story this week is about an immigration lawyer who is pretty shady and, unfortunately, some of his clients are being deported. The Weekly wanted a stylized seal of America that was rather ominous, with Antonio Salazar, the lawyer, happily welcoming people into the land of opportunity!
They wanted me to execute the cover in a style somewhere between my Cops & Robbers poster and my Let’s Save Michigan poster. For my first attempt, I decided to go a bit more in the hand-drawn direction, but it wasn’t really coming out right.
I should note that that Statue of Liberty was just a placeholder. But it doesn’t matter. The whole thing wasn’t looking great anyway. So I scrapped this one and instead pushed forward in the direction of the Michigan poster. Much more graphic and bold, which was more along the lines of what they wanted anyway.
We worked back and forth over the last couple of days finalizing this piece, preparing little versions for the interior and the web, and getting the masthead to look interesting but not distract too much from the art. I think it worked out pretty well!
Big thanks to Boo Davis and the Weekly for giving me the opportunity and good direction on this. It was a lot of fun and a great pleasure to do the cover!
I just completed a new poster for Comedy Central’s Mash Up. More specifically, this poster is for the live event that will be filmed as part of the upcoming one-hour special on Comedy Central. The show will be directed by one of the greatest guys I know, Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Mashup also features four great comedians: TJ Miller, Matt Braunger, Kumail Nanjiani and Hannibal Buress.
If you live in LA you should do yourself a favor and reserve some tickets. Especially because tickets are free! You will be required to get drunk, watch some great standup and be part of a live taping, though, so if you’re a moron you might want to avoid this.
Going through various old project folders today, I found some things that I still like but that I felt might not fit in my current portfolio. So I’ve chosen to put them here so that they’re still represented.
The first piece is a logo for my cousins’ farm, The Kitchen Garden. They wanted something that showed off the bright color and variety of their produce (which is pretty awesome and delicious, by the way). Here’s the final logo:
In the process of getting there, I did some sketches that were way too detailed for a logo, but I still kind of like the drawings:
In 2008 while I was in the midst of doing the Manifest poster for Columbia, they also asked me to make some little characters for their newly launched social site, The Loop.
I visited Columbia recently and laughed when I saw a shirt with these characters on it inside of a claw game.
And I’ll end this post with the old BLERDS postcard design. I still enjoy this and the BLERDS logo.
I came back to Seattle with a lot of books. Friends and family were very generous, including my in-laws who gave me a couple of books on the illustration biz (maybe they’re trying to tell me something?). Add these to a few other books I’ve picked up over the last couple years (and haven’t actually read), and I seem to have a nice little set of books on how I should go about becoming an illustrator.
I’ll try and find the time to go through these and maybe relate any useful information I find within. If anyone has any other suggestions of good books about illustration, drawing or creativity, let me know.
I recently finished this baby announcement for some friends in Chicago. The announcement included lyrics from a David Bowie song (with a link to the song), the baby’s “stats,” a drawing of the happy family and a photo of the baby. All of the text is hand lettered. The announcement was distributed via email (as a PDF and as an HTML embedded email). Apparently it went over pretty well.
