It was very exciting to get a call for a Forward cover. As you can see here, it’s a great lineup of illustrators to be a part of! The package was about the future of the housing market and the end of the McMansion era. Basically, housing is coming back, but it’s in smaller construction and closer to cities. Here is the cover:
Here is the interior spread:
Thanks to Nicole and Tiffany!
A few weeks ago I was asked to work on a full page for Adweek for a feature on the best movie marketing campaigns ever. Originally the art was going to focus on The Dark Knight, but that idea got 86ed. Here are a few of the sketches that I thought were fun:
I had lots of roughs that played off the bat signal, but these two were my favorites – shining on a billboard and the old marketers’ bullhorn. The article mentioned an online scavenger hunt that revealed small trivia about the movie so I did a series of matroskas alternating between fans and characters (I really wanted to do that one!). We ended up going with one of the sketches that was more general and really just played off the elements of the headline – selling and movies. Here are a couple of the rejects:
And here is the final:
The AD was photographing marquee letters for the typography and early on we considered just using line drawings of guys putting them in place. It would have been too late after they were photographed and the layout was done but I did give them one little man at the end to use on the headline page:
Thanks to Nick for a fun assignment!
Last year I illustrated the End of the World Sports column in ESPN Magazine beginning in August and concluding (naturally) on December 21, 2012. I loved working with everyone there and happily I’ve done a couple more assignments for them recently. Both pieces were for a very stats-heavy page and it’s a pretty challenging space to work in – 8.5 inches wide by 3 inches deep. The first column was about the disparity between fan favorites and statistical favorites, and which is more important:
The second piece, which is on the newsstand now, is about the Miami Heat. The column talks about how all of the top teams can seem like the best in a single game, but Miami has greater consistency in single and series games, and that’s why they will win the championship this year:
Thanks so much to Linda and Meaghan!
Wait, what? Yep, in the same week I was asked by the New York Times to illustrate a) Viagra’s newest benefit to mankind as a way to lose weight, and b) a story about a woman taking testosterone therapy for menopause who turns into a road-raging sex maniac. Sure, no problem. I knew I wasn’t going to get too far with the Viagra story but I had a lot of fun working on these sketches anyway:
The top left was my favorite, and I thought maybe it had a shot, but yeah, no way. Then I thought maybe the slim-wasted heart boxer shorts? Nope. And the other two were pretty much just for laughs between me and the AD. A little safer, but OK, here is what got the green light:
And here is my first piece for the new Booming blog on nytimes.com. After taking testosterone to ease the symptoms of menopause, the writer found herself with a very short fuse and the libido of a 17-year-old wrestler. I liked the idea that the treatment was waking these primal urges from within, so I tried to get at that in the art without losing the humor from the story. Since it ran earlier this week, I have received the nicest emails from the editor and the writer, so I think we nailed it:
Thanks to Peter, Laura, Mike and Stacia, and of course, Kelly for the recommendation!
After leaving the Dallas Observer, fans of the talented Alex Flores tearily wondered when and where we would get to work with him again. The answer is at Success, a business magazine in Dallas where he is freelance art directing. Alex called me to do a full page for a feature on the perils of procrastinating at work. As always, it was a pleasure to work with someone who has so much energy and loves illustration. Here is the final:
And this is one of the rejects that I really had a tough time parting with, so it gets honorable mention here:
Thanks to Alex for the assignment, thanks to you for visiting!
Golf Digest has become a very regular job, and I never get tired of it. I think it has something to do with all that green. This column was about how to pick the perfect club for your game. For the final I wanted to try playing off the golf instructional diagrams – simple, fixed-width line, very basic shapes, flat color. I think it worked nicely with the content of the image:
Here are some of the other ideas I sent:
Here is a batch of icons I did last month for AARP for repeat use with their web content. They had to be simple, immediate reads and generic enough that they could work over and over.
Things move pretty quickly over LA Magazine. I did a fast turnaround on these little office exercises for my first assignment with them:
And here is the Science Times spot from last week. It was about how China’s one-child policy has created children who are anxious, untrusting and risk-averse.
You can read more about this and all the Science Times illustrations at Drawing Science. Thanks to Doug, Dian, Steve and Peter!
Happy 2013! Here is a little roundup of some recent work for the NYTimes…
From Science Times yesterday, the Observatory column was about the mourning calls of scrub jays:
And another spot for Science about the discovery of cheese-making dating back to the Neolithic period:
This one was my first Letters piece in a while, about whether or not we should scrap the Constitution:
Here are four recent spots from Biz Day – a million air miles in one year; behavior detection by the TSA; happier on the train than on the plane; getting detained in Mexico for passing a counterfeit bill:
And for today’s Frugal Traveler, old fashioned tips for saving money on travel:
And finally, just a quick nod to these two spots from Science Times which were accepted into the Illustration West 51 show!
This is my second illustration for the parenting column in Worth. The topic was raising successful children and what that really means today, and how too much emphasis on continuous achievement makes children depressed, anxious and can even lead to drug abuse.
Here are a couple of ideas that almost made it:
The AD felt like these focused too specifically on athletic and academic success respectively, but I was very happy with the pick for the final. Thanks to Pam at Worth for another great assignment!