Tufts Goes Hollywood
Tufts Magazine
AD: David Horton
Tufts Magazine
AD: David Horton
This month I got the chance to do one of my first double page spreads. This was for a story about TUFTS alumni presence on the West Coast, and in the movie business in particular.
I always forget how much I like drawing landscapes until I get an assignment that calls for one. I think, like everyone, I drag my feet a little bit (or a lot, actually) when I am at the beginning of a project, but can totally lose myself in the process once I am actually on a roll. One of the pitfalls of doing the sort of short deadline spot and 1/4 page work that is my bread and butter is that, by percentage, I am spending a lot more time in the feet-dragging initial stage of an illustration, and a lot less time in the totally effortless "Let's add a happy little tree over here" stage. A landscape assignment (or really anything with a little more real estate on the page) gives me a great chance to correct that ratio, at least for a project or two a month.
A big thanks to David Horton for the assignment!
Hollywood Gossip
NY Times
AD: Barbara Richer
The Hollywood theme rolled into my next illustration as well, this header illo for the Sunday Styles section of the NY Times. This was for a story about the culture of industry gossip-swapping in the movie business.
This was a slightly unusual format to work in (super panorama) but it ended up allowing for a sort of extreme foreground background composition that I don't think would have really worked as well otherwise. I'm always looking for a way of breathing a little fresh life into my studio work, and recently one thing that I've been trying to do is to allow myself to fill out the backgrounds and settings of my drawings. This is actually bringing me full circle, in a way. Before getting into illustration my drawing was always free-association based, and I tended to focus more on filling out spaces with visual interest than trying to tell a particular story. Initially, moving towards commercial art meant filtering out a lot of the visual chatter so that I could focus on a single subject. Now I'm starting to get curious about what would happen if I left the door open to a little more clutter.
Thanks to Barbara Richer for the assignment!
Bio Engineering Lab
UT Arlington
AD: Brody Price
This was a fun one for a story in "University of Technology Arlington" magazine about their Bio Engineering program.
Somewhere in a journal somewhere, or up in my head, there is a list of things that I'm always excited to draw. Sometimes, though, it takes an assignment for me to remember what those things are. In any event, a control room full of screens and digital read outs is definitely on that list. This was something that Marshall Arsiman would always talk about at SVA, and it is one of those things that is totally obvious, but is kind of easy to forget anyway. His advice, and I'm paraphrasing, was to forget about illustrating the assignment, and instead just shoe horn something you are already excited about into all of your sketches. If you wanted to, you could probably use a control room full of scientists to illustrate any assignment, but then maybe people would start to catch on. Perhaps I've already said to much.
Thanks to Brody Price for the great assignment!
Phone Bomber
NY Times "On The Road"
AD: Bob Goetz
AD: Bob Goetz
NY Times "On The Road"
AD: Bob Goetz
This month also marked the end of my year long run as weekly contributor for Joe Sharkey's "On The Road." These last two spots were for stories on the TSA's response to potential "phone bombers," and the way that large companies insure against possibility that employees may be killed during business travel, written in the aftermath of the MH17 tragedy.
Working on a weekly spot was such a great experience, and I can't thank Bob Goetz enough for the opportunity to work with the column. The spot runs in black and white at barely 1 inch square, but there were plenty of weeks where I would rack my brain for a full day or two before I could come up with a way to fill it. Knowing that I would get another chance at bat every 7 days gave me a lot more freedom to experiment (and sometime, maybe too much freedom!) But I don't think I could have given myself a better assignment for teaching myself to simplify a visual idea to it's kernel. In the end some of my favorite illustrations from the last year came out of the working with "On The Road."
