http://www.drawger.com/atomic/ Tue, 08 Jul 2014 01:18:03 EDT FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://drawger.com/_images/drawger_leo_logo.gif http://www.drawger.com/atomic http://www.drawger.com/atomic/index.php?section=articles&article_id=14931

These are images from a sketchbook I kept while in the UK and Italy on vacation this last month. We visited friends and embarked on an epic art tour, from Stonehenge to The Last Supper, the Vatican and Sistene Chapel, Raphael's cartoon of The School of Athens, Cranachs and Breugels, many Carravagios, many duomos, Leonardo's notebooks, Isola Bella, etc.  Head still reeling. London, Rome, Siena, Cinque Terre, Florence, Venice, Stresa, Milan. An epic food tour as well: Cacia al Pepe, Vitello Tonnato, Bresaola, pizzas, rosatos, espressos, Negronis. And the best of all of them, Polpo alla'Inferno, cooked by the master chef di Milano, Alessandro Gottardo. Still letting it all process.











I brought a bathing suit, but didn't end up using it.  I did however go swimming, fully clothed, in this lake, by accident.























If you have interest, you can see the sketchbook in it's entirety on my website. Have a great summer everybody!

]]> Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:45:41 EDT http://www.drawger.com/atomic/index.php?section=articles&article_id=14837

I was recently asked by The American Bar Association's ABA Journal to illustrate a really interesting feature about a new group of people who collectively call themselves "Sovereign Citizens".  These are some images from the piece.



This group is comprised of both radical right-wingers as well as radical left-wingers who believe that the government has no legal right to collect taxes. Furthermore, they believe the U.S. government secretly created a glitch in the tax law that has set up a "straw man" account for each and every citizen that secretly holds our tax contributions and is only accessible by the feds.



They believe that they can force the government to hand over these large sums of money that we each supposedly have accumulated in our "straw man" accounts.  Some real bonified lunacy.



Being a journal of law, the focus of this fascinating feature was the technique that "Sovereigns" use, which is mainly achieved through clogging up legal proceedings with vast amounts of paperwork consisting of pseudo-legal mumbo jumbo, slowing down the courts and in some cases freezing the process of lawsuits and filings.



Art director Debora Clark did exactly what every illustrator loves - she gave a quick run-down, sent me the story and let me go.  A very fun job all around. This "Sovereign Snake" will be in the upcoming American Illustration annual.  The piece at the top of Uncle Sam as a straw man didn't run after an editorial decision to emphasize the paperwork rather than the fake tax accounts, but I like the image anyway so I posted it.



]]> Fri, 18 Apr 2014 16:46:40 EDT http://www.drawger.com/atomic/index.php?section=articles&article_id=14613


Below are some details of the Schiphol piece. I also made some elements with which Daniel made a really fun animation for the Schiphol site.



I hadn't known about the Amsterdam "XXX" until this job.  They suggested adding them to the wing of the plane.



Onward and upward, and hopefully towards a minimum of traffic jams. ++++++ These next two pieces were done for a Financial PR firm's collateral materials. I'd meant to post this a couple of months ago after I did the job but completely forgot to. This one was fun to do, but tough.  They gave me only a few key phrases for each, and wanted a super distilled image. The key phrase for the first piece, below, is: "Our Firm Sees Finance Through Many Lenses". I often tell my students that they need to do a lot more sketches.  For this particular image, the client kept asking for more and more sketches, three rounds of many ideas, and iterations of those ideas, in all.  In the end, they went with an idea that I had in my first round. They were concerned the fellow looked a bit too much like Mr. Magoo.  I explained that I'd attempted to render him like a modern, well-heeled, recently IPO'd Mission internet hipster.  I tried doing the same idea with other characters, a cat, etc., but in the end we all agreed the original guy was the way to go.



I should add that this image had to work both as a vertical and a horizontal, as it was being used in a variety of contexts, business cards, pamphlets, banners, etc. Below are some of the sketches.



For the second one, below, the given phrase was: "Finance is Different". Luckily, I got this one right in three sketches.  I'll spare you the other sketches. Eight years ago, in the then sea of horn-y illustrations, I told myself to never, ever use antlers or unicorns in an illustration.  Or raw slabs of steak. Thankfully, the antler/unicorn trends have finally disappated and I feel fine with using them again. 



Might be time soon to use a side of beef.

]]> Tue, 01 Apr 2014 20:56:08 EDT http://www.drawger.com/atomic/index.php?section=articles&article_id=14316


While they still remain palindromes, in this new episode the anagrammatical Mom and Dad have furthermore become mod and mad.



The book revisits Bob, who, due to events explained in the first book, now prefers to go by either Bert or Robert.  Like the first book, he quickly finds himself in a word conundrum as he attempts to fetch his Aunt, who doesn't really exist, and bring her to his Grandma.  It's either a blessing or a curse that Bert isn't dyslexic.



Like the first book, I was called upon to imbue each image with as many anagrams in the background as I could muster.  The spread above allowed me to make a bunch of them, as food packaging labels, needlepoint wall decor, etc.



Along Bert's journey to retrieve the Aunt that he doesn't have, he discovers some troubling things out there in the big, bad world.  For instance, he realizes something about his sisters that he'd not quite put together previously.





Gold Roaches grade school, Nature's Rat restaurant. It's a crazy, mixed-up anagrammatical world out there.





Bert never ends up finding his non existent Aunt, but he does manage to fish up something else to bring to his Grandma.



Coming soon to a bookstore near you.



]]> Wed, 18 Sep 2013 18:15:00 EDT http://www.drawger.com/atomic/index.php?section=articles&article_id=14346

This last spring I was contacted by Cameron about a picture book project that I'd be crazy to take on, yet crazy to pass up.  The deadline was insane, and I was already booked with work and in the middle of the teaching semester. But baseball season was just about to begin, and I'm a big Giants fan.  And the book was written by one of my favorite of the great Giant's t.v. announcers, Amy Gutierrez, known to her many fans as Amy G. For various reasons, the publisher wanted to have the book out before the season was over.  So, the deadline got compressed into about two month's time, which is insane for a 40 page book. When they told me Sara Gillingham and Amy Noveski, art director and editors extraordinaire, were on board, I knew that I had to take the project.  So, in I dove.



They wanted the book to be a thinly disguised ode to AT&T park and the Giants, a park which I dearly adore.  The park has a few key icons, most notably the scoreboard, big glove and the coke bottle.  There's also the fog. The main team was named The Good Guys, the opposing team named The Other Guys.  I dressed them in Orange and Blue respectively of course, as the Dodgers are the Giant's arch rivals. Ironically, this season is not working out well at all for our guys, and the Dodgers are on fire.  But hey, that's baseball.



Amy wrote the story around a young girl taking her brother to the ballgame, and one of my favorite things she did with the story is how she used the tale to help educate how to use a baseball scorebook.  I've never learned how to use them, so it was an educational experience for me.



I decided I wanted a really clean, commercial look for this book.  Adding to the pressure of the deadline was the fact that there were a lot of visual problems involving figure drawing, perspective and logos. In the end it all worked out.  Blew the deadline by a couple of weeks, but still in time for the presses.  Sara did a lovely job on the design, and the book will be coming out on August 18.  Amy and I will start doing the book signing rounds soon too. Many thanks go out to Mark Ulriksen, who recommended me for this.  Not that I needed any more, but I have a new found respect for Mark's incredible baseball work.





At the time of this writing, the Giants are at the bottom of the NLW, the Dodgers at the top.  They've turned it around before, and they could do it again. ¡Vamos Gigantes!



]]> Wed, 31 Jul 2013 17:21:01 EDT http://www.drawger.com/atomic/index.php?section=articles&article_id=14303

This was commissioned by the most excellent Lisa Sergi at Brown Alumnae Magazine. The article was an essay by Ruth Simmons, a former president of the University, and her reflections and analysis of MLK's influence on her life.



This was one of the sketches that I sent Lisa, a portrait of MLK.  I knew this would be labor intensive, so I first quickly did this as a way to have something to run by her to see if it was something that would work for her layout.



I also sent this as an alternative idea, using the simplicity of "equality".  We both agreed the portrait was a more elegant solution.  This image works well maybe for a more general idea of equal rights, so perhaps a good image for pride day if I segregrated the sexes?



A detail. Lots and lots of little heads.  I'm not going to count how many.



]]> Sun, 30 Jun 2013 18:00:59 EDT