I have no idea why I started this series, especially since my circus series is up to only two performers. The thing is I’ve become obsessed. My working title is Diner Monsters and I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who is going to love these little guys, but I can’t help it. There is something so silly about the idea of a monster sitting down at a diner and having a meal.

I plan on doing a series of six. Mostly because that’s how many artboards I have set up in Illustrator. I also have a feeling that by the time I’m done this grumpy guy may look a little different. I’ve been creating symbols for things like plates, silverware, ketchup, etc. so I can use them over again and they’ll all look alike. The thing is I’m not 100% sold on some of them, so I may go back and do some editing along the way.

For my first monster I actually chose the meal before I started the monster. I’m not sure why, but I started drawing a hot turkey sandwich. For things like inanimate objects and food stuffs I don’t necessarily need to sketch them out first. As long as I can find something to reference I can draw it directly in Illustrator these days, so I usually have Google images open on a second screen. In fact my sketches have much the same purpose. So while looking at plate after plate of hot turkey my first diner monster came to life. Now I usually like getting fries with my hot turkey, but I noticed that most pictures opted for the mashed potatoes instead. Since it appeared to be the more popular option, and was more interesting looking than gravy covered fries I decided to appeal to the masses.

When it came time to decide on what kind of monster would be dining on hot turkey I decided I wanted an older, blue collar monster. Something about hot turkey just screams old people to me, although I’ve loved it since I was a teen. Since the breakfast monster I’m planning on working on isn’t going to be drinking coffee I decided Hot Turkey would. Drinking coffee with savory dinner items is something I’ve always associated with old people.

I’m finally done! The last in my series of business cards, and I couldn’t be happier. I put in the order today.

For the last in my series of Tat business cards I did another more personal card. I LOVE visiting offbeat tourist locations. Giant Gorillas or Madonnas? Check. Museums opened by people with a disturbing collection of elephant chachkies? Absolutely. Any two headed, multi-legged beast, real or faked. I’m there. Buildings that look like inanimate objects? Especially those! Summer time is the best time to visit those places, seeing as most are seasonal, so I’m getting very excited to finish of visiting places in road trip vicinity of Philly.

This one was actually pretty difficult. The main focus of these trips are the places I go to, so how do I depict myself as a roadside adventurer? At first I thought it would be fun to have me wearing an old timey safari outfit, because noting says adventure like safari gear. But I don’t go on safaris, and have no desire to. Unless they have the worlds largest teapot. I also considered drawing me driving my car, but the most interesting thing about my car is the plastic Jesus that lives on the dashboard.

In the end I decided I would try for a more touristy look, me with a camera. I also wanted to include some of the sights I’ve visited. At first I was going to do full drawings, but they started to make things look busy. Instead I took the header from an old blog I wish I hadn’t deleted and repurposed it for my business cards. In the original image I included places I still haven’t had the chance to experience, but I wanted the business card to show places I’ve actually been. After all, the whole idea of these different versions of me on business cards was a way to start a conversation.

On my business card you can see silhouettes of the following Roadside Attractions:

• Mighty Joe the Gorilla
• The Mars Flying Saucer
• The Praying Mantis Statue
• The Bedford Coffee Pot

One of Nutrisystem’s biggest competitors on the web is a company called Medifast. They both offer food created specifically to shed pounds, but with drastically different offerings. As it does with many of it’s competitors Nutrisystem put together a landing pages outlining the benefits of their product.

For this project I was asked to do illustrations that showed a typical day on each program. The color palette needed to be somewhat soft and muted, but still be consistent with the food items. I also needed to keep the serving sizes accurate while making the Nutrisystem options more robust in comparison.

Aside from the last round of food illustrations I did for Nutrisystem’s member site I rarely draw food. In fact I don’t know too many people who do. While shooting a picture of your every meal and posting it on Instagram may be all the rage, people just don’t get excited about drawing food.

The first step was to open up each companies web site and begin sketching out their products. I was very conscience of using the same sized dishes to show scale for each product. From there we moved over to Illustrator and I began creating meals.

Learning about Symbols the Hard Way.

Although there were very few changes after the illustrations were done, some things did need to be tweaked. It was a lesson in using Illustrators capabilities to the fullest extent. Since the only time I’ve created illustrations for anyone besides myself was when I worked on the travel posters for Destination: You I don’t often need to make any revisions. Besides, I like drawing people and they don’t have to many repeating parts.

With food, however, things like spinach leaves and seeds often get repeated so having to change them all is a pain. This is the moment I realized the importance of symbols. It’s not that I didn’t know about symbols or how to use them, I’ve just never thought of how useful they are. After listing to a web designer describe the process of using Illustrator to do mockups, and the flexibility of symbols specifically, it became abundantly clear that I needed to be using them for my illustration work as well.

Since I created Don’t Call Him a Hipster Strong Man back in January I’ve been thinking about doing a series based on the circus. I’ve also been thinking of turning them into a series of cards, all with the same basic color palette and everyone wearing some piece of apparel that’s red and white stripped. This week I completed my aerialist.

When it comes to aerialists in the circus it pretty much comes down to high wire acts and trapeze artists. Personally I’ve always like the high wire better. I think it may be because it seemed like the one act I might be able to do if I ran away with the circus. I’ve never been gifted with any sort of physical prowess, but one thing I could do was walk a balance beam. When I was a kid I always dreamed that the circus would take me in and seeing my skill at walking a straight line in the grocery store parking lot they would eventually teach me how to ride a bicycle fifty feet in the air.

Of course a bicycle just isn’t dramatic enough, so I decided to go full on unicycle. That’s right, a single wheel and an amazing amount of core strength. For both my aerialist and my strong man I decided to focus on the Barnum years of the circus and plan to do the same for the rest of the series. I’ve tried to keep the costuming related to the late 1800′s without being too slavish to the time period. I also love the idea of a woman who can wear a bustle and bear her legs. Scandalous!

As for the title, well… mostly I wanted it to match up with my strong man title. Of course it’s also because there’s a hipster in my neighborhood who lurches around on his unicycle and I just want to push him down. Listen, I’m all about expressing yourself, but a unicycle is not the way you get around a major metropolitan area. Now that I think about it I haven’t seen him in a few weeks. I wonder if he unicycled to the wrong part of Philly and someone did push him down…

When I decided to create a collection of business cards based on my interests I wanted them to showcase both things I just like and things that I actually do in real life. Both the Bearded Lady Edition and the Mad Scientist Edition were based on my love of old timey sideshows and old horror/sci-fi movies, particularly of the mad scientist variety.

For the next two I decided to tell a little more about what I like to do, and for this one in particular it was spending time with my cat. I actually only have one cat and she’s a bit of a demon, but like most pet owners I love her. I also thought it would be a lot of fun to do a crazy cat lady edition.

Part of the fun of the cat lady business card is I got to play with the stereotypes of a cat lady while still making them directly relatable to myself. For instance, on the rare occasion I do pick up my cat like a baby she does everything in her power to push me away. Her kitty legs become man of steel strong. I also own a fair approximation of that sweater, although I only wear it as a coat for the week of spring and fall we have here in the northeast.

Another thing I had fun with was the general disheveled nature of a cat lady. My cat really doesn’t get into my hair or knock my glasses off, although she will cut you. I also thought it would be fun to use the idea of my cat’s collar for the band that went across the bottom.

I think the thing I got the most excited about was the idea of finally getting away with using a font like Curlz. In fact I can’t actually think of another time when it would be appropriate. Curlz feels very cat-ladyesque; I imagine if I ever go full blown cat lady I’ll use Curlz in my cat newsletter.

This was the business card that was at the same time loads of fun and really daunting. I’ve been trying to draw more animals lately, but to be honest I’m still not at all comfortable with their anatomy so there’s a bit of a learning curve. My cat’s markings were especially hard since she’s got a tortoise shell coat. On the other hand this card has some of my favorite bits like the stitching on the collar and the cable knit on the sweater. I also think I’ve caught the essence of my cat very well. She seriously sauntered out of hell. I’s loves her to bits!

Nutrisystem has a members section that allows users to add weight loss recipes to the section. Unfortunately, not every user would upload a photo of their food and even if they did the images weren’t of the best quality. Often the team would try and find a piece of stock photography that was close to what the recipe was trying to make, on occasion this was impossible. So for those images a placeholder was needed. I was asked to do some illustrations of several different categories that the recipes fell into.

Nurisystem categorizes it’s recipes the same way it dose it’s weight loss plan. Food is divided up into breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert/snacks. I did a series of sketches for each category, trying to give three options for each. Although I was pushing for illustrations of bunches of ingredients that could be used to make each meal, the design team decided on final cooked foods.

I tried to keep the meals as healthy as possible, while still making them recognizable as breakfast, lunch, dinner or dessert. The most straightforward way to communicate breakfast really is sunny side up eggs. In fact Breakfast had one of my favorite illustrations with the cup of coffee. I really wish I could have featured it more. In trying to stay consistent I also tried to keep the same, or similar color palettes. For each of the categories the dishes, all round, sat on some sort of blue background.

Along with the picture that went along with the meal category I also had to create a series of thumbnails to go along with the image. It was mostly just figuring out what to keep so the image could still be recognizable while scaling down to something almost a sixteenth the original’s size.

In the end the images were given a high opacity white overlay with the words “Image Not Available” so it was apparent that the illustration wasn’t for that recipe specifically, but instead just a placeholder. It was important not to take away from the rest of the page.

This week I decided to participate in yet another free project from the good people at The Skethbook Project, I joined in to work on the Infinite Scroll Space.

This week’s instructions:

The Infinite Scroll series is inspired by the surrealist drawing exercise known as exquisite corpse… We’re expecting aliens, nebulas, orbiting objects, and anything else you can invent!

— The Sketchbook Project

Since exquisite corpse is a game that’s dependent on the images before and after your sketch my submission for the Infinite Scroll was slightly different, mainly on the sides where the sketch has to join up with it’s friends. But for the most part all of the elements of the adventures of Ham, the first astrochimp, look the same while being completely historically inaccurate.

LIFE With the Astrochimps: Early Stars of the Space Race © Life

I was mostly inspired by a recent episode of Roderick on the Line where they talked about Ham the space Chimpanzee, and then while researching the little fellow I found this picture of Ham and I couldn’t resist. I just knew I was going to be drawing a space monkey.

I especially loved the look on little Ham’s face, he want’s none on of this. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, animals want nothing to do with human shenanigans. At first I thought it would be fun to put Ham on the inside of the spaceship, but since I decided on a Flash Gorden style rocket I figured there was no need to pretend that this was in any way a historical depiction of Ham’s accomplishments. So instead little Ham is floating around space letting the good folks at NASA know just how annoyed he is that there seem to be so many barriers to entry when eating a plain old banana.

This week’s topic over at Illustration Friday is wool.

I actually don’t have too much to say about coming up with this idea. I knew I wanted to do a sheep because I want to start drawing animals more often. I’m not very comfortable with them because I’m not overly familiar with their anatomy. Also I love the stylized curls.

Half Shorn Sheep oldest instance from FFFFound

While researching sheep I also found this guy, who is pretty awesome. He was the inspiration for the idea of knitting directly from a sheep, something ridiculous yet accurate in an overly simplified way. I also thought having a slightly put out sheep was pretty hysterical. Actually there’s something about irritated animals that I find funny in general, especially domesticated animals. I really doubt they want to have any part in human nonsense.

Oddly, with all of the holidays you don’t get work off from this week I really couldn’t come up with anything specific to draw for either Chinese New Year or Valentines day. I did happen to hand out all but five of my business cards this week, so I knew the best course of action was to get back on track with that endeavor. So this week I bring you, me, as a mad scientist!

Mad Scientist may seem like an odd way to identify myself, but I didn’t want these business cards to just be me hanging out in my t-shirt. Much like the Bearded Lady I wanted to tell people about my interest. And while science is absolutely one, so is horror. Mad Scientist are one of my favorite sub-genres of horror; regular folks who have let their ambition and self interest go wrong. I love the ways in which sci-fi and horror use allegory to entertain us while making us think and filling us with dread.

I’ve actually been working on my Mad Scientist edition for quite some time now. It was the first idea I came up with for the series, but I had to find the right balance. At first I thought it would be fun to do experiments on my cat. It would be nice if before I went to bed she stopped her all out assault on my and my appendages. But when I thought about it I decided my first impression shouldn’t be experimenting on animals.

So I decided I’d go a little more Frankenstein. I thought why not create a picture of a person laying on the operating table with a regular foot and a dinosaur talon. Unfortunately it’s really hard to make that work. It didn’t matter how many talons I tried to draw, they just didn’t transition well and seemed weird next to a human foot. I think nature is telling us something. In the end I decided to just hint at some sort of nefarious creature. It also made more sense since I had myself filling up a syringe. It would be a bit more Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with a touch of the Lizard from Spiderman. I especially like how the tail just kind of creeps into frame.

My biggest challenge with the Mad Scientist edition was how to treat the logo. I wanted my logo to continue across all of the business cards, but have slight modifications so that it would fit the theme. I tried all sorts of things. Stretching it, going warp tool nuts, adding a brushed stroke, all in hopes it would give me the desired effect. I even toyed with idea of using the edition font instead of the logo for my name, especially since it’s only used the once, but it just kind of got lost. So instead I decided I would try to recreate my logo in a horror font treatment. I still don’t think it’s entirely successful, but it’s on the right track. I’d love feedback if anyone has any ideas, I have a little time. I plan on doing a series of five and this is only number two, so feel free!

The good people who put together the Sketchbook Project every year do these fun, little creative projects you can participate in throughout the year. Even though I didn’t get my sketchbook finished in time for this year’s tour, I did decide to participate in their free project, Infinite Scroll | Monsters.

We’re calling out to 500 people worldwide to make one segment of what will become a really long, continuous drawing [...] We’ll start the drawing off with a monstrous head and end it with some grotesque feet – everything in between is up to you!

— The Sketchbook Project

How could I resist? Of course the head and feet tend to be the most coveted parts of a monster, but, with 500 participants I’m sure the body will be a lot of fun.

At first I thought about adding some extra hands or maybe a squiggly body segment, but then it hit me! Stomach contents. I have a huge love of anatomical models, in fact I have two mini models of the human body and skull. I thought it might be fun to show the inside of an infinite monster. I started by looking at different animal stomachs, but ended up just making it a ball. I’m sure an infinite monster has more than one belly, better to go simple.

Then I needed to decide what should go inside. As always my love of juxtaposition decided it had to be something adorable, yet not terrifying. I decided on a kitten, but a whole kitten. I image an infinite scroll monster would eat their dinner in one big gulp, like a snake. Besides, kittens are both cute and insufferable curmudgeons. If having been eaten by a monster I don’t imagine a kitten would be all that amicable. Plus they have claws, so they’re bound to be the type of food that gives you a tummy ache.

UPDATE: See all of the Monster’s parts on Flickr!