Cricket & Spider

A couple months ago I did some illustrations for both Cricket and Spider magazines, and they just came out in the May/June issue. These were really fun jobs and the people were great to work with. It's funny that both stories revolved around a similar character (a grumpy old guy).

The Spider illustrations were for a poem called 'Mr. Ollie Odenhofer' by Monica Gudlewski. Please excuse the image quality. I haven't gotten the originals back yet so I just took a snapshot of the magazines.



The Cricket illustrations were for a tall Tale called 'Making Do' by Joan E. McCarthy.


Many thanks go out to Sue and Karen for involving me in these projects.

The Big Cheese

I did this drawing for a friend in trade for some vintage bicycle parts.



To warm up this morning I did a quick colored version in Photoshop.

Some New Stuff

I recently finished a couple of books that were for the educational market. For both of them the time frame was really short and the images had to be pretty specific, but they ended up being fun to work on. The main challenge for me with a short deadline and lots of images is that you have to design for the time you have. Usually I like to put in as many details as possible, but with these it is all about simplifying and making the images easy to understand. I've noticed that when I'm painting faster the over all colors end up being brighter.

This one is from Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" for Compass Education.



These two were from "The Three Little Pigs" for Benchmark Education.

Mr. Lincoln

Recently I read part of a biography on Abraham Lincoln and it inspired the sketch below. He was an extremely interesting man with a face that just begs to be drawn.

I can't believe it has been a month since I posted anything! I've been working on a couple of projects but I can't show anything from them yet, so here is a promo sketch that I've been working on in my spare time. There are a few things to fix and hopefully I'll get it painted in the next couple of weeks.

When pigs fly...... or at least try to!

This has been sitting next to my desk for quite awhile waiting to get painted , and finally I had a chance to get it all finished. 13x19 acrylic on watercolor paper

(click it to see it bigger)
(detail)
(line drawing)

Doodles

It's been a little while since I posted anything, so here are some random people sketches from a little while ago. It is always crazy the variety of people you see while riding bart.