Been a very busy Holiday season. Several of the postcards that I’ve sent out over the past few months have started getting attention, and the docket is starting to get crowded with assignments and new clients. This past week I spent quite a lot of time working on more of the presidents for the Dover assignment (pictured below), and am getting close to the finish line with that one (6 more to go). This one has proven to be a lot of fun, especially with the chance to practically develop a new style because of it.
Above, is an illustration that I did on quick turnaround for Barrons this past week. This was a concept that I came up with for a story on investing in shaky regions of the world, which the article’s author described as ‘wild west investing’. Surprisingly, I was able to find very little photo reference for this particular pose (I assumed that google images would provide a mountain of material), so I ended up finishing it up without much in the way of photo reference help, and was quite pleased with how it turned out.

In addition to the presidential portraits, I also had an assignment for a new magazine client over the past weekend. These were a series of 6 ‘lawyer’ portraits for a feature article in St. Louis Magazine.

I also had a fiction assignment this week for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. This one was a little odd, in that the whole ‘story’ was in the form of an email, and also involved several traditional clues and possible murder weapons, so I tried to make the computer the central focus (which also figured into the clues of the story), but also scattered around it several of the key clues and items and setting in the story, while at the same time portray the two main investigators in some way. I was pretty happy with the design.


And to cap the week off, yesterday I had a pair of assignments for the Wall Street Journal. The one above was about retirement investing, and the one below was a typical story for this time of year, sort of a recap of how investment predictions have gone over the past decade. (past decade? already? – that means I’ll be moving into my third decade at doing this in a few weeks)

Happy Holidays everyone – now back to work on those presidents…