Red thread

Days 38 through 40

ChronicleHE, Red thread

Day Thirty Eight

Today’s illustration will unfortunately have to stay under wraps for the time being. An unexpected job dropped in out of the blue on Thursday evening, and I’ve been spending the past few days feverishly finishing it up. The conditions are such that it remain confidential until sometime in 2012 when it becomes public. But suffice to say it is probably one of the best looking pieces I’ve ever done, and easily one of the most interesting assignments that’s ever crossed my desk.

Tomorrow I’ll probably not post a drawing, as I’ll be busy playing a four hour gig at a motorcycle festival in Muskegon with my country band.

Day Thirty Nine


Finishing up the Chronicle project this morning with a few interior illustrations along the same lines as the cover and spots I did last week.

Day Forty


A lot of the day today spent working on the above cover illustration for a Detroit area client. Mostly done, but I’ve still got some tightening up to do on the upper portion of the illustration. It’s late, and time for call it quits and catch a late supper. I’ll post the finished piece tomorrow.

ADDENDUM: And here’s the finished version, completed the following morning:

Early April Projects

ChronicleHE, Red thread


Another long dry patch was finally broken last weekend, when I suddenly found myself working again on several new assignments. This ‘illuminated letter’ above was for the Chronicle, where I was one of several illustrators commissioned to do different letters for an article on ‘the Bible’. I also had another cover assignment for Red Thread magazine, on adoption trials and tribulations. I normally don’t like to do the scratchboard style for such a large format (the cover runs 11×17), but I kept the linework fairly chunky and the colors bright, and it seemed to work nicely. I wasn’t crazy about the little ‘icons’ at the ‘dead ends’ of the maze, but it was an editorial request that I tried to accommodate whilst trying to keep it from getting too busy. (click on the image for a larger version)

Back to Pastels

Red thread


Had an assignment this week for a newer publication, ‘Red Thread’ out of Detroit, and, at 11×17, I didn’t feel like the scratchboard style would quite work, so I returned to a style that I had first begun to market way back in my earliest days of freelancing, a loose, sketchy pastel style (except in those days it was actual chalk pastels on paper, and boy was it a mess, especially in trying to send to clients, and then the scanning process on their end…). You can click on the image above for a larger version.

Marching Into Spring

AHMM, Highlights, Red thread


A few illustration projects from this week. The one above was another fiction assignment from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. This was my first national client way back in 1989 (I can still remember that first image, one of my first attempts at scratchboard, of an ice fishing shanty in the middle of a frozen lake), and I’ve been working for them pretty steadily for the past 20 years, through several personnel changes.
Below is a cover illustration for a Jewish magazine out of the Detroit area. Did this one in a bit more of a painterly style.

And then, wrapping up the week, I also had a series of small ‘umpire’ spots for Highlights magazine.

Kind of slowing down here at the end of March, and I’ll probably take advantage of the lull by doing a bit more advertising and self promotion.