Worked up a sketch of Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s new mayor this afternoon (whom my son shook hands with in Wrigleyville this past weekend).
Month: February 2011
Lab Work
Newsday
Well, I’m choosing to take this as a good sign. After what has been probably the slowest 3 months in the past twenty one years in business, the phone actually started ringing again on Thursday with new assignments. I had a quick turnaround assignment for Newsday (pictured above) about the closing of a Nassau county Crime Lab and it’s implications for the region (pictured above), and I managed to finish up the last of the chapter opener illustrations for the book project that’s been percolating around here since before Christmas (pictured below).
I also thought I’d share one of the alternate sketches for the Newsday sketches (below), since I rarely show the sketch phases of my assignments in this blog, and I probably would have enjoyed going to finish on either one of these.
This last one, was a faux ‘logo design’ for the fictional grocery store chain in the book, and once it gets approved, will be inserted here and there among the illustrations.
The Early Bird Draws the Worm
personal
A touch of insomnia this morning, so I ended up arising at 5:30, and just for practice, whipped off this portrait of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi before settling down to my usual workload. Tried to push myself into a looser style than I usually do.
Yesterday, I had a few more of the chapter opener illustrations for the book project I’ve been working on for the past few months (pictured below) with a few more to finish up by the end of the week.
Goofing Off
animation
Messing around with the Painter animation tools yesterday & today and came up with this quick little looping animated gif. Still haven’t quite figured out what to do with this sort of thing, but I’m going to continue experimenting with it when I get a little down time. (this one is a little on the big side, at 7 MG, so be patient while it loads – click on the image above to access it).
From Toe Jam to Teddy Bears
Self Promotion, WSJ
Interesting range of topics already this week. The illustration above was for the Wall Street Journal for their ‘aches & claims’ column about a new laser treatment for foot fungus.
I’ve also gotten the go ahead on several more chapter opener illustrations for an ongoing project. A few of them are pictured below (and others have appeared in previous posts) and I’ll more than likely have more to post later in the week.
Since it was president’s day on Monday, we decided to send out another couple thousand email ‘virtual mailers’ with a president’s theme. This has been an advertising method that I’ve long avoided, equating it with ‘spam email’, but we are giving it a limited try this year, since there are those on the mailing list that we subscribe to who have expressed an interest in receiving email mailings. We did two designs (and these were both recycled artwork from the past few years), and send out both in random fashion to several thousand recipients. The jury is still out on this, as far as effectiveness, but if there is anyone who stops by here who has actually received one, I’d be interested in hearing feedback.
