Month: September 2018

At Long Last Postcard Mailing

Self Promotion

postcard

 

On the self promotion front, I have to admit, that I’ve been very neglectful of the direct mail postcards of late. I’ve send out Xmas cards to clients the past few years (a very small mailing list), but I haven’t done a full blown, big list mailing for at least a couple years (either 2013 or 2014 was the last time I sent out a full mailing). I’ve been directing the self promotion funds towards other avenues which have proven to be less than adequate on their own, but have finally gotten around to putting together a mailing that will be hitting the mailboxes sometime in the next two weeks (likely while I’m on our trip to Ireland in early October – doh!).

This was an personal favorite image of mine that I actually planned for a postcard a few years ago, but never got around to actually sending out. This will be an oversize card – 6×9 I believe, and I’ll hopefully be able to garner a few cartoon projects out of it.

If you aren’t on the mailing list and would like to be added, drop me an email and I’ll drop one of these postcards in the mail to you.

Chronicle Sketch to Finish

ChronicleHE

OneSizeweb

 

An assignment for the Chronicle of Higher Education this week. This is a client that I’ve been working with since 1992, and although the frequency of assignments has slowed considerably the past few years, it is nice to still be on the radar for the occasional project. Every once in a while I like to share the rough sketches along with the final to show the evolution of an idea. This was a story on ‘one size fits all’ theories of student education, and the two ideas I came up with are below, with the editors choosing the more sparse concept. This was a quick one, with the assignment coming in on Monday evening, sketches on Tuesday morning, and final on Wednesday morning (a little early for the Thursday deadline).

sketch1sketch2

I have a few more rough sketches to share later in the week for a few other projects I’m working on, and in the meantime I’m working on a ‘Who Was’ book that I’m hoping to get finishes done soon so I can clear my plate for a large assignment I’m expecting in the next few months.

Hectic Week Roundup

AHMM, Dover, Llewellyn

LittlePrincessWashwebBetween finishing up another MacMillan ‘Epic Fails’ project, and the Wheatland Music Festival over the weekend, and several smaller projects pictured here on this post, it has been a busy week (and catching a cold partway through it didn’t help matters any). Above was the finished illustration for Dover’s Evergreen Classics line of reprints, this one for ‘A Little Princess’ (I had shown a sketch version of this one last week, and they asked that the monkey be moved over to the window for the final version). Below is the finished version of the Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine illustration. This one is drastically different than the original sketch. The editors felt that a ‘hanged man’ would be too disturbing for their readers, so I picked a scene from earlier in the story. I’ve been doing illustrations for AHMM now for almost thirty years, you can see an entire checklist and links to all the illustrations here.

Below that, it is once again that time of year for the Llewellyn Witches Companion cover. I’ve been doing these now for over a decade, and it is interesting to see what concepts the editors come up with each year to keep it unique and different, and yet, basically the same.

BeaconHillSuicideweb

witches2020web

 

Throwback Thursday – A Pair of Children’s Books

Instructional Fair

MGN6

 

In 1999, I had a pair of full color children’s book assignments for Instructional Fair. One was entitled “Mother Goose News”, and told various fairy tales in rhyme, as if presented by a newscaster, and the second book “Imagine That” was a hodgepodge of two unrelated fantasy stories told in rhyme. I got the impression that the purpose of the books was to introduce certain vocabulary words to a particular age group.

In the past, I’ve only shared a few sample illustrations from each book, but I have gone back and revised the original blog posts so that each book is now shown in its entirety. Click on the links below for the illustrations collections for each book.

Mother Goose News (sample illustration posted above)

Imagine That