Month: December 2018

Mopping up the End of 2018

Hudson Valley, Taylor Design, Today Media

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December has been a quiet month, and thankfully so (I’ve been laid up with a bronchial infection for most of the month, so I’ve been on the couch a lot, and catching up on a lot of reading). Above is an illustration for Hudson Valley Magazine that I finished up this morning, and below is a holiday card illustration that I did for one of my design clients at the start of the month. I’m expecting a rather large project to hit my desk at the start of the year, so I’m getting mentally pumped up for that, plus some more ‘witch’ artwork for Llewellyn. Here’s to my official “30th year in the business” in 2019, and Happy Holidays everyone. Likely over the weekend, I’ll be compiling my annual “best of 2018” post, so stay tuned.

 

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THROWBACK THURSDAY – MERRY HITCHMAS

AHMM

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I received a very nice Christmas surprise in the mail this week. I have been working for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine since my first year in business (1989), but, unfortunately, I have not been very good at saving my original artwork and/or printed samples over the past thirty years. I put out an online ‘appeal’ to anyone who may have back issues of this magazine to try and recover some of these lost illustrations from my early years in the freelance business (some 33 missing pieces to this puzzle when I first made my christmas list). Thanks to a reader in New Jersey, and over the course of the past several months, I have now been able to fill in the blanks in that chronology to the tune of 20 missing illustration assignments from the years 1989-1993 (many of these arriving the day after Christmas).

Of course, most of these early illustrations appear very amateurish to me now, (looking back from a thirty year perspective) but it is interesting to me to look back and see how far I’ve come. Here’s a link to a AHMM checklist of each and every illustration I’ve done for them in the past thirty years.

The illustration above was for a Holiday card design I did for this publisher back in 2007.

Holiday Card for 2018

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Krampus2018webusageHad a bit of downtime, so have been working on my Krampus card for this year’s holiday mailing. I have been doing various designs on this theme since 2009. In Bavarian countries, Krampus was St. Nicholas’ demonic counterpart, who would take away the naughty children to his lair and whip them with a switch. I am considering doing a ‘boxed set’ of several of these designs in the near future.