day 23: o pioneer

Happy Pioneer Day!

day 9: kites

I just realized I've never posted this. I did this earlier this year for a cover for The Friend Magazine. Always a good gig. Looking at this again, I'm amazed at myself for drawing so many individual blades of grass. Must have been in a grassy mood that day.

Also, this is another good example of a Photoshop cheat that I like: gaussian blur the heck out of the background so you don't have to spend so much time on details (when it's not important). Saves a lot of time.

day 5: freelance v. inhouse

Imagine Learning inhouse flyer for trip to Soldier's Hollow.

Today is my seven year anniversary working at Imagine Learning. It's a good gig and I work with some great people. The art team has doubled in the past year and a half. For the longest time it just just me, Jim Madsen and Nate Baertsch. Then Jed Henry came along to spice things up. And last fall we hired Hollie Hibbert and Jake Parker. All very talented folk. Check 'em out, they've all got really interesting things going on.

Illustration for The Friend Magazine.

One thing we all have in common besides working at Imagine Learning is that we all do freelance. Students like to ask which is better: freelance or inhouse? I guess ultimately it comes down to opportunity and personality. I prefer having to get up and go somewhere else to work. I like having the security of the paycheck and health insurance. But some people prefer to be their own boss and like the flexibility that comes with the freelance life. I, personally, was terrible at it. I was bad at dealing with the financial side and was always broke. And was maybe going a little stir crazy being by myself all day every day.

Anyway, not much going on today. I've been flat on my back most of the day, which was annoying as I have a lot to do. At least the cat was being cuddly and made for a nice heating pad on my side.

i like to draw vines

illustration in the current issue of the friend magazine. quite enjoyed working on this one.

yes, i did draw all those leaves and vines individually, but cheated on the flowers. ran out of time. :-)

friendly treehouse

Here's the cover illustration I did for this month's The Friend Magazine - always love working those. I was supposed to come up with something with a dad and kid(s), so here ya go. And a lovely Happy Father's Day to all those dads out there!

my Friend ricky

I've been hearing that the April issue of The Friend is out there, so here are the illustrations I did for it (way back in January). The Art Director there is fantastic to work with, and let me decide which style to illustrate the article. The top illustration is part of a full spread - the white edge between the boys is actually the gutter. The second illustration was a spot for the third page of a three page story.

There's not too much to describe in the step-by-step. The art director gave me pretty tight comps as a base for my sketches, and everything went smoothly from there.

I imported the sketch (done in Photoshop) into Flash. I used the pencil tool to trace, and then filled in all the shapes. Then I went and deleted all the outlines.


This is what it looked like when I was done in Flash. Not every color is a different layer, but there were a lot. When I exported layers, I grouped together areas where I wanted there to be a drop shadow. (In Flash, go to File>Export>Export Image... and then select .png as the image format so you keep the transparency.)

I then imported all those separate layers into Photoshop and combined them into one big ol' file. The spread had 26 layers, and 10 for the little page 3 spots. Once in photoshop I adjusted all the colors, added a Drop Shadow in the Blending options. I added a little extra detail here and there like tree leaves, asphalt stones, blush on the faces, but really there wasn't much. I added a Guassian blur to some of the tree layers to push them back into the distance a little, and then finally on top layer I had a photo of a stone texture that I set to Soft Light.

Friendly March

Been hearing from lotsa folks that this has been arriving in their mailbox - so guess it's ok to post. This was a really fun project. I was given the magazine's theme for the month, and told to come up with something. I was fairly stressed trying to think up clever ideas - and finally settled on two I thought were alright. At the last minute I thought, I really should have three sketches, and quickly did a sketch of the above. So naturally that's the one they picked! I actually liked this idea best as well.

I wish I'd worked on her hair a bit more so it was more hair-like (less helmet-like), and fixed the center chrysalis that is absolutely in the wrong perspective... oops. Oh well. I hope I get to do this again sometime. All done in photoshop from thumbnails to final.