Mayor's Day Poster

I was asked by the city of St. Paul to create an event poster/giveaway item for the Mayor's Day of Recognition for National Service, an event honoring the AmeriCorps volunteers of St. Paul. I worked with the marketing department on a design featuring historic and well-known city landmarks, and elements symbolizing the important areas of the AmeriCorps: health, education, economy, and environment.

I'm really happy with the final design. It was a quick turnaround and I had to go from a sketch to a final in less than a week. The hand-drawn quality of all the components works well with the textures. I'm excited to see the final print!

Art Director: William Tully
Designer: Bill Ferenc
Printer: Big Table Studio

Feature on the MPLS Egotist

  

Last Friday I was featured on the Minneapolis Egotist in their Fresh Meat Friday blog post! I'm very honored to be selected and very humbled by the write-up:

"The thing that stands out to us isn't just the high level of craftsmanship and the fact that he is able to effectively explore multiple different styles; but, it's also how memorable the work is. Often it's the kind of visual illustration and design that sticks with you for quite some time after seeing it."

Read the whole post, and check out the work the selected to display, on their blog: MPLS Egotist

Perfect Pair - A Font for Hand-setting

Looking for something fun, creative, and original to do for your current or future sweetheart? Emma Trithart and I have joined forces to create a handset font and other fun graphic assets just for you! With Perfect Pair, you can create you own custom greeting of eternal love in your favorite vector editing program. 

Check out the samples above, then purchase the EPS file from our BigCartel Page! It’s only $1.00 and you’d be supporting Emma and I to make even more fun fonts and graphics in the future. 

Check out more of our work on our website : The Perfect Pair

Doodle!

Is it still a doodle if I used acrylic paint? I made this while tutoring my art student today!

The Astronomer

             

Full Illustration

A detail!

My first promotional piece is finished! My main goal with this piece was to just pack it with detail. Lots of textures, lots of little pieces, and lots to look at. I would agree with anyone who said that there is too much in this piece, but I love how many things are going on. It tells a good story about this astronomer character. 

The depth and scale in this image is very important to me. There are several layers of dimension from the main orange cat in the front, to the table of books, to the astronomer, and then the back wall. What I like most is that the figure feels so small in this space... that's a pretty forced analogy to how we should feel as living creatures on Earth. We exist in this vast universe and we're such a tiny, insignificant blip among all the stars and planets. Another interesting point, that was brought to my attention, is that all the animals in the piece aren't setting foot in the room with the astronomer. They're other living creatures (aliens?) observing from another room (a galaxy?) in the house (the universe?).

I should call this piece THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE... or I WANT TO BELIEVE. A silly throwback to one of my favorite TV shows. 

Coffeeshop Doodle

Waiting around at a coffee shop. It was -10 degrees this morning so I drew this bundled up guy!

Promotional Progress

 

The Astronomer : Progress

In my free time I'm working on some promotional illustrations. Above is a piece I'm putting together about an astronomer. Kind of an abstract idea, but I wanted to flex some creative muscles. I'm also trying to develop a consistent style that I can call my own. This is a mixture of hand-drawn/painted pieces that I bring into photoshop to digitally collage together. 

The original scale of the room was a little too straightforward, so I enlarged the size of the doorway and shrank the figure. I wanted the room to seem grand to make the astronomer feel insignificant in the space.

I'm really happy with the progress so far, and happy with the harmony of digital and hand made.