Tyranosaurus rex formal portrait painting

Spiceworks is an IT management software company, with nearly 2 million users, and is based in Austin, Texas. SpiceRex is their mascot. I was hired in 2010 to create a cartoon illustration of his appearance. Since then his popularity has grown and he is on all sorts of swag. Then the Marketing Director decided it would be fun to go further and have a portrait painting made of him as if he were a modern entrepreneur. This 22x28 inch oil painting is for their boardroom where he will be shown as the "CRO," the Chief Rawr! Officer. Funny!

Spice Rex, Tyranosaurus rex, oil painting portrait
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Amazon Kindle Cover Illustration

I started working on this illustration a year ago. (See: Not from around here, May 2010 below) For several reasons, it went into hibernation for a while. The drawing was initially created as one of several pencil, spot illustrations in a book of short science fiction stories. The author, Daniel Russ, and I discussed the project often over the last year and eventually he decided to publish the stories as individual short stories on Amazon for 99c each. So my pencil drawing, had to grow up and become a cover instead. Hooray.

I inked the drawing (aprox. 11x17) with a Faber-Castell brush pen, then scanned it, placed it in Adobe Illustrator. I then wen to work on it with the tracing tool to clean up the line quality and create a sharp, clean black and white line drawing. Once I had the black and white lines, I opened the illustration in Adobe Photoshop and added background effects, color, shading and light effects. And here it is. The published piece is 600x800 pix, but the finished art is 300 dpi and 12x17, so I have a lot of flexibility if we print it one day. Might make a fun poster. I’ll post a link when it’s up on Amazon.

Amazon Kindle Book cover art
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Austin ADDY Award

On Saturday night, February 12th, I won an ADDY Award for a project I did for Katz’s Deli. I worked with Daniel Russ to re-make the restaurants menu from a regular deli menu, into a faux New York newspaper.

Daniel, who was a stand up comedian for many years, wrote several hilarious stories for the “paper” while I created graphics and fake ads for silly things like solar powered flashlights, a language program to teach people how to talk like Marc Katz the owner of the restaurant and local celebrity.

The stories and fake ads were sprinkled in among the actual menu sections to create a 8-page newspaper to both entertain customers and function as a menu. We produced three issues of the menu which were all well received by the customers.

addy-award

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Not from around here

This is one of several illustrations I’m working on for a short-stroy Sci-Fi anthology a friend of mine has written. You can read the story for this drawing here. I’m working on the inked version of the drawing next. I’ll post it when it’s done.

Man-in-the-divingbell-suit-
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Animated Steampunk story

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.

This is a wonderful short film done in a very gothic, victorian, “silhouetted steampunk” by director Anthony Lucas. A well told story and absolutely captivating illustration style. Learn more about the film and it’s creator here: jaspermorello.com/gazette

steampunk-silhouette

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Freelance: Not for the undisciplined

A lot of people think that working for yourself is like a vacation. Well, it could be, but then you wouldn’t be working, would you?

During the past almost ten years that I have worked freelance, I have found that you have to take it seriously and run your operation like it’s a real business, not a hobby. To make it work long term you have to still do a lot of the things you’d do if you were working at someone else’s company. Like get dressed, be at work at a regular time (when normal people are working—if your clients are in Australia, then sure, work at night) don’t spend the day surfing the web, and most of all, meet your deadlines.

I found this video at FastCompany. If you are contemplating freelance, it has some good advice about how to approach the business or working for yourself.

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E-Book design issues

I love this quote:

“Different typefaces are like like having different actors in play or different voices in an audio book,” Simonson says. “The variations in typeface influence the personality of the book. Sticking to one font is much like having the same actor play all the different parts.”
Read more at Wired.com
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