Here’s a bunch of drawings that I had fun doing for a new client, Read Magazine (published by Reader’s Digest). The story, titled “Twist of Fate” by Steven Frank is about a teenage girl that ends up spending a weekend in the library’s rare books room reading a dusty old first edition of Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”, to avoid flunking a class. She snoozes off and finds herself magically transported into the story, and interacting with all of the characters. The only way home is to write herself out of the story, Dickens himself tells her. The sequence of the drawings is clockwise from the top left image.
Click on the image for a larger version.
The story for this month’s Soapbox in Publisher’s Weekly was a pretty fascinating one. Ben Cheever (son of John Cheever) writes about two seemingly unrelated topics: running and seeking the truth. Yet they come together in a most interesting way in his life.
Having just written a book about running (“Strides“), Cheever talks about how in his family of runners, running together lead to moments of surprising honesty because “the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen to support a falsehood”.
I was struck by the mention of his family’s deepest secret, his father’s bisexuality (thus the closet imagery) which lead to the idea for the illustration.
You can see more of my work for Publisher’s Weekly here.
If you didn’t figure it out already, a disproportionate share of the Invisibleman crew met each other at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, back in the early 90’s. In my last year in the illustration program, I was lucky enough to land in Roger DeMuth’s class, which set me on the course I am now traveling.
Roger is a man who has abundant shares of talent, craft and shrewd promotional savvy. These of course are the skills a freelance illustrator needs to be successful, and they have served Roger well.
This summer my wife and I dropped in for a visit at Roger’s house in Cazenovia, NY where you’ll find his enviable art-filled studio attached to a beautiful home nestled in a lush garden of his own design.
Roger binds his own miniature sketchbooks (painted with equally small watercolor sets, usually using a bottle cap with a little orange juice as the medium). He also builds precision custom drawing travel kits that tuck away all the required implements for drawing in a handsome case, replete with handsome stamped leather detailing. Tucked into shelves you’ll see hilariously cheap chinese novelty toys, frog popup books (lots of frogs), a sizeable stash of antique pen nibs collected from ebay, and dozens of clever mockups for toys and such delights as the Kitty Condom.
Read on to see a slideshow of our visit.
Click here to read more »
This is another illo for the “Soapbox” column in Publisher’s Weekly.
Author Steve Weinberg laments the fact that once you are a bona fide published writer, you immediately become besieged by people looking to get their manuscripts (of varying degrees of quality) published.
He writes:
“When my telephone rings, I almost always check the caller ID before I answer. If the number and name look unfamiliar, I assume that the caller probably is (a) a prison inmate, or (b) a would-be author seeking advice about publishing a book.”
This illo for Publisher’s Weekly was for a story about a book with a tricky title. Robert I. Sutton’s “The No Asshole Rule” proved difficult to discuss on public airwaves, and the way the interviewers approached the title varied greatly. An NPR producer killed the interview after a producer got squeamish, and anything-goes satellite radio actually asked him to mention the title frequently as they figured their audience would enjoy hearing it on their radios.
I was listening to the audio book of Frank Herbert’s Dune while working on this. Nothing like an epic story to keep you glued to your desk while working on a deadline.
You can see more of my work for Publisher’s Weekly here.
One of my favorite things about this website, is that when it’s my day to post, and I don’t have anything lying around that’s obviously post-worthy, it forces me into the lab to play around and experiment…I don’t do it enough, but it always leads to interesting things (though not necessarily this piece).
If you pick up a copy of this week’s U.S. News & World Report you’ll find a few of my drawings inside. The illos are for the annual ‘Paying for College’ package, and the team at the magazine picked a fun “Texas Hold ’em” theme for this year’s section. Lots of great visuals to work from!
The image above is the opener for the package.
Click to see a larger version with the rest of the illos.
You can see more of my work for U.S. News & World Report here.
A pretty simple Illo for Publisher’s Weekly. A writer (Pete Croatto) working at a bookstore tells how he found peace in the simple job of selling books:
“I’ve been snapped at, lectured to and dismissed, all of which could happen in an hour”.
Even after being threatened with violence, and talked down to, he found helping readers rewarding.
I am doing more opaque color on my digital paintings now. I used to give color a much more watercolor type treatment, but I am feeling nostalgic for the satisfying opacity of oils. Time to go back into the lab with my neglected copy of Painter and see what develops.
You can see more of my work for Publisher’s Weekly here.
Seafaring geezer seen aboard the S.S. John W. Brown in Boston. There was also a dogfight.
