Born in Detroit and youngest of four artistic boys for whom many a creative ruckus were attributed. Moves to Pittsburgh in his youth and finds it a cool town. Attends Syracuse University and studies illustration. Lives in Vermont for a few years doing freelance illustration and lots and lots of snowboarding. Moves to New York City and begins doing illustration and interactive design work for the Wall Street Journal Online. Lives in NYC for 10 years during which time he meets the ever-amazing Kristina. In the spring of 2009 they drive across the country with two cats in the backseat to relocate in Sacramento and enjoy the awesomeness of nothern California.
This was a quick Wall Street Journal Online illo for an economic forecast survey. Whether our intrepid donkey and doofus elephant are merely navigating some rapids or careening towards a deadly waterfall is the question I guess. I do like that the pachyderm has carelessly lost his paddle.
It had been a while since my last figure drawing session and thus it was invigorating to draw and paint these images at the Society of Illustrator’s Jazz & Sketch this past tuesday. One fellow in front of me was drawing on butcher paper with charcoal and white pencil and I couldn’t believe how good he was… humbling.
The fellow on the right is an 89 year old illustrator who was also making some great sketches. I chatted with him briefly as we walked out and he told me how last winter he got a pair of the new fat ski’s and how they were really fast. He also lamented that he was just a bit too old to start snowboarding.
I sketched my brother while we were lounging about our parent’s home in Pittsburgh a couple days before Christmas. A few days later my girlfriend Kristina and I headed to Utah for a week of snowboarding. While Solitude and Brighton were great mountains we were really taken by the Snowbird resort which you can see a few views of below. Everything I’d heard about Utah being the home of the lightest snow on earth was true.
This past weekend I created this illustration for The Riverfront Times of St. Louis. The paper was highlighting an upcoming lecture by one of the scientists who discovered a diminutive, fossilized skeleton in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores which was dubbed ‘The Hobbit’. As for the scientist I was going for the academic version of Indiana Jones. This was a particularly fun job as I’m a bit of a Lord of the Rings nerd. Click the image to see a larger version.
The easiest subway sketching situation tends to be when commuters are either sleeping or reading. The downside is that your sketchbook fills up with renderings of people with their eyes closed or at best, downcast. Though I find more often then not people get off the train before you complete a sketch and I’ve got many disembodied ears, eyeglasses and hands floating around the sketchbook to prove it.
Third in a series of fed-chairman Ben Bernanke drawings for the Wall Street Journal Online. Below is one of the quick sketches which precede the final illo.
“Merry Second-To-Last Christmas” is written on the inside of the card above. It’s fun illustrating for the likes of The Onion. Both Christmas cards can be bought here.
I can imagine the kid crying and breaking crayons.
This is another illo created for the Stowe Guide, a magazine in Stowe Vermont. The humorous article deals with the phenomenon referred to as the ‘Dude Patch’ in which a group of snowboarders move about a mountain in a tightly packed posse. Click the image to view a larger version.
I recently worked on a project for the Wall Street Journal Online which tracked the rate at which the arctic ice cap has melted over the last quarter of a century. Click here to see the astonishing rate of decrease since 1979 – with the past six years or so of particular worry (you may have to turn your popup blocker off for the link to work… sorry). The magenta line is the median ice extent and is an average of where the ice would normally be on September 1st of each year (around 7.5 million sq miles). As you can see above this summer only reached 4.4 million sq miles. The graphic also covers how arctic tourism industry is booming as visitors want to catch of glimpse of the environment before its gone.
About 10 years ago I did an illustration for the Vermont weekly ‘Seven Days’ about a couple getting caught in a blizzard while hiking up to the Stone Hut which sits atop Stowe. The hut was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1936 and is a special place; perched as it is atop the famous Nose Dive trail. Recently the Stowe Guide contacted me about reusing the art though I recalled having sold the original (pre-computer days: no scan). But I had a few sketches and drawings stored away and thus did a Dr. Frankenstein and stitched, spackled and redrew the drawing above. The original story by David Healy is a great tale and can be read here.