New work!

It's been a busy couple of weeks with loads of new work. There have been paintings, drawings, new layouts, new mailers, new faces and some familiar ones...

Oscar on the farm

Birthday

Halloo everyone!

As some of you might know, I seem to be marking a significant number this year. I've been thinking a bunch about growing up this year and made a recent (albeit fairly obvious) discovery - you can grow up without becoming a grown up! Woooah! Amazing.

So I made a little birthday list. 

Now take a closer look... At one item in particular...

I got home late last night, just around midnight, and walked in to find that my apartment looked like this:

My ever-amazing bf had filled our ENTIRE apartment with balloons!

I thought it was amazing...

The cat, however, wasn't convinced.

Cards: Clubs

Halloo all!

So finally, FINALLY, I had some time a few weeks ago to finish the last suit for N's deck of cards. Clubs!

As with the previous suits, I already had a series of easy templates, so I quickly subbed the clubs for spades or diamonds or hearts.

Again, I moved onto the Ace next, using the Spade and Diamond and Heart motifs...

For the royal cards, I decided to do another set of birds. I had two sets of mammals - rabbits and foxes - so I decided that there ought to be two sets of birds, one song bird - Sparrow/Spades - and one set of birds of prey... owls! 


So after my owly sketches, I tackled the Jack, who I wanted in profile like Sparrow Jack, though a bit less mischievous and more dangerous.

I imagined the Queen to be rather bored with it all, though still a dangerous royal lady, and I modeled her with a decorative headpiece, like the Rabbit Queen.

And finally the King, who like his Lady Owl would also be rather royal, somewhat bored, but still a dangerous old bird.

Like the suits before, I made it a little package, but, alas, I forgot to photograph the actual printed cards. So, until next time!

Freelance for the Forward

Hey there blog readers!

Exciting things. I recently did a job for the Forward (or פֿאָרווערטס , for the Yiddish speakers among you). Because it's the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, loads of news sources are running articles. The Jewish Daily Forward ran a bunch of interesting pieces, and one in particular about two passengers on the ship, Isidor and Ida Straus. Straus, a NY resident, was co-owner of Macy's department store. On the night the Titanic sank, both Isidor and his wife refused places in the lifeboats and were last seen sitting on the deck together. In addition to a place in Woodlawn cemetery, there's a memorial park dedicated to the couple on the Upper West.

My favorite part of the job was doing some outdoor sketching uptown at Straus Park. These are my two favorite sketches from the afternoon.

I also spent some of the afternoon following around older folks along Broadway.

Once I had some decent reference, I went home and started playing with possible compositions. These are five of the samples I sent in.

Once we settled on a sketch, I did a tightened version so the folks at the Forward had a place-holder as they worked out the section layout. 

Before starting in on the final illustration, I inked a small sample, just to play around and loosen up.

Ink!

And finally, color.

Exciting things, indeed.

You can check out the full article here.

Many thanks to Dan Friedman and Lil Swanson at the Forward and Liz Marcus for putting me in touch.

Bunnies!

Happy spring holidays everyone!

Sketchbook Thursday: Miscellaneous characters

Hey folks,

I have a couple of big posts in process. Soon soon!

In the meantime,  here's a bunch of silliness from the ole sketchbook.