Holiday Cards!

This year at Real Art we took a laid-back approach to the festive season. No crazy websites or high-end print projects... instead we decided to go hand-made and heart-felt with our holiday mailings. Each of us came up with our own messaging and made our own cards and letters to clients and friends. Pretty cool idea! So here's a snapshot I took of some of my favorite ones I made. Simple little "rough" pencil and pen drawings of reindeer on notebook paper spray-mounted to brown paper cards I hand-tore and folded. I liked how they turned out and hopefully our clients will dig them too!

Here's A Reason to Take More Vacation Days!

I took a vacation day and was wandering around the craft store last Thursday looking for some stuff for another project I was working on - and ran across a cool canvas. The concept for this painting hit me as I was standing there in the aisle, so I grabbed it up and rushed home to get started!

(I need to take a random vacation day off work more often... especially if I continue to fill my dwindling "spare time" with painting!)

Acrylic on canvass.

Hope you dig.

Nude From Figure Drawing Class

I've been taking a figure drawing class on Saturday mornings at the Dayton Art Institute this fall, and I love it! It's really helping to open my eyes and expand my abilities across the board as an artist. I'm starting to really see results in all my illustration work - and am noticing a difference in the way I think through a drawing, a design, a tattoo... etc. Here's one of my favorite pieces from my last Saturday morning session.

It's ALIVE!!!!

Rob Anspach always throws one helluva good Halloween bash! And it's become a tradition for him to tap the shoulder of one of his fellow designer pals to create each year's invite postcards and posters! Well... this year I had the privilege of doing so! I figured I'd design this year's invite with the feel of the old horror/suspense comics - and I'm really happy with how it turned out! (I've included my rough sketches below, as well, to show the process I went through to get to the final end-product.)

Grobot Concept Sketches

Last holiday season I had the pleasure of working on our holiday promo at Real Art! As always - the Real Art Holiday Promo is a team effort andeveryone gets involved. And it always has a tie-in with a local charity, etc. This year we created "Grobots" and auctioned them off in a silent auction format - proceeds going to various Hope Equity Micro-Endowments. The project was a success and we sold out of our various "Steam-Punkish" creations over the following months! I was looking through some of my past projects the other day and stumbled across these concept sketches I did back at the start of the Grobots project and I thought they were worthy of sharing here!

Check out www.recycledlifeforms.com to see where we ended up! We one Adobe Site of the Day back in January for this project... and several other awards as well. It was definitely a fun project to be involved in.

Cornhole Guys!

While I'm on the subject of cool little retro-looking characters, I thought it appropriate to show off some little guys I invented for my pal Ben Witherspoon recently. He's one of the masterminds behind Cornhole.com - the #1 makers, suppliers, distributors of Cornhole game sets, products, etc in the world. (Man - I hope they have a better elevator speech than I just tried to construct! Haha)

Anyway - he came to me about designing their biz cards, letterhead, envelopes... the whole 9 yards. And soon I'll be working on their brochure. But these little fellas are playfully present on all their printed stuff.

Oh... and be sure to check out Cornhole.com and buy a set!

A Happy Little Character

I like the simple sculpted "line" of this little fella. Some lazy Sunday coming up soon I plan on animating this little character, but for now - I thought I'd share a simple sketch of him.