Always A Winner

Everybody loves a chicken dinner. It's quick, easy and hard to mess up. That's why my pal Bekah and I cook it so much, it's kind of become the thing to do. We decided we should make a design reflecting our joy of chicken dinner, a celebration ... an ode, if you will to this master of meats, this ... poultry prince this ... dinner of desire.

So, below is my layout for this scrumptious shirt, Bek's is coming soon, and I'll also post it here.

In the meantime, I can guess what you're cooking tonight.

¡El día del toro!

This is a piece I was invited to do by alreadytv.com for their weekly artist series. The only stipulation was that I pick a topic relating to sports and come up with my own commentary. This was all hand-drawn in Adobe Illustrator with the exception of the background, which was a manipulation of a photo I took of some grungy paper.

(click on the image to view larger)

Here is the blurb on the Web site:

Bullfighting has been in practice for over two millennia. During the 2010 Festival of Saint Isidro at the Plaza de Toros las Ventas bullring a matador, Julio Aparicio, was gored through his throat only to have the six inch tip of the bull's horn erupt through his mouth like a hellish piston.

This cruel sport exists today only because of tradition. A game devised to taunt, humiliate, and murder the animal, bringing to light the most barbaric and primordial urges of humankind. Luckily, Aparicio survived this encounter, but unfortunately the bull was quickly disposed of. Regardless, that day was a day of justice for the bulls and May 21, 2010 should forever be known as: ¡El día del toro!

Billy Joel Oughtta Know

If you're driving west on I-44 outside of St. Louis towards/near Washington, MO, you might see this billboard along the highway. I didn't have too much control over the design of this one, the stock photography was pre-chosen, I just had the task of inserting the copy and laying it out.

This was the last rush job at the end of a crazy day at the end of a crazy week. For some reason as I was designing this billboard, Billy Joel's Movin' Out song popped into my head. The image below is the culmination of all the craziness, just for fun. I would've loved to have seen this along side I-44.

Odosketch Rhinoceros

Please be patient while the sketch video loads ... apologies if the copy is hard to read in your browser, I think the video code is interfering with the text code.

I saw this little Flash program on a couple of blogs that I check in on often: Joe Bluhm and Jason Seiler and was inspired to do a little sketch of my own in this Web based program. It's fun, fast, and user-friendly; you're given a limited palette of thick and thin colored brushes to work with that allow you to create quickly, and in a way that looks good no matter what you draw. I started a little high on the "page," but that's the fun of these quick sketches ... who cares if it's not perfect? Also, I didn't have to do anything special to record the drawing, that's done automatically.

Personally I liked sticking to a very limited palette, but the colors are chosen in a way that it's hard to pick a bad combination.

Again, this is a lot of fun and hopefully encourages everyone to do a little sketching.

Bird Sketch

This is just a little drawing I did from a Google image on my laptop ... got a little lazy with the stick it's sitting on.

Font Capture

Well this was really cool, and took about 10 minutes to do. By clicking here you can visit a Web page that allows you (if you have a printer and scanner) to create a font based on your own handwriting. The directions are on their site, but you really only have to print out a template, fill it in with your own writing, scan it, load it, and bang ... new font! It saves a .ttf file format which works great for Adobe products, I haven't been able to make it work with any Microsoft products, such as Word though, but I really don't have any reason to try to do that.

A+ to this site, the possibilities of font creation are really endless!

Volunteer Newsletter

This newsletter, News from A to V (Auxiliary to Volunteers) is directed at the aforementioned audience for St. John's Mercy Medical Center. I believe that the number is between 850 - 1000 volunteers, all who contribute countless hours of good work to the Medical Center. Rags like this are typically low-budget and low-priority pieces, but we found that we could keep printing costs down due to new printing systems and give the Volunteers a nice piece that's well-deserved to showcase their accomplishments and service.