A COLLECTION OF SERIOUS ART FOR VERY SERIOUS CONSUMERS OF SERIOUS SUBJECT MATTER.
Launchpad
Watercolor, gouache & colored pencil
As a character originally created to be Scrooge McDuck’s traveling companion on his adventures in the TV show DuckTales, I was always intrigued that Launchpad McQuack made the leap to be a sidekick to Darkwing Duck as well. This piece was created for a time when I was a guest at a Disney-themed convention that was also being attended by Terry McGovern, the voice of Launchpad in the original series DuckTales and Darkwing Duck.
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Fierce
Watercolor, gouache & colored pencil
I’m always intrigued by the little guy who acts tough – a Napoleon complex if you will. This piece started as just a random pencil sketch in my sketchbook, and as soon as I saw the kid with the Doberman on the page without a background, I stopped sketching. This HAD to be a painting. Combined with the interest in the main subjects, and a crazy desire to take on the challenge of drawing and painting a chain link fence, this piece was born.
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Leap Frogs
Watercolor, gouache, colored pencil & digital
What is more summer-ful than frogs enjoying life in their natural habitat – the ol’ swimmin’ hole? Just a fun piece inspired by a series of sketches from my sketchbook. You never know what inspiration can come from random doodles on a blank piece of paper. Well, NOW I guess you know, but before this, you had no idea.
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Summer Boredom
Watercolor & colored pencil
These spot illustrations were created for an article about summer boredom in children’s publication Clubhouse Magazine published by Focus on the Family. One boy was napping on a road trip missing all the exciting things out of his car window, a girl pretending to be Noah with her stuffed animals on her bed, and a third kid was writing about how he imagined his life as a lobster, but kept breaking the pencil with his claw. It was a super fun assignment that I hope put some smiles on kids’ faces as much as I was smiling when I thought of a moose juggling prairie dogs.
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Pic-a-nic on the Grass
Watercolor & colored pencil
Created for a Hanna-Barbera themed art show at a Los Angeles gallery, Pic-a-nic on the Grass is a direct parody of Èdouard Manet’s famous Luncheon on the Grass that was all the rage in good ol’ 1863. The paintings are 150 years apart, but both meals probably had ant problems.
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Frankenlisa
Watercolor & colored pencil
This is perhaps my favorite piece I ever did. I had been working on lots of pre-school animation projects for television at the time, so maybe a way to decompress at home was to combine Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with Frankenstein’s monster. It certainly was a big challenge to paint in a way I had not before, but that’s what personal projects should do, right? They need to make one a better artist. I wrote extensively on my blog about the step-by-step process of creating my own monster. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, the only electricity used this time was for my lamp and pencil sharpener. CLICK HERE to go to Part 1.
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Arbor Day
Watercolor & colored pencil
Each year I create my own Christmas card. Every now and then I like to shake things up by skipping Christmas, but surprising folks with a card for a holiday on which no one ever sends cards. One year Arbor Day was chosen. This image graced the front of the card with a beautiful verse about the majesty of trees. On the inside was a line drawing showing how that tree had been made into that year’s card.
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Green Eggs & Ham
Watercolor & colored pencil
I was pleased to be a part of the storyboard team on the second season of Netflix’s Green Eggs & Ham series. As a series, it extended the adventures of Sam I Am (voiced by Adam Devine), and gave a name to his grumpy companion that Dr. Seuss did not name – Guy Am I (voiced by Michael Douglas). I continue to enjoy drawing Sam and Guy for fans in sketches and the occasional watercolor piece. This remains the most liked image I ever posted on my Instagram page, and I enjoy it so much, too, that the original remains on display in my studio.
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The Swimmer
Digital
Many times over the years, I will post on social media and my blog a monster a day during the month of October. Monster Month, as I call it, has been fun for the character designer in me to come up with fun images whether as simple as a sketch, or as finished as an illustration. This is one of the latter, created in Photoshop, with real paper texture scanned in to ground it in the physical world. Also, it’s nice to know that monsters can have a healthy fear of the water. Safety first!
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SILA Poster
Watercolor, gouache, colored pencil & digital
In 2020, the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles (SILA) asked me to chair their annual art competition called Illustration West. It was the 59th year they hosted this competition for professional and student illustrators from around the world. So, I put together a stellar jury of industry professionals, and made it happen. I was also asked to personally create the poster that would advertise the call for entries which was a huge honor (which means it was intimidating).
Since the contest is in Los Angeles, I wanted the poster to reflect that. And to make it fun and exciting to me, I looked to the creature feature posters of the 1950s for inspiration. While I did the painting, I called upon my buddy Andy Heckathorne to design the text. After laying in the text, I did some digital finagling to give the overall piece a hint of printing dots that were more common back in the 1950s printing technology.
I wrote a 7-part step-by-step of the creation on my blog which you can read by
CLICKING HERE.