Last night, I needed to work on something different to clear my mind. I had just received this picture from my mother of her dog and her, so I did a quick drawing of it to experiment with color.

I have been working hard these last few days on illustrating the mural for South Austin Music. Drawing all 29 people has given me some good practice and you can definitely see a difference in the quality of my drawing towards the end. So I'll probably have to go back and fix a few parts to make sure it is consistent. This example was just a small part that I finished towards the end that had a lot of fun details and interesting poses.
I was actually able to contact one of the musicians, Patricia Pike... or at least her people... to give me a some higher quality promotional pictures. So I had a good selection to pick from, and I found a perfect shot of her smile, tattoos, and some interesting jewelery.

One of my clients, Cactus Advertising, hired me to do some portrait illustrations for their website. They also plan to use them in their business card designs. I really liked how they turned out, and I think it will help set them apart from their competitors.

This is a little flyer I designed for Alicia's store. It's parent's weekend at Baylor starting on Friday and Alicia wanted to give the them information on how to order gifts through her store for their kids. The main draw being that she would deliver to the dorms, and they could look at stuff on her website. So I really need to give her website a facelift soon too. Its literally been years since I've done anything to it. Her physical address has changed since and she really wants to just offer the products that she makes, which is where she makes most of her money anyway.
I did this design in about 40 minutes, which is fast for me. I tend to experiment a lot with fonts and placement of each component, but I knew pretty early on what I wanted.

I spent about six hours today working on a second version of the mural that includes more people and better images. I'm waiting to hear back for approval, and then I can finally begin to illustrate it. Yay!
I would like to start early next week preparing the wall for painting. Since it is brick, it would be best to smooth it out to save time and improve the quality of the finished piece. It would also stop it from looking distorted when viewed from the road! Then after I lay down a white base coat, I'll be good to go. But first things first, I must get the illustation approved.

I did this oil painting a couple weeks back, but this is the first time I've ever shown it. I like it because of it's luminescence, and how it imitates a watercolor style.

This is my beautiful wife Alicia. She is the owner of Harts N Crafts in Waco, Texas. She recently was front page of the Baylor Lariat.
I always loved this picture of her and I needed more examples of my style for the Illustrator Techniques website. They hired me to write an article on how to imitate the "scanner" style using Adobe Illustrator. It is a step by step tutorial on how to turn any photo into an illustration like this one. It turned out great and everyone was very excited about the result (especially me) thanks to two of my fans and long-time friends, professor Terry Roller at Baylor University and Chris G. Johnson, who helped edit my writing. Chris has a great blog that you should definitely check out.

I spent most of today compositing all my reference imagery into one file to layout the mural I'm working on. Holy smokes! Its a huge file! 202 megabytes to be exact. At one point I had to delete some of my music off my hard drive just so I could save. Rest assured, all my music and files are carefully backed up on my external hard drive. As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in this world - those who back up and those who will.

Side note: So after we had finished compositing the whole movie, "A Scanner Darkly," in after effects, it took up pretty close to 600gigs of memory across six hard drives. Each hard drive w/ one twenty minute reel. At 23.976 frames per seconds, that's a lot of pictures!

Anyway, one imporant criteria that I had to consider while designing this mural was to make sure each artist was close to the same size, so not to offend anyone by making them feel less "important." This can be tricky because while I am trying not to bring focus to any one person, my fear was that there wouldn't be anything to grabs the viewer or lead them into the picture. Thus making it less memorable and more difficult to "read." So I tried to pick imagery that was engaging and surprising, while still portraying their personality with some accuracy. Once I get this stage approved, the next step will be to finish a small scale illustration using the approved reference as a guide. Which should take a couple days at least. If that goes smoothly, then I can begin to execute the mural. yay!

Another busy weekend flew by as I visited Waco. Saw a lot of old friends and my sister Julie's family, which was great! Now I'm back at it again, recently working on some headshots for my wife's business Harts N Crafts of her employees. In this image of Shannan, who goes to Baylor, I was really trying to capture her playful spirit while giving the whole image a minimalist, chic design. Her friends who have seen it all agree that it captures not just her likeness, but portrays her vibrant personality as well.

For about a month or so, I've been talking to the owner of South Austin Music about doing a mural on the side of his building. Its a big thirty foot brick wall that has great visibility when you are driving north-bound on Lamar in South Austin. He wants to pay tribute to the artists who have kept him in business for over twenty years, with artists such as Monte Montgomery, Jimmy La Fave, Charlie Sexton, James McMaster... and help establish his business as a landmark in the area.
This sketch was an example I did of John Dee Graham to show what style I would like to use. Of course the real deal will be in color, but you get the idea. It is exciting for me to have such a great opportunity to paint large, experiment with house paint, and make a really positive impact on his business. I also hope it will lead to more opportunities doing this kind of high-impact, high-visibility work that still trusts my creativity and point-of-view.