recent projects: wedding save the date portrait

Lindsay approached me and asked if I'd like to do a portrait of her and her fiance Steve for their Save The Date invitations: she supplied me with a series of photos of the two of them to reference, as well as images of the family farm where the wedding is to take place.

Since Lindsay's a designer herself, I came up with a line-based illustration that she could adapt to suit her purposes: she added the fantastic watercolor quality, as well as the text, in the end result below:

recent project: website redesign

I recently worked with the incredibly well-respected, talented artist and educator Johanna Poethig on a major overhaul of her existing website.

Johanna's former site was good in that it was functional and very comprehensive, but... a bit dated. It was also built in such a way that updating it was cumbersome, and she had no ability to edit it herself. She's also an extremely accomplished artist with a long history in the arts, and so the idea of rebuilding a site with a prodigious amount of content, on her own, was daunting. 

Over a number of months, she and I slowly edited and redesigned her site, and I trained her on how to use WordPress so that she could now maintain it on her own. In a lot of ways, once she was trained, Johanna really did the bulk of the work on it, but it was an absolute treat getting to do the redesign, and to collaborate with her on the process.

Click through on the image below to visit Johanna's site: 

recent projects: editorial work

Whew, talk about a neglected blog! Well, let's see if we can change that in 2012. 

Just a few updates, some of which have already made it onto my portfolio pages. One recent development is that in the past 6 months, I've been doing occasional illustrations for a pretty cool San Francisco online magazine called The Bold Italic. Periodically, the editors email me about a story that someone has written, and they ask if I want to illustrate it. Below are links to these stories:

In The Line of Duty:

We Are The Champions:

Hot Sax:

Entering The Nest:

Singin' On The Dock Of The Bay:

 

Thirty Year Itch:

 

recent projects: education poster

Some of you may know that I used to be a public school teacher (art/art history, in a San Francisco high school). A few of my former colleagues now work with the organization SFCESS (San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools), and they commissioned me to create a poster for their annual Fall Forum event:  

The poster had to address some pretty shocking statistics about California's financial priorities, in particular, the tremendous disparity between what the state invests in its school system versus what it invests in its prison system:

Oyy! Sooo frustrating!

Hopefully, the use of the posters at the Fall Forum, as well as in California classrooms, will generate some conversations that will lead to change. After the event is over, I'll see about making the poster available as a free, larger, PDF on this site. 

recent projects: family/pet portrait

A new client recently approached me with an unusual but highly timely request: one of their beloved family dogs had recently passed, and she wanted to give her husband a remembrance as a birthday present. She provided me with a really sweet photograph of her husband and their dog for me to work with, and then I was able to make this family portrait for them:

It was a little heart-breaking making this portrait, but also really comforting, getting to create a picture that had so much love in it. It was clear from all of the reference images that my client provided that their dog was dearly loved and missed, and I feel grateful to have been able to make a tender image for them.