Another one in the series of illustrations for Yoga Earth food products. Beautiful and kinda creepy, that Maca root.

Another Yoga Earth snack packaging illustration.

I’ve been busy lately. I’ve been generating enough work to post, but just haven’t made the time to do so. I’ll try to catch up over the next couple weeks, posting a varied selection of recent paid work. Map design, comics, food packaging, website illustration, all sorts of little jobs piled up on top of each other, making me feel schizophrenic. Off all this stuff, the illustrations for Yoga Earth, a healthy snack food company, have been the most gratifying. Very friendly client, a good designer, and its also nice to have an excuse (getting paid!) to do nature drawings. The above is a picture of almond tree branches.

Its been a long time since I added to this series. This scruffy socket, mounted to a column in a dingy, florescent-lit waiting room in the Kings County Board of Ed, had a beleaguered yet vigilant quality to it. I hope it appreciated the attention.

The lovely and lively Comics Reporter blog gave me a nice mention! Thanks to whoever was responsible.

This doodle was completed over several days in various coffee shops and at home. Milo wants to color it in, but I told him I had to scan it first. I wonder what he thinks that means.

Ok, these are the last pictures from this book that I’ll be posting (at least until April when the book comes out). I’m moving on to other things next week but first I wanted to show some of the smaller images. Looking back at book 2, I think I was overly tight which was especially noticeable in the spots. I tried to be a little looser with these but still gave in to obsessiveness here and there. That said, here are three of the better ones:

Mayhem on a large scale in a small space. This one reminded of me of some of the design work for CODENAME: Kids Next Door.

An underworld brownie home.

I was particularly pleased with the beefiness of this kid’s chin and fingers. I also had fun rendering the bagful of earwax.

Next week I’ll move on to posting some other kinds of things, but I wanted to show a couple more of these…mostly because I had so much fun doing them! The challenge of this one was that the premise was very similar to a picture from the previous book and I wanted to be sure to make them distinct from each other. So, I simply reversed the camera angle which also cut down on the amount of detail I had to put in. The detail, of course, is where the fun is but it is also where I’d go broke if I don’t restrain myself. The budget for these books is not great and if I were to spend more than a full day on any of these pictures my rate of pay would go from modest to miserable. Anyway…enough griping. Here’s the image along with the one from the previous book for comparison:

In looking back at the illustrations for the previous books I felt that I had a tendency to create claustrophobic spaces. I think I’ve always had this inclination, in all the various styles and applications of my artwork, to both fill up all the space with stuff and also to not vary the tonal range as much as I could, resulting in a flattening of space despite my best attempts at dynamic perspective in my compositions. I really had to force myself to keep the background of this image as light as it ended up. The compulsion to darken the outlines was nearly impossible to resist but I’m really glad I did. Can I do this more often in the future? I hope so.