The Remarkably Sage Frogbeast

Really happy how this latest digital painting came out. It has been a while since I've done one (not for a client) that I took all the way to finished detail. 

During a portfolio review with the venerable Chris Oatley I got some good feedback that I have a bunch of sketches I could take to the next level with a more finished look. This is the first fruits of following through on that advice. 

It's amazing how many more areas of improvement your eye begins to notice as you continue on with the work. Things that looked reasonably okay as a sketch don't hold up when the work gets more refined. In this particular case, the character evolved as well - the act of painting was part of the discovery. Really encouraging process, hoping to do more!

Live Painting at Alhambra's First Friday #2

Another live painting in Downtown Alhambra, the theme for April was "Film" so I made this mashup of genre imagery from films. Most of it is not directly referenced from a specific film, but meant to be wacky and fun and capture the overall spirit of the movies.

I feel like my proficiency with this painting style is really coming together.  Just a little bit of preliminary sketching and research was needed this time (though I'm sure more would have helped if I had the time). Of course, I've been researching dinosaurs for about 30 years so I'm sure that helps too :)

Cartoon Boy Hairstyles

Researching some different youth hairstyles for a preteen boy character. Looking for something with a good silhouette (the character is black & white like these), and that could work for more than one ethnicity. Oh yeah, and it can't look too much like Justin Bieber. That's surprisingly hard to find these days, even with Google Image search :)

Illustrations for a Menu App

A new service allows restaurants to create mobile- and web-friendly versions of their menus. The client wanted to depict the app’s convenience for customers wherever hunger strikes.

I created these illustrations to fill a rotating carousel on the website home page, emphasizing the diverse customers and their ordering habits. These illustrations show how the app can connect restaurants to their customers — wherever they are and whatever they’re craving.

The client enjoyed some of my sketchier styles and wanted to keep that rough liveliness in the final illustrations. A big emphasis was that the illustrations would feel lifelike and natural while still being simple and stylized. The client loved my rough sketches so a few times we would need to retool the finished quality images to look more like the roughs. We stuck with a limited color palette for consistency with the rest of the website.
See more views of this project: Menu App Illustrations