Stranger Than Fiction...

Never let him walk by without studying his proportions.  You know who I am talking about.  The man you have to look twice at, even though you know it's wrong.  He looks like a cartoon.  The man in the shape that you couldn't make up, but stands there before you, real as anything.  It's like the pattern in the tile floor, the marble lines, or the ceiling bumps when the light stretches them across the top of your room, that looks like a hippopotamus, balancing on the last bit of rock, like a stranded polar bear.  The pieces of truth that are always stranger than fiction.  Don't let them pass. Keep them.  This man was about seven feet tall and the strangest shaped person I have seen in some time.  Here is a sketch I threw down on the iPad using the app Paper by 53, and the drawing I turned it into later.  Still needs some reference point to emphasize his height.  Later. Enjoy.

Early Morning

Early morning.  Dawn is interesting.  It's when we decide.  For the past eight months I have been neck deep in a tech start-up.  It is still on-going, though I have lost touch with part of me.  I jumped back into illustrating some of the books I already have under contract, but I am locked into the styles on those.
While studying creative writing I often heard the saying, "if you want to write well, read a lot."  To that end, I am beginning an exploration of various illustration styles.  While the styles I have used and show on my website are varied, they all have a strong underlying quality.  The outline.  All of my work has the same starting point: the drawing.  What happens from there can take an enormous variety of forms, but ultimately falls into two categories.  One, where the drawing becomes part of the illustration, and one where it disappears entirely.  The vast majority of my work falls into the first of these choices and therefore exhibits a strong outline quality throughout.
Here I share with you the beginnings of my departure from that.

Look for at least weekly updates to my journey.  Feel free to contact me for work or any other reason.  My lovely wife, Heather will be taking an active roll in the administration of my illustration business, so this is very exciting.  We have a lot planned.  We will soon be launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund the creation of one of my own children's books since I have never been able to illustrate any of them all the way through before pulling myself off to illustrate for food.