Ad Week - Jan 2014

I haven't been doing much illustration lately; a FT job offer I received earlier in 2013 has allowed me to scale back and only take jobs that I have really wanted to do. But when Ad Week magazine called me up about this group of little portraits, I agreed because A)It seemed like a fun gig, and B)I've done work for Ad Week before, and they were a delight to deal with.

Click the image to see the portraits close up; the magazine put them in those little bubbles and I think they look cool!

Inc. Magazine - March 2013

These were portraits I did for the March 2013 edition of Inc. magazine, for an article called "You Have Nine Months To Get Healthy" about the impending full implementation of the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare."

It was all very simple and Inc. was easy to work with. Done and done!

Aung San Suu Kyi

This was a portrait I did of Burmese political opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi for a "worktext", which is a workbook for kids age 6-12. Published by Houghton Mifflin, kids are encouraged to write in the books so they can be used as study guides.

HM was very specific about how they wanted the portrait to look, so it took a number of tries to get it right. But after some tweaks they approved it, and the final is what you see above!

Vera Ellen

I have become obsessed with the movie White Christmas. Only merely aware of its existence before this holiday season, we started watching it on Netflix and after a couple of viewings I fell totally in love.

Nearly everything in the movie--the performances, the music, the comedy, the Technicolor cinematography--is perfect, but the real stand-out to me was Vera Ellen, who plays Judy Haynes, half of the musical act The Hayne Sisters. She does virtually all the dancing in the film, and she is tremendous. Her vitality practically jumps off the screen, and she is a joy to watch. She's funny, cute, sexy, and more than matches the movie-star wattage of her much more famous co-stars.

Of her co-stars (Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Rosemary Clooney), Vera-Ellen went into--and came out of--White Christmas as the least famous participant, and sadly it seems co-starring in the one of the biggest movie hits in history didn't do much for her career: she appeared in just one more film, then retired a few years after a personal tragedy. She died in 1981.

I was inspired to pay tribute to Ms. Ellen, so I did this little portrait of her as a way to say "thanks" for her amazing work in White Christmas. I see myself watching the movie again and again, even after the season is over...

Control-Alt-Hack

Now it can be told!

Earlier in the year my normal prodigious illustration output slowed to a crawl. Part of that is because of my increased Ace Kilroy workload, but that was also because, as I alluded to a couple of times, I was in the middle of a big illustration project and it just didn't leave me with much time to do anything else.

Well, now said project is out for all to see (and buy)--it's a RPG called Control-Alt-Hack, which is "a tabletop card game about white hat hacking, based on game mechanics by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games (Munchkin and GURPS)."

Not being a gamer, I had no idea what any of that meant when I landed the job, and I still don't. My part of the game was to produce twenty portrait illustrations, loosely based on real people turned into characters for game play. Here are some promo shots from the Control-Alt-Hack site:

Each character was shown in a sort of action pose, doing something that was specific to them: dancing, blogging, cooking, etc. They were detail-intensive and my part of the game took quite a while; I worked on it from March through July, one of the longest projects I've ever been involved in.

Here are a couple of the other portraits as I delivered them to the client:

It was an enormous challenge working on Control-Alt-Hackers; it required a lot of concentration and organization. And while that's normally not a problem for me, sometimes the illustrations were in so many different stages of completion that I had to whip up an Excel spreadsheet to keep it all straight.

But in the end I was glad to be asked to do it, and am proud of the final results. I've not been asked to do this kind of project before so I was happy to expand my portfolio a bit.

If you're a gamer and this sounds like something you'd be interested in playing, use this Amazon link to order the game:

...once you get the game, pick out your favorite characters and send me the cards; I'll return 'em autographed!

Smithsonian - Nov. 2012

I drew the contributor portraits for the November 2012 edition of Smithsonian magazine--nine illustrations in all, though one had to be dropped because the author's piece was bumped from the issue.

I used to like putting heavy outlines on all my illustrations, now I kinda prefer open color holds like you see here. For portraits this small, it helps each piece breathe, I think.

Video Detective Villain of the Week

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted anything new; I've been so busy with other projects that I really haven't had time to produce anything new outside of client work, a lot of which wasn't really worth showcasing here.

One exception are the series of portraits I've for VideoDetective.com, a website featuring trailers for movies, TV shows, games, and more. Back in July, they came up with this idea for a "villain of the week", who would be picked from whatever big movie was coming out that week. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, I produced these every week from August through October. Starting in November, they changed their frequency monthly--the better to give people more time to see them, and enter the contest associated with each one.

Below are all of the VOTWs I've done so far; I think they got better as I went along and they've been a lot of fun to do. I hope I can keep doing them!

Video Detective: Grassroots

I am now finally putting the finishing touches on this big project I've been involved with, so I've had time to work on some other stuff--case in point, this portrait I did for the website Video Detective, which features thousands of trailers for all the latest movies, TV shows, and games.

For the next month, maybe longer, I'll be producing an original illustration based on a movie that comes out that week--and for this inaugural effort, I picked the indie film Grassroots, starring Jason Biggs (American Pie) and Joel David Moore (Avatar) about a ordinary citizen who decides to run for Seattle city council.

I went with the traditional campaign poster colors with a messy, almost hand-made look, like they were done with silkscreens, one by one, and then pasted up around the city. And since this Mr. Moore's first lead role, I made him the focus of the poster, rather than his character. Because, of course, if Grassroots is a big hit, this won't be the last time Moore is the lead!

Each week's portrait will appear on the Video Detective Facebook page on Fridays. So be sure to head over there and check out what I'm doing--and if you like it, be sure to Like, Share, and Comment. If they're a big enough hit, maybe I'll be doing these for more than this month!

Mrs. Joker

I'm still in the middle of this big illustration project that's eating up most of my time and energy; consequently I haven't had the inclination to work on anything new.

But last night I found myself with a few moments of free time so I just sort of doodled around and I created this Mrs. Joker character. It's not Harley Quinn; it's definitely some distaff version of the Clown Prince of Crime!

Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow is my hero.

I guess I should clarify--the Clarence Darrow portrayed by Spencer Tracy in the 1960 film classic Inherit The Wind is my hero. I saw that film for the first time when I was a teenager, and it struck a real chord with me. All my life, I've always been the kind of person that has valued reason over superstition, science over religion. The real life Darrow (called Henry Drummond in the film) was very much that kind of guy, though he took his beliefs to an extreme edge, refusing to compromise what he believed in even though it would, frequently, enrage a lot of people who would have normally been on his "side."

Aside from the film version, I never actually knew that much about the real man, but I knew enough to know that there was no way he could have been as heroic and perfect as the Spencer Tracy version (who could?). So a few weeks ago I started reading John A. Farrell's Clarence Darrow: Attorney For The Damned to learn more about the actual Darrow, and I've been enjoying the book immensely.

So I whipped up this little portrait, trying to convey some of the dark forces that Darrow did battle with, both in society and inside himself. I liked how it came out, all hard edges and extreme lights and darks.

Margaret Cho on Melissa Harris-Perry

They, this was a nice surprise! On yesterday's episode of Melissa Harris-Perry (which airs weekend mornings on MSNBC), they had on Margaret Cho to discuss women's self-image. During the segment they ran the above graphic, featuring my portrait of her from the "Revolution" tour! Ginchy!

You can watch the whole interview below, "my" part comes in at the 10:15 mark:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Taylor Swift

I hadn't done a straightforward portrait in a while, so I thought why not go with someone contemporary (as opposed to some ancient horror movie actor, who tend to be my muses), and you really can't get anymore more "now" than superstar Taylor Swift.

An astonishingly beautiful young woman, I modeled this idea on the poster for Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, which consisted of a simple caricature of star Veronica Lake on a field of yellow. My version's not so cartoony of course, but it comes from the same super-minimalist idea.

Vincent Price

Sometimes I just like to doodle...

The Village Voice - 11/16/11

I was asked to do the above portrait of NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly (no relation) for the cover to the 11/16/11 edition of The Village Voice.

The VV showed me the rough layout they had in mind for the cover; a Russian Constructvist-type thing, and I immediately knew what they were going after, since I'm a big fan of that style. The portrait went through a couple of stages, and as it developed it got looser and rougher, to better convey that DIY feel.

I'm happy to see a piece of mine on a cover like this; I think its beautifully composed and really gets the message across. This is my first piece for The Village Voice, I hope its not my last!

Lilian Bond

I've been so busy the past couple of weeks I haven't had time to think about more complex pieces, but I always want to be working on something, so I whipped up this simple portrait of actress Lilian Bond, whom I'm most familiar with from James Whale's The Old Dark House.

I used to do tons of these straightforward portraits back in the early years, when I was first developing this style, so it was kinda nice to go back to that time with this.

The Real Ace Kilroy?

Being the writer, not the artist, on a creative project is new for me, and I have to say so far I've been enjoying it. But of course that didn't stop me from doing my own portrait of our creation, Ace Kilroy.

My co-creator Dan O'Connor initially used actor Clint Walker as the model for Ace. Over time Dan's talent took over and he made Ace into his own person, but I went back to Clint as the model for my portrait, which wasn't meant to be anything more than a messy little doodle.

Go read Ace Kilroy!

Rod Serling

Thanks to Netflix Watch Instantly, I've been catching up on all the episodes of The Twilight Zone I've never seen before, or haven't seen for a long time. I spent last Saturday working on an illustration project and I just played episode after episode of the show, all day.

This started out as just a portrait of Rod Serling, and then I started playing with it and added some show stills just to jazz it up a bit. Submitted for your approval!

From The Vault: Martin Short - 2006

I used to have all the "Hot Seat" portraits I did up on my namtab.com site, but now that I trimmed that page down to a manageable size, I figured it would be fun to dig out some of the older and (IMO) better ones and put 'em up here!

This portrait of Martin Short--who was promoting a one-man show on Broadway at the time--was one of the first Hot Seats I did for Time Out New York after they had redesigned the page and changed the orientation of the portraits from vertical to horizontal.

Feeling creatively invigorated, I really tried to give these portraits my all, making them more complete illustrations all around--giving the magazine more bang for its buck, so to speak.

So I thought the name "Marty" all up in metaphorical lights was a really neat desig element. Plus, it tied in visually to the picture, and sort of commented on Martin Short's on screen/stage persona, which was kind of an attention hog, the kind of guy who chased after the spotlight. Nothing would make that Marty happier than seeing his name in giant, twenty foot glowing letters.

But...for whatever reason, the magazine had some weird rule about no text ever being in these portraits, so they asked me to take it out. I kinda thought that ripped the guts out of the piece, but by that point I knew not to argue. Even if I had, they would have gone ahead and taken it out themselves, so I said sure, got rid of it, and the resulting printed version was okay, but not as good as what I had.

Some days, the bear gets you.

"Mera"

This portrait of Aquaman's queen, Mera, is just me goofing around, really. I wanted to try the water effect--since that is her natural habitat--and I thought it came our pretty well.

I was tempted to add some design element to this, like I did for the other Mera portrait I did, but then realized I should leave well enough alone!

Sacajawea

This is a portrait of Sacajawea I was asked to do by Scholastic Books for a proposed series of children's biographies of famous people. They were looking for a cover artist for the series, so they hired a number of different artists to do a portrait of the same subject and would pick one to do the cover artist for the series.

Sadly, I didn't get the gig, which of course is a big disappointment. But overall I have no complaints--I've landed the majority of the jobs that I was in competition for, so I was bound to lose one eventually.

Both Scholastic and I were happy with the piece; maybe I'll get to do something for them in the future.