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Pretty happy how this Boa golf shoe turned out.

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I recently had the opportunity to test out a new vector drawing app for the iPad. The app is called Bez by Juicy bits and just launched on the app store today. I was extremely skeptical at first as I’ve never used a vector app that I have liked. I will not kid you, it was challenging having to re-learn how to draw with a more stripped down set of vector drawing tools. But it was fun and made me rethink how I do things in my normal process. The developer of this app did an amazing job and it was great to be able to provide feedback and help improve the tools and way the app functions. There are some features that I wish were in adobe illustrator. So I drew this Salsa Deadwood, with my finger, on my iPad, pretty amazing feat actually. Once I got the hang of things I became pretty suprised with what the app could do. Go to the app store and check it out if you are into that sort of thing. I hope to do a more comprehensive review in the near future.

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Popular Science has been a pretty regular thing for me for well over a year now. Here are a couple of the latest.

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Lesson Learned. Tip on preparing final art for print.

So a couple of weeks ago I posted a tutorial video on working with transparency masks in adobe illustrator. You can see that here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU7vuaHWfTA

I regularly contribute an illustration to the DIY section in Popular Science each month. This month however I noticed an issue on my illustration. These white blocks (circled in red) are not supposed to show up, they were transparency masks meant to hide sections of the wires. This could have happened if someone ungrouped the art. So in the future I would say it’s a much safer bet to edit the final art to not include the masks, something I typically do but not always. Drives me crazy seeing a mistake like this that I made, I can guarantee that it won’t happen again.

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Had a nice time working on these illustrations for Scientific American Mind magazine. Been dealing with a lot of work related to exoskeletons and prosthetics lately. 

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Couple of Popular Science illos from the iPad app.

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Full page illustration for the April issue of Popular Science to give the lowdown on the Google Loon project.

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Been drawing a ton of cool stuff for this awesome company lately. Super fortunate to be working with some great clients.

www.iconaircraft.com

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Love this video on the illustrator that created the McLaren F1 Owner's Manual artwork. Some fine work in there and very inspiring. I would love to get the opportunity to work on something of that caliber one day.

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Random 2014 Illustrations that didn’t make the portfolio, Part 2.

Here's the last batch, for now. Sasquatch on a sweater!

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Here is an alternate version I had shown the client.

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Pretty pleased to have a couple more illustrations in Popular Science this month. I love the magazine and they have been awesome to work with.  Huge thank you to Michelle Mruk at PopSci for the opportunity.

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I updated my portfolio with a bunch of new work I recently created for Lowes. I loved working on this project as it really forced me to think simple and get away from the heavy detail I usually add in my drawings. Send more work like this my way please.

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It's been a busy couple of months. I've had the good fortune of working with another great Michigan based company to create some product illustrations for their consumer catalogs. This project has been a lot of fun as I've had to bust out some photography skills and do some real hand sketching (on the wacom). Looking forward to updating my portfolio with a lot of new work when things slow down.

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I thought I would share a great way of mapping drawing elements in illustrator onto a perspective plane that matches your drawing.

So I started with a photo to draw my person. The brief was to have her interacting with a monitor to view information about her vehicle.

Then I drew in the monitor and matched the perspective plane to it.

Now any art I create that needs to show up on the screen can easily be applied.

The great thing about this is that you can move around those elements individually and they stay in perspective wherever you put them. The old method was to use an envelope distort which was just not very good at all.

Now it's easy to swap in anything I need, move things around, etc.

I will be using this a lot in the future.

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I recently gave some of my time to create these illustrations for print ads used in the surrogaid campaign for Warchild.ca. It seems like a good cause and everyone was happy with the way these turned out. Plus I picked up some tricks to cheat at drawing people. Win!

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This Ad featuring one of my illustrations won a Gold ADDY Award and also Best of Print at the American Advertising Awards in Washington DC. Special thanks to Melissa Meyers, the ACD on the project, I had a lot of fun working on it.