Tip Top Gash

Atomic orbit

Atomic orbit explained:

Atomic orbit illustrated:

Picture This sketches

Here are some of the first sketches for the NYTimes video, most of which made it to the final product. Picture This is currently the number two most viewed in the Times’ video archive. Go ahead, watch it again…maybe you can make it number one.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/08/15/science/100000000999724/picture-this-cancer.html

Picture This

Today the NYTimes launched the first Picture This video to accompany a very complex article about cancer research. How do you make it easier to understand? With a video of an illustrator using simple drawings to explain the content. Which illustrator? Well…

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/08/15/science/100000000999724/picture-this-cancer.html

While cleaning out my flat files…

I found this screen print of the tampon cowgirl spokescharacter from a few years ago. I did these on the shiny side of freezer paper and it took the ink surprisingly well…

Football

Sometimes…

…Twitter is more noise than anything.

Pen and Paper

A dear friend just finished his MFA at Bennington and asked me to do a drawing for the cover of the reader that features work by all the graduates. It’s pretty nice to do something so simple, just pen and paper (and a little white out)…

Leftovers

Here are the rejects from this assignment:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/books/review/book-review-turn-of-mind-by-alice-laplante.html?ref=books

Play Golf!

How dare they talk about Social Security when they refuse to fairly tax the rich, and while the people are still waiting for someone to go to jail for causing this shit sandwich we find ourselves in…gross.

“The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.”

Moving pictures

I had lunch with an illustrator friend at Society yesterday. We sat for nearly three hours talking about the biz, which included animation. I don’t aspire to be an animator at all, but I do love the idea of illustrations that move. Back in December I did 20+ spots for Golf DIgest’s iPad app launch including some that had very simple moving parts like this:

As simple as this was, it was very exciting. It changed the way I went at the sketches and it felt different and new. I did this a couple of months ago:

And the whole time I was wishing they had an app version or I could do something like this for the web:

I do hope that more of this is coming soon. After all the gloom and doom about the death of print and what that would mean for illustration, here is this wonderful possibility for what it could actually mean for illustration. 

Bested again

Lucy and I have this new game where I draw up to a line (you can see the line across the paper) and then she finishes from where I leave off…kid is getting pretty good.

Happy 4th!

Missed Connection

About once a week a week I take a few minutes to read Missed Connections in the Craigslist personals. Unlike the much sleazier Misc Romance, Missed Connections is fairly innocent, and some are so sweet and wistful that I find myself checking on old posts hoping these ships passing in the night were able to signal one another. Some are gross, to be certain, due in large part to the fact that men are allowed to participate, but most are just a public record of a fleeting spark. The idea that people are possessed by enough romantic whimsy to take a chance on what amounts to a message in a bottle, all because for a moment they find someone so bewitching that they are compelled to act, well, I really love that. So here’s to you, Chicken Parm girl, the best post of last week, god speed…