SPACE! The Gallery Show!

My piece for Mike Mitchell's SPACE! The Gallery Show, opening this friday at Gallery 1988 in LA! (with a ton of other amazing artists, oh man!)

I'm a lifelong sci-fi fan, and when I was deciding what to contribute to the SPACE! show I thought of my more memorable sci-fi experiences. Watching Silent Running with my dad as a kid both fascinated and terrified me, and I've been interested in how nature fits into a space travel ever since. What are the logistics of putting something so beautiful and complicated into a very fragile & isolated location?

In the 1970's, NASA, with the help of Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill, studied a variety of plans for space colony designs. I think it's notable that there was a lot of awesome original art created for these plans to inspire people and generate interest in space travel. It's amazing that these same designs have also informed so many modern day depictions of space stations in books, tv and movies!

In the spirit of those NASA illustrations (and after doing a silly amount of additional research) I made a travel poster for a new ecological space habitat of my own design!

Shoutout to Sam for inspiring me to use Google Sketchup....I've been watching him use it very effectively to make simple environment/perspective reference and decided to take the plunge myself. No way in hell I'd be patient enough to draw an inverted curved perspective otherwise!


Some of my preliminary process steps:

Having good perspective reference is invaluable. I made a simple mockup of my space habitat in Google Sketchup & took a screenshot to use in PS. It's a fiddly program...but it's free, and was definitely useful for this!

After taking the screenshot, I deleted everything except the lines in Photoshop, and colored them white. I drew my rough color sketch underneath so I could figure out what goes where!
 

Once the rough color sketch was in place, I started working out the colors and details more. (using adjustments/adjustment layers to fiddle with color)

Once I got the color figured, I added in even more rough details. After this, it's just a matter of polishing up the lines and shapes and adding some bits of texture on top!

Summer Vacations...

...aren't always the most relaxing. I was asked to illustrate an essay in Boston Globe magazine written by an author who prefers to just stay HOME during the summer and let everyone else clog up the roads and sweat out in the heat.

My AD suggested an uncomfortable roadtrip, and I thought that adding a glimpse of the cool and relaxing house she's leaving behind would be a nice contrast. (as a homebody at heart, I sympathize)

I myself will be moving apartments not once but TWICE this summer--in two different states no less--so I'm getting geared up for my own "uncomfortable roadtrip" haha. But! I'll be living it up in Brooklyn at the end of it, so here's to some future summer fun!

Thanks again to my AD Ryan Huddle!

Editorial Grab-bag!

In between a few longer-term projects I've worked on recently, I've had a bundle of editorial pieces from various times this year that I've been slow in sharing. So here they are now!!!

Family Circle-- An illustration for a personal essay about a teachable moment that happened in a grocery store check-out lane.

Sketches

Final

Boston Globe-- For a personal essay about beer snobbery--craft beer enthusiasts are often labeled as snobs, but the people who exclusively drink Coors or Bud Light are just another kind of snob too!

Sketches

Final

The New York Times--A quick illustration for the Preoccupation column. The article was about the clash between older management and young college grads--the younger generation is having a hard time finding employment because many CEOs are skeptical of their workplace value.

Sketches

Final

Thanks to my ADs Amanda Kirk, Ryan Huddle, and Minh Uong!

Ivy League Confidential

Here's a quickie illustration for today's New York Times Letters section! (it's less than 2.5 in tall in print! Eee, so cute) You can find the letters & my piece online as well!

The letters are all in response to the Op-Ed article "The Secrets of Princeton", which argues that the social connections that happen in elite universities are far more important to the graduates' success and privileged standing than is generally acknowledged. "It's not what you know, but who you know"

My ivy-centric sketches:

Thanks to my AD Alexandra Zsigmond for the chance to draw some secrets!!

Domestic Etch-- and new prints!

Hey guys!
I wanted to post my cover illo/design for an upcoming issue of Domestic Etch magazine! The theme was “The Past”, and of course I wanted to draw a medieval alternate reality! It was a while back, but I’m very happy to report that my cover was featured in the Society of Illustrators editorial show this year (along with this piece, and this one!) Thanks to my AD, Elizabeth Godspeed!

Also, I updated my print store with a bunch of new pieces, including my Domestic Etch cover (minus the type), the rest of the images you see below, and more! Inprnt has seriously amazing print quality—the colors SUPER ACCURATE—so check ‘em out if you need to fill some wall space with lady space marines or floating donuts!

The Lost Property Office

Mitzi, an American girl attending international school in Tokyo, discovers the mysterious Lost Property Office while searching for her friend Maki's homework in the sprawling Tokyo subway system. Mitzi gets her own chance to become a Finder like Mr. Motomeru and his nephew Yuki, and she soon learns that there's more to Finding than traveling through space-time!

This is a two-part young adult short story by Marji Napper in the March and April issues of Cricket magazine. It was a lot of fun to illustrate and research (Tokyo subway tunnels! Japanese houses! Tokyo Station in the 1930's!) and I'm pleased with the results. I worked on both chunks of illustrations at different times, but I tried to keep the feel and colors relatively tied-together.
Thanks to my AD Karen Kohn--I met Karen way back when I was still in college and I interned at Carus Publishing for a summer. I subscribed to Cricket magazine when I was a kid, so it was wonderful to get a chance to contribute!

Looking at the images all together, what I remember most are the things I was listening to while I worked on these illustrations. For the last 3, I specifically remember listening to the Feast for Crows/Dance With Dragons audiobook mashup, Victo Ngai's interview on Your Dreams My Nightmares, and Stella live in Boston. This seems to happen with most of my illustrations....the strongest memories are what I was watching or listening to while drawing them. Go figure, brains!

Lady Knights//Women Warriors

My contribution to the Lady Knights//Women Warriors zine! I'm psyched to be in it with all the other awesome contributors, every piece i've seen for it looks RAD. Thanks to Abby, Julia, and Roxie for putting it all together--they'll be selling at MoCCA!

I've always had a thing for mysterious heroes, and I recently started a love affair with motorcycle ladies. (this one is a bosozoku bike!)
When I was asked to be in the zine, I was already considering making a book of my own warrior women...I'm even more excited now, so we'll see!