Dave Ramsey - "Junior" books

 

At the start of 2015 I took on a monumental project, to illustrate six books in six months for financial guru Dave Ramsey.  There was no way I could do it totally on my own, so I teamed up with John Trent and Kenny Yamada for the flats and rendering.  It took down to the last day to get these done!

The whole product came out last month.  Here's the link if you'd like to explore further.

   

Animals colored

For fun I colored 49 of these animal icons I've made.  I'll get them on the portfolio site soon.

Rhyming book

Been forever since I posted!  I'm still freelancing occasionally when I'm not at Hallmark.  I'd like to post more, but lately I've gotten a lot of projects I can't put online because they haven't gone on sale yet or they're logos or character designs for things that haven't been made public.  But here's one I can show--it's the 11th book I've done now in the line of activity books that are on sale at Target stores nationwide.  The topic of this one is "rhyming," and another artist will color the book.  Below are a sampling of some of my drawings from this book.

This first one has got a slug and a bug on a rug and a frog and a dog on a log.

 

Then here's some more animals.  I'm amassing a big collection of these animal icons from all of these books.

This one is a big hodge podge of rhyming words.  (Cat in a hat with a bat, etc.)

 

These icons below all have two rhyming words each (well, maybe not the fairy).

  

And then one more big hodge podge.

Magazine covers

Both of these covers were for the same tween-focused magazine; they were printed one on each side like a flip book.

The sketching process on this project was interesting since originally there were two totally different designs, seen below. After these the company decided to have me go in a different direction, and the result of that is seen in the covers above.

For the boy cover, I did the initial sketch and then was asked to age the boys up a bit, which you'll see in the second sketch.





For the girl cover, the sketches went through four phases of aging the girls upward. Pretty interesting exercise in taking the same characters and trying to make them older while retaining their same design and identity.

Vector dog

Pinewood story test

Video last updated 2/21/11 5:20 pm

I've started working on a second story test with humans to balance out the previous Dipsy Dunkaroo one which was all animals. I got a lot of great notes from some buddies in the industry on the Dipsy test, which I'll go back and tweak according to their notes when I finish this Pinewood test. I've got a lot of work to do on this still, but I wanted to go ahead and post online this first little bit.

Again: I have no intention on becoming an editor. It's just easier to show a story rell that's all put together than posting still drawings.

Anyways, just wanted to get the little I've got done up to show!

Jaybird turnarounds

Finally took advantage of the bright sunlight today and took turnaround pictures of Jay.

Jaybird is here!

I got a UPS package at my door from China--the final production plush of our melancholy Jaybird! These are going to be sold with the patent-pending pajamas by EscaPeeJays and should be available in a couple of months. It turned out better than I could have expected! I've done tons and tons of plush design in the past for VeggieTales, and sometimes it would turn out okay and many times not. However, the Jaybird looks outstanding.

Better pictures soon!

Jaybird plush

This has been a long time in the works, but it looks like the plush we've been creating for EscaPeeJays is almost done. I designed the character last November, and did the turnaround drawings for the plush (below) in January of this year. I'm supposed to be getting final samples in the mail soon, but it looks like they're already advertising Jay on the EscaPeeJays website. It really turned out great--very exciting!

Directory of Illustration ad

I decided to advertise in the 2011 Directory of Illustration, and this is the ad I created for it. Basically, I already had the Ant piece, and I liked the way it bled off the page, and so I wanted the rest of the art I was going to put on it to do the same thing. that's why I created the Superhero Family piece and the Animal Basketball piece, to fit on this page.

The Directory is this really heavy hardcover book with glossy pages and around 600 illustrators participate each year. The book gets sent to ad agencies and other places all over the world. There used to be competing directory companies but I think the DOI is the last man standing at this point. I'm excited for the clients I hope this ad will bring!

Fish book color

Had some time so I colored this piece. Original post for this is here.

Animal Basketball

Another self-promotion piece. I thought it would be funny to see the small animals have to take on the giant ones.

Superhero family

Here's a self-promotion piece I just finished. I wanted to do a "superhero" piece that wasn't exactly a piece of fanboy art, but something that could have a subtext of sorts. I also wanted to do a man, woman, teen, child, and dog. In the end it seems to be about a superdad's irritation/expectations of his family, I think. But my only reason I did this was to have a superhero piece with a fully drawn city in the background.

Anyways, below is the uncropped version of the art.



Then the city by itself. I had to create it separately and then put the characters over top. If I hadn't built the piece this way I would have gotten lost figuring out where everything was--too many details to keep track of.



Last, the original inks.

Circus book

The last book in the series is done! Whew...vector work doesn't go quickly. 20 illustrations in this book.

Fish book

Here's some of the art for the third book. There were 20 illustrations for this one. All art is vector, like the other books.

Owl book

Just finished the second in a series of four activity books--the first being the astronaut/space-themed book I posted about a couple of weeks ago. This owl book has 19 individual poses and two big scenes. Colored art above is mine--it'll probably be colored a little differently by someone else for the book. Original vector art is below.

Character designs

Ideas for modern model-looking cavepeople, a test I did to see how well I could draw straight into my Cintiq.

Chef Brothers

This is a logo for a private catering company. The owner wanted a logo that represented his two sons, and the graphic designer gave me a quick sketch to work from, seen below.



I then did my version of that, and the final vector version followed this sketch closely.