Old Stuff

I worked at the local newspaper for seven years. Seven lonnnng, soul crushing years, that seemed more like decades. The deadlines were grueling and brutal, but it turned out to be great training. If you can design a full page newspaper ad in two hours with a press foreman standing behind you, arms folded and waiting for you to finish, then you can handle pretty much anything a client can throw at you.

Occasionally I would need some art or a character for an ad, and most times I found it was quicker for me to just draw what I needed rather than search through endless pages of clip art for a couple of hours and still not find what I was looking for.

So here's some of the art I did during my time at the newspaper.

Turkey Bowler. This was for, not surprisingly, a Thanksgiving ad.

When I first started at the paper I would always draw the characters in pencil, then carefully ink them with a pen, erase the pencil lines, then scan them and add color & shading in Photoshop.

Then one day I didn't have time for inking and I just scanned the pencils directly. I liked the look and began doing it that way from then on, as seen here. I got pretty much the same result and it saved a lot of time.

I think the bowling ball came out a little too light, but whaddya gonna do?

For some reason this is THE all-time champion most-viewed illustration on my Flickr site. At the time of this writing it's at 1,950 views and counting. I don't quite understand why, but I'm glad everyone enjoys it.

By the way, this was for a"Turkey Bowl" promotion that a local car dealer was having at Thanksgiving. They set up a small makeshift bowling alley in their showroom and urged customers to bowl with actual frozen turkeys (not live ones, so settle down, PETA people!). If you got a strike you won a prize. Luckily they were only bowling with the turkeys, not dropping them from a helicopter.

Vacation Santa. This was for a Christmas in July auto ad. EVERY summer, EVERY auto dealer in town would run a "Christmas in July" ad, and EVERY one thought they were the first who thought of it.

Drawn in pencil, scanned & colored in Photoshop.

No Bull Sale. One of the local auto dealers wanted a "No Bull Sale" ad, featuring a bull inside an "anti" symbol (you know, red circle with diagonal slash in the middle).

Drawing the bull was simple, but the diagonal line was trouble. If I drew the line over the bull, then it blocked his face. If you put the bull in front of the line, then you couldn't see it. The client eventually said to get rid of the line altogether. So now the whole thing makes no sense. Why's the bull in a red circle? Who knows? Even the bull doesn't know; see how he's shrugging?

This is the kind of thing you can't let get to you if you're going to be a designer.

Drawn in pencil, scanned & colored in Photoshop.

Cowboy. A character I drew for some Western-themed auto ad. I think he was "branding" cars with low prices or something like that.

Penciled, scanned into Photoshop where color and shading was added.