Drawing in Church- Christmas Edition

A recent drawing from the pew, (with some additional time on the desk at home.) Merry Christmas!

Video Game of the Year

For Entertainment Weekly's end of the year wrap-up, I was asked to do the drawing for the Best Video Game of the Year- UNCHARTED 2! (I had never heard of it.)

For all the D&D I played as a kid, I haven't invested into the first-person shooter video games- though I have a kind of admiration for them. My video game of choice as a 12 year-old dork was "The Legend of Zelda." So, I had to do some extensive visual research, as this game bills itself as a kind of hyper-real Indiana Jones-esque shoot'em-up. (No, I wasn't able to convince them they should buy me a PS3 for authenticity.)



A few alternate ideas that I sent- along with the final sketch.




The final sketch took an unusually long time to resolve. In drawings of this kind, it is a lot like assembling a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and for hours it seemed I was missing all the center pieces, resnapping the edge pieces together again and again.



One of my favorite passages from this drawing-


Probably 95% of my drawings are done on one sheet of board with minmal Photoshop surgery... but this piece was a bit different. It really wanted to approach it a bit more graphically - here are a collection of some of the parts of this image.



I even got my beautiful bride to pose with my son's Nerf gun. I really get so little chance to draw this kind of old fashioned '15 year-old's notebook' drawing with evil henchmen and Beretta hand guns, etc.- I tried to enjoy it!

The Info-Wheel

Kenyon College called me to do a cover about Kenyon trivia for their Alumni Magazine. I used the chance to finally create an homage to the wonderful book collection of informational wheel charts 'Reinventing the Wheel' by Jessica Hefland. In many ways, these kind of projects really function as design much more than illustration. An example of how difficult it is in today's visual landscape to divide image-making from design thinking.



The cover above is shown without the masthead and all the headline copy. I also did four two color spots for the interior as well...