Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Several months back I was hired to do a cover for the Nashville City Paper. It's a long story, but the short version goes there was a bit of a mixup with the schedule and as it turns out I had to turn around the entire cover in just about seven hours. This is far and away the shortest time I've ever had to do a cover for any publication and on top of that there was surprisingly little photo reference to be had of the people I had to paint. I finished on time, but I wasn't really happy with the result, but at the time I figured at least it was done and that's what mattered. The story, incidentally, had to do with a crazy contract/real estate deal involving three former Kansas City Royals, Dan Quisenberry, George Brett and Willie Wilson. Today the AD from The City Paper realized he never sent me a copy of the cover to show me how the final layout turned out. I have to admit, seeing it now months later, I like how it turned out better than I did before.

Lord Alan Sugar

This is a cover illustration I did for a new U.K. iPad-only publication called The Browser. This is Lord Alan Sugar, host of the British version of The Apprentice. This is my preferred version of the cover, which is slightly different from what will actually appear.

New York Observer Cover

Here's my latest NY Observer cover. This was an ultra-rush for the magazine, so I had to pull out a bunch of time-saving tricks in order to get it done on time. The basic premise behind this illustration involved a series of editorial shake-ups at Conde Nast publishing over trouble they've had launching their iPad versions of their magazines. The idea was to show their art director as an app on the tablet behind deleted by the Conde Nast publisher. The pad and the icons are fully illustrated vector objects created in Adobe Illustrator and the hands are painted in Photoshop. This cover was especially bittersweet because it was the very last cover by the awesome Design Director Ivy Simones, who has moved on to another job with another publication. Ivy will be missed.

New York Observer Cover

I got to do another cover illustration for the ever-awesome Ivy Simones at the New York Observer. This is for their Gay Power List issue. From left to right are New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, movie producer Scott Rudin, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and fashion designer Marc Jacobs. I had a little more time than usual on this cover, so I really had time to focus on the likenesses and some of the fine details of each of their individual features.

New York Observer cover

I was extremely honored to be able to a cover recently for The New York Observer. For years, The Observer has published covers by some of the finest illustrators in the world. It's like the Justice League of Illustration: Drew Friedman! Victor Juhasz! Philip Burke! Edel Rodriguez! Robert Grossman! Barry Blitt! Jason Seiler! Dale Stephanos! And the list goes on and on. I'm humbled to be in such company (although I think it makes me more the Gleek the purple monkey of this particular group of Superfriends). Design Director Ivy Simones was awesome to work with (as well as being one heckuva designer). The cover is of SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro. The article is highly critical of the job Ms. Schapiro's been doing, but the thing that struck me about the article was despite the growing criticism, everyone seems to still like her. That made me think there must be something about this Mary woman, which led me to doing this parody of the poster for the movie "There's Something About Mary".