American Illustration 29

I'm extremely honored to hear that I got these 2 illustrations accepted into the American Illustration 29 annual. The top one is titled "Miscellaneous TV Outerwear", and it was made for the group show Idiot Box at Gallery 1988 in LA. You can see my original post about that show here. The other one was done for Amtrak's Arrive Magazine back in October. You can see info, spots, and sketches here.

Thanks so much to the AI jury for being awesome and hooking me up with this great honor. I have been denied plenty of times in the past, so it's great to see that sometimes the effort (and $ spent) does eventually pay off..

Arrive Magazine Illustrations

Last week I worked on these 3 illustrations for Amtrak's Arrive Magazine. The article's headline is "You can go your own way", and the subhead reads "The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in these hard economic times." For the opener illustration, I wanted to come up with a metaphor that tied in with this. I thought that the visual pun of swerving headlights could suggest that entrepreneurs are thinking ahead and avoiding disasters when they seem imminent. The 1st spot illustration (with the butterflies) will be in a section that discusses how to get the word out about your (the entrepreneur's) product or service. And the 2nd spot (with the horse) will accompany one of the sidebar sections – "Are you running away from something or running toward something?" If you ride on Amtrak's Acela line in December/January, be sure to flip through the mag to check these out!

I included my sketches below. For the opener, I was actually kind of hoping they'd pick the sketch of the guy on the stilts avoiding the bear traps.. but it in the end I think the one they picked works better. That 3rd one shows a beaver making a dam out of all the "For Sale" signs out there (doing something constructive in a bad situation). As for that 3rd spot sketch, it would have been for the sidebar section titled "Can you sell your vision?" I think I was channeling Magritte a bit on that one..