The Nation, Spring Books

The cover of The Nation's spring books issue doubles as an illustration for the lead story about "Literary Evolution" by William Deresiewicz. The editor and I decided that it would be good to poke some fun at the notion that reading, or art, is an extension of biological evolution. I wanted to give the illustration a vintage feel, as if this were something out of a science text book. I did the type by hand to loosen it up and make it less mechanical. Click on the image to get a closer look at the figures.
I also did a piece for an interior story of this issue called "The Kundera Conundrum" written by Jana Prikryl, which takes a look at the controversy around Milan Kundera's possible involvement in informing the Czech communist regime in the 60's about a suspicious fellow student.
Editor: John Palattella

Summer Sketchbooks

I wrote a lengthy post on the Illustration Academy blog about keeping a sketchbook. If you'd like to read it, click here. Hope you enjoy it!

Sites Updated

My editorial page is updated with a lot of new work and a tweaked design with larger images. I hope you enjoy looking around! Thanks again to Alec for helping me out.
ALSO! The illustration academy is only a month away, it gets going Monday, June 1. I'll be teaching there again full time this Summer with a line-up of great artists, including Mark English, John English, Jon Foster, Sterling Hundley, George Pratt, Brent Watkinson and MANY OTHERS (Gary Kelly, C.F. Payne, Anita Kunz, Robert Meganck, Natalie Ascensios, Barron Storey, Sam Weber, Ed Kinsella...plus scores of amazing, hard-working students. That about does it for the line-up!). It's not too late to sign up if you are looking for a heavy dose of inspiration and knowledge. Take a look at their new site, it was just launched a couple weeks ago. The academy blog is also now active, that will be one to keep up with.

True Crime

This was done for a review in The Nation titled "There will Always Be Blood" which discusses the book "True Crime: An American Anthology". Like the last post, this one also needed diverse sources to reflect the range of material in the anthology. The idea was to use different distinct styles to evoke separate time periods. If they had mugshots in the 15th-18th centuries, maybe they would have looked like this. Each is pieced together with my own drawings and different print material, except the last shot- that man was executed for murder in the 70's, in Indiana. For the bloody fingerprints I dipped my finger in oil paint and colorized them digitally.
Editor: John Palattella

Lincoln Anthology

This one for The Nation accompanies a review of the new “Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy From 1860 to Now.” The book is huge at over a 1000 pages, representing Lincoln through many different lenses. The idea for the illustration was to create a single composite image from many sources to reflect the diversity of the anthology. I tried to use as many different styles in the piece as possible, photo, line, paint, graphic shapes, 3D, anything that would add to the impression of diversity.