Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on an exciting new print project for an ERA404 client. While I can’t really discuss the nature of the project, yet, I can say that part of this work entails me completing about a dozen sketches for the final book, along with designing its 52 pages. This is the fourth time that I’ve been hired to do illustration for clients, and the most demanding. The sketches are of famous scenes and landmarks from around the world; the taj mahal on the left is just one of them. Each one is pencil-sketched, inked with thin and thick sharpies, drawn over with carbon pencils, and “water colored” with diluted black ink. They’re then scanned and overlaid on old tea-stained sheets of paper (coffee works too!).

Updated: March 27, 2007 – Illustrations Now Online!
>> See the Illustrations

In the past, I’ve illustrated for some pretty fun clients. My first illustration work was for a survivor promo. My client was CreativeGroup.TV, a boutique post production facility in New York. The sketches were of tribesmen eating, dancing around a fire and playing around, which were used on a 3D book describing “The Rules of Survivor” in the broadcasted ad.

My second illustration work was for The Electronic Theatre’s “An English Mystery” graphic open, which you can see in my portfolio, here (Here’s a link to the video itself). The 12 illustrations were various faux-lithographs of mystery-like objects (victrolas, magnifying glasses, absenthe bottles, daggers, etc.). These were then manually-erased, saved, stacked, imported and edited backwards to look as though they were drawn in front of the swooping camera. A fun forum sprang up about this work and you can read posters’ thoughts, here.

The third illustration work I created was for the “Target Benchmarks Central Park” event at Christie’s Auction House, in the Rockefeller Center. This consisted of twelve 10-foot by 10-foot Japanese-style illustrations of various iconic scenes in Central Park (Bethesda Terrace, The Central Park Zoo, The Harlem Meer, etc.), painted in black on giant sheets of paper. The event was designed by Phoenix Event Productions (then RANDM) as an Alice-in-Wonderland stroll through an open sketchbook. Target Corporation got a number of celebrities to “design” park benches to be auctioned off at Christie’s. Notably, a number of the illustrations were also bid on and sold at this event and all the proceeds helped in the charity. You can see those illustrations, here, too.

Weird that I seem to be hired to do sketches a dozen at a time…Anyway, I feel excited that I can use one of my hobbies (sketching) in my career as a graphic designer.