oh, it's SCIENCE!

As I was gathering together images for my portfolio I realized that I have had unique opportunities in my line of work that most people do not get to have. I have been able to research, illustrate, and add effects to either my art or Judith Hunt's art to make it appealing to children and parents alike. Work can be a challenge at times with looming deadlines but being paid to learn something new either from my software or from our research is incredible.

No day is boring and no deadline too tough...Yet.

Some science textbook images for a series I worked on for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt back in 2007-2008.

A Porbeagle Shark (Lamna nasus) and it's skin texture for Treasure Bay's newest book Marvelous Sharks! Doing the research for this book was almost as fun a working in the digital effects.

An antique map done digitally

The studio got a couple of large assignments in over the last several months and my job has been the completion of digital maps and old documents. Here the art director gave me a sketch of what she wanted and I completed the digital work ...matching or adding lettering, parchment look, edging, and application of altered old (original) map...for the illustration.

Logos, Logos, and more logos!

A grouping of just some of the logos I've done. I used both Illustrator and Photoshop for developing them.

My process is to find a great font and then play, play, play with it til it looks right.

Dinosaur Farm is my favorite as it involves a bit of texture which made the font "pop". It also described well with the graphic novel which was about a dirty messy planet full of ravenous dinosaurs.

DVD cover of Colossus: The Forbin Project

I've always have a soft spot for god-like supercomputers threatening to end all of man-kind in a fiery rain of nuclear annihilation. Which makes Colossus: The Forbin Project one of my all time favorite movies.

Unfortunately, Universal Studios didn't share in my enthusiasm when they released Colossus on DVD with this cover:

Gah!, besides the much over used "giant head" cover design, the movie studio released the DVD only in dreaded pan & scan.

Being the movie connoisseur that I am, I hunted down a laser disc copy of Colossus (in wide screen format) and transferred it to DVD.

And then I had fun giving it the cover it deserved!

XMas Cookie Tin Label

A totally different but fun job came into the studio that made my day. A design was required for weird gingerbread cookies for holiday gift tins; the "bizarro cookies" inside required a fun label. The wacky label is what I came up with late at night, but on deadline.... to adorned the tops of the cookie tins.

That's me, as the insane Professor Pfeffernusse from a photo that was distorted in Photoshop.

The client's sample cookies by the way tasted great despite their disconcerting extra arms, legs and 8 eyes.

Dust Jacket Design

Prunes and Rupe by Lydia Griffin & Judith Hunt
Published by Filter Press

My first picturebook pre-press job from beginning to end. This was the dust jacket design. Required font manipulation, pantone colors being chosen, vector work using permission free Victorian designs put out by Dover Publications. The designs may be free, but you have to clean them up! Then I had to change them to fit the back cover illustration of the stack of pancakes.

I designed the back cover and the 1900's western style title lettering to convey both the time period and West ....the story was about a miner and his burro in the small town of Fairplay in 1900's Colorado.

This was a fun job fitting it all together, getting the images just right, playing with font manipulation and shading, resizing a portion of an interior illustration for the story summary flap, working with the illustrators' and author's images...and finally making the publisher's logo fit on the very tiny spine without disappearing.

Krill

An illustration I did digitally of krill and water texture for the book, Whales by Leslie MacGuire. Krill are really small shrimp like critters, they make whale food. Judith Hunt illustrated the hand to help with size comparison.