The Journey of the Ant

Last month I had the opportunity to create an Image that will become the visual portion of the label that will be applied to an Insect repellent used to control the local Ant population. The idea was to create an image of a single ant that looked a little scary, but wasn't in the Monster Horror movie imagery. The first stage was rough pencils, shown below.





One of the three ideas was selected, and a final pencil was scanned and emailed for approval....



The next step was to create a full color rendering, which I did using traditional tools and water based mediums on a watercolor board surface. The original artwork was approximately 9 X 12 inches. I made a quick trip to the clients office and delivered the end product.



Apparently, what i didn't know was that the line of products that this client manufactured had a very specific "DIGITAL"
style to all of their Illustrations. Of course, my traditional look stood out in contrast to what was being done by other artists.
Soooooo.... the next phase was to go back to the studio and crank up the "ol computer, and see what I could do to tweek the ant artwork, and make it look like it belonged to the other digital style that was on the product line.
Without having to start over, I scanned my image, took it into Photoshop, and after some serious layering and some slick blending and editing the final result, below, is what was then re-delivered to the client with happy results. Check it out!

Martin Luther King Art

It's been a while since I've been able to focus on posting new info and images on my Blog. Due to finalizing the last few weeks of the spring semester, and gearing up for summer school, plus whatever work has come my way in May and June, I just haven't found the time to do any posting.Here is an image that I did recently to honor the Reverend Dr. Martin luthert King Jr.on
the anniversary of his birth date.

The original image, shown here was done in color, and then had to be scanned, and converted to ablack and white image to be published in the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. Here is the same image as it appeared in the Post-dispatch article. Dan Martin was the Art Director on this project. He's a long time friend and fellow Illustrator. A fast turn around, but that's normal for the Newspaper industry.