Featured project
in Illustrations, Layouts, Portfolio, Uncategorized
Over the past couple years with The Dallas Morning News, I’ve been exploring different techniques with some of my centerpiece illustrations. Mainly, I’ve been looking for a way to simply what I was trying to do earlier in my career while at the same time still creating an image that was bold enough to carry the page as main art.
In the last week, I’ve worked up two illustrations that I feel embody what has become my style, if in fact I have a style. It’s a heavy reliance on bold, bright colors, high-contrast images, thick layering of textures and a liberal use of blend modes.
I was very pleased with the way the Playoff Quarterbacks piece came out. It ran as the centerpiece art with a column by Rick Gosselin on the transformation on playoff teams relying on big-game quarterbacks rather than stout defenses. He proposed that only five teams in the NFL playoffs had quarterbacks that were capable of carrying their teams: Aaron Rodgers, Eli Manning, Tim Tebow, Drew Brees and Tom Brady, and those were the images I used to build the idea around.
The image is created from the five quarterback images, a layer of color (the gold); two texture layers (one a gritty concrete, the other a soft, paper-like texture); a layer of graininess that was created from a flat gray color that had a noise filter applied to it; an image of Lambeau Field in the background to give some visual base to the players; and a couple low-opacity shapes to create some movement.
The Sabin piece follows the formula above pretty closely: image of Sabin laid over a rich color layer (red); a mix of of a couple grungy textures combined through blend modes; and an alternate Alabama logo behind Sabin. I really like the way Sabin and the elephant logo engage the viewer with their eyes and feel that it serves to help draw the reader in. The white box was added in to make sure there were no legibility issues with the type, as our press does not mix small, sans-serif black type over colors very well, nor does it allow for much reverse type due to ink saturation.
View Project
A set of five desktop and ipad wallpapers featuring Dallas Cowboys players and the 2011 schedule created for SportsDayDFW.com, the website for the sports section of The Dallas Morning News.
Centerpiece illustration for a Dallas Morning News SportsDay story looking at Highland Park-ex and current Los Angeles Dodger Clayton Kershaw and his chances of making his first all-star game.
Four pages (three gameday covers and one preview) for the Mavericks championship run through the 2011 NBA Finals.
Centerpiece illustration for Evan Grant column on why Cliff Lee chose to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies after leading the Rangers on a World Series run in 2010.
View my full portfolio