Two good friends of mine are planning a wedding in the fall and asked if I might be interested in making some illustrations for their invitations. Needless to say I jumped at the chance.

The wedding is planned for an outdoor setting so they asked if I could put together something with birds, squirrels, trees, and the like, so my first stop was the natural history museum to sketch the stuffed creatures.

Turns out there weren’t many squirrels at the museum, but there were a ton of birds. These sketches were fun, but for the invite the couple asked if I could make something sketchy and whimsical, so I played around a bit with different ways to abstract bird and squirrel shapes.

Along with the critters I needed somewhere to put them so I started playing with some different forest ideas. I really liked this idea of the bride and groom riding giant animals but it’s a little over the top for a wedding invite. Maybe I’ll save it for something else.

I was thinking about different ways to portray the forest: light and airy, dense and thick, tall trees, small trees, etc. It got me thinking about some images Luc Desmarchelier posted to his blog a while back when he was doing concept work for Open Season. I took a few cues from his use of hatching to create layers of foliage and thick underbrush. In the end though I think most of this was too thick for what I needed.

When we first talked my friends asked for something sketchy looking in pencil, probably without any color. Even so I decided to do some color experimentation just to see if it would generate anything interesting. Most of it wasn’t but the exercise was fun.

Really like this one with the two trees. I think I’m going to make it into a card for another occasion.

Back to the pencil stuff. I decided it might be interesting to think about different perspectives on the trees, such as looking up through them, or from low down or cropped tightly in the thick of branches.

Weather was finally looking up at this point so I took the camera out in the yard and took some shots of leaves and branches just to have something to look at.

Starting to close in on some ideas now.

I’ll post more when things are finished.

The last of the concept designs for this training material. For this one I was given free reign to try come up with whatever I could. Given the look of the other two I decided something completely different was in order, so I got out the pencils and just went for it.

The concept for this one centers on this little crab character, a charming but hapless hacker. Each of his exploits provide an example of a common attack strategy of real-world computer criminal including here: network monitoring, social engineering (as in disguises!), and dumpster diving.

If you’ve ever seen the movie American Psycho then you know how important a business card can be. Crisp letting, off white, thick textured paper stock, even a watermark. Not all of us can afford the trappings of power like that.  Some of us have to make our own.

Here’s the front of my card:

And this was the original back (minus the contact information):

I liked this idea, but the image had some issues trying to be light enough to represent a pencil test but dark enough to show up on the card.  Plus it didn’t leave much room for the contact info, so I took another run at things in gouache.

This is the back I ended up using, cropped tightly in around the character with contact info to his right.

With the senior show fast approaching I’ve been working the past few weeks on logos and other identity and personal branding items. The general rule for branding is usually to be as consistent and unified as possible, which is of course very good advice, and also very boring. I’ve tried to work along a few themes but I’m having too much fun to stick with a single thing.

If you’ve been to my portfolio site (you have been to my portfolio site, right?), then you’ve probably seen my alsoalso circle logo.

This text logo is great, but I’m an illustrator after all, so I wanted something a little more image based. I found this bulbous little umbrella character in my sketchbook.

Based on this little guy I tried a few referencing the alsoalso logo.

Since umbrellas have been such a big theme in things so far, I need some clouds too.

So far this ink and dashed line aesthetic has proven to be pretty flexible. I made these signs for my senior show display.

Some vehicles based on insect forms.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could ride to school in a giant beetle?

Cicada hippy buses.

Snailing ships.

Hot air ticks.

Some swanky space ships for Buck Rogers and his friends.

Buck Rogers

Wilma Deering

and Killer Kane

The beginnings of character designs for a re-imagining of Buck Rogers. Setting the 70′s TV show aside for the moment I’m focusing on the characters from the original radio and movie serials from the 1920′s. I’m focusing on 3 characters, Buck, his female side kick Wilma Deering, and their evil nemesis Killer Kane.

Just for fun I’m making all of the characters based on animals. First up is Buck based on a bird.

Next is Wilma who I decided to make a pig.

And finally Killer Kane. Goat seemed appropriately evil.

I really liked this sort of long Kiwi beak idea.

And for whatever reason, the smaller I made Wilma the pig, the funnier and tougher she looked.

Kane was a bit of a challenge because his character in the original series is rather vague. I tried evil space man, evil scientist, evil business man, et cetera.

Why don’t super villains ever have photos of their childhoods hanging in their evil lairs? I know it kind of clashes with the antiseptic quasi-futuristic decor, and it just provides fodder for the hero’s witty retorts, but come on. It’s important to remember where you came from.

For this project I’m looking in to the childhoods of famous super villains. Here are a few of the early concept sketches (remember to click through for bigger images).

I was toying with a few different villains at this point. The Penguin from Batman in the upper left, Lizzy Borden, and that Ernst Blowfeld from the James Bond movies on the bottom.

Eventually I settled on the Penguin. I think he’s one of my favorite villains of all time. And not just because he has a top hat, umbrella, and monocle (though that defiantly helps).

A lot of fun ideas bounced around on this one, but I think it’s important to stick to the basics of supervillainy, and there’s nothing more basic to the supervillain’s kit than his minions.

With winking apologies to E. H. Shepard, Disney, Charles Shultz, Hanna-Barbera, Ikuko Shimizu, Pillsbury, and Theodor Geisel.

Try this, got to Wolfram Alpha and type your first name into the search box.  What comes back will be the statistical breakdown of the popularity of your name (at least in the US).

I won’t put my name here, but I can tell you a little about it. The year I was born the name I was given, one of those traditional biblical names, was also given to 50,163 other people in the United States, or so says Wolfram Alpha. That earned my name a ranking of 3rd most popular name over all that year, a named shared by roughly 1 is every 37 people. My name has been popular for quite some time, there are roughly 1.422 million of us in the US, but it just so happens that I was given this name at about it’s peak in popularity, so a sizable number of the people sharing my name are also about my age. I meet them all the time, you have no idea.

The point to take away from this is that my name is far from unique. Something that, in the age of domain names, presents certain problems. Rather than go by my name then, I’ve spent the last few years inventing different monickers to use as user names whenever the need arises. That’s where the name “also” came from.  For whatever reason the user name “also” was rarely taken.  This is less so today, but when it’s not available, “alsoalso” always is. That’s why I’ll be using the company name “alsoalso” for my burgeoning business.

As baby names go, “also” is pretty rotten, but from a designers perspective it has a lot going for it.  ”A” is a great letter.  Repetition is always fun. The word itself is short and punchy. A good brand.