Hans Holbein and me

My friend and fellow caricaturist Phil Herman emailed me a photo of me from a party we were working at together (we were instructed to wear berets, not my idea). The photo gave me a flashback from art history class of Hans Holbein's painting of Thomas More. So, I found the painting online, and created a morphed image of the two of us. The most remarkable thing is that me and old Tom have the same squiggly mouth.

This guy has no sense of scale!

It's always a challenge to decide which pieces to feature in your portfolio. I was proud of this illustration. When I'm working in this style I aspire to be a second rate Norman Rockwell, but I was really pleased with how the characters came out in this piece. I featured it on my website, I put it on a promo card.

After it was circulating for years I had two different people tell me they didn't think I had a grasp of human proportion, that the man is too big in relation to the kids. Well, duh, I thought, he's A GIANT! The book is Giants Don't Go Snowboarding! But, when I display the piece I usually show it without the type, so how would anybody know that? Another problem is that he is just a little bit bigger than is probably possible. Since its a Bailey School Kids Book, one of the underlying premises is that this character might possibly be an oversized human rather than a giant, so I can't go too extreme.

So, if I had made him 20 feet tall, people would have known he's obviously a giant, if he was 7 feet tall, they would think he's a large human. As it is, I look like I have no sense of scale!

Blast from the Past

I thought it might be fun to periodically post some of my favorite illustrations from over the years with a brief explanation. This was a cover for a book of Sci-Fi Fantasy stories entitled "Betcha Can't Read Just One". This also is the only time in my 25 year career that the book company lost my art. Ace Berkeley used to commission a lot of fantastic cover illustrations, so I guess its a compliment that mine was the only one that disappeared from their office. That's one thing good about illustrating in the digital age, there is no original. Nowadays illustrations only exists as files.