Children’s Book for Goldfish Swim Schools

Goldfish Swim Schools hired me to illustrate another children’s book featuring their cast of mascot characters. Here’s a couple of sample pages:

Bubbles and Friends’ Golden Adventure is not available to order on line but it is available to purchase in the gift shot at select Goldfish Swim School locations.

Musicologie Mascot

Musicologie is a music school headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. They hired me to design a fun cartoon mascot inspired by the bird in their existing logo:

I started with some VERY rough thumbnail doodles, messing around with a bunch of shapes and proportions. Some turned out better than others but that’s how every creative process starts:

The client asked me to stay closer to the shape and proportions of the bird in their logo. I did another round of exploratory thumbnails, this time adding color:

The client really liked the body shape in “PP”. However, with the big head + tiny pointed tail + upside-down tear drop shaped body + the shade of blue, I felt it was starting to feel a lot like a cartoon version of the Twitter logo. Which would look derivative. Also, Twitter has a negative brand association in some people’s minds. Many think of it as a place for arguments and fights and ranting. So I tried adding some stylization to the wings and feathers to help differentiate it from the Twitter bird:

The client liked PP2 but asked me to try exploring more options for the eyes:

Here’s the final design, rendered as vector art:

Learn how a mascot can benefit your business:

Polaris ATV Activity Book

Last year the Six Speed marketing agency in Minneapolis hired me to illustrate a children’s activity book to promote Polaris snowmobiles. This summer they hired me again to do one promoting their ATV’s.

Here’s a few of the finished pages:

Sketchbook: World War I Soldier

A while back I watched Peter Jackson’s excellent documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old”. It made me realize soldiers in WWI don’t get enough credit. Soldiers from World War II get tons of movies and books and accolades, and rightly so. But the soldiers from the previous war were just as heroic, and in some ways suffered worse. Trenches were cold and disgusting and full of disease and downright awful. So, I thought I’d take a crack at drawing a tough looking soldier from “the Great War”.

(Also, there was a lot of pipe smoking during WWI which I think always looks cool.)

The Great Exchange (Animated)

This is so cool! I occasionally make Christian webcomics and post them over at NarrowRoadComics.com. A professional animator named Jezreel Carlos took one of my most popular webcomics and made an animated version. The audio is AI generated but he animated the visuals himself, and did a great job!

You can follow Jezreel on LinkedIn.