What I Did On My Vacation

Recently, I was in Texas and New Mexico for a 5 day vacation. Just before I left I got a call from a senior manager at Scholastic who asked me if I would do some sketches for an internal presentation. They liked the quality of the sketches I had done for previous jobs (which I then went on to finish and color) and requested that these be done as sketches. Great! I knew I could fit in some work while I was away; what I didn't realize was just how many sketches there would be! It turned out that there were 4 pages of progressions (which they had sketched out very basically with stick figures) which illustrated how a certain segment offers important benefits to Scholastic.

So I started out with simple sketches with a ballpoint pen in my sketchbook (usually in the hotel room while my son napped) like this:

Which I then redrew with a nicer drawing pen:

When I returned to Boston I arranged the separate illustrations on the page and added halftones:

Another page:

A detail from the page above:

I was very happy with how they turned out.

Just before I got on the plane to Texas, I was asked if I could work on a sketched-out logo (same style) for their segment as well. The concept was Entrepreneurial ideas/Innovation and to include the words and phrases you see below. My client's wish was to avoid using the lightbulb cliche as a symbol of innovation, so I  created a futuristic-looking device that is (pardon the pun) light years ahead of the bulb.

Well, I can't even tell you how much I enjoyed creating these illustrations and logo. The fun of my job is finding creative ways to express ideas and I got to do just that! And Scholastic was very happy with the work. I even got to draw an Ed version of Clifford for one of the pages!

 

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