Portraits From the Third (and final) Debate

Portraits from last night's presidential debates. 

Trump was drawn with a ball point pen and Clinton was drawn with a Faber Castell PITT pen (shown in the photo). Tones were added later in Photoshop.

A Kiss for the New Year

This is an illustration I recently created for a client's blog and newsletter. One of their articles talked about the Hershey's Kisses that the company's clients couldn't keep their hands off during the New Year's party so it was a no-brainer what the illustration should be!

This style is a little more realistic than my usual so it falls under the "FRED" section of my website.

2 (Cool) Old Guys

I decided to put myself through an exercise today: Design a poster that makes these old guys cool.

My motivation was to keep things fresh while also updating my website (this will go in the 'design' section under 'posters'). Yeah, I used some popular conventions in the design (the style of the photo, edgy type) but I hope you will agree that I made the design my own with the concept.

First, I decided that these guys should be in a band, and what better name for a band than going with exactly what they are? It helps that they are dressed hip (certainly better than I was dressed when I shot the photo in Boston. I recall a pair of flip flops.). Then I gave them a venue and a couple of performance dates. (If you took a few minutes to Google the venue you would find out that it's an assisted living community where the median age is 80. Just having fun!)

I considered putting something about the type of music they play but decided against it- leaving this out suggests that if you were cool you would already know what they play.

Portrait for Twitter and Facebook

Cindy Bernat is a successful real estate agent in NYC who decided she wanted to shake things up a little bit, which, during a down economy and terrible housing market, isn't such a bad idea. So she contacted me to illustrate her portrait for use on her Twitter and Facebook accounts (with a revamp to her email signature).

I worked from a photo she supplied me to create the portrait, then we discussed what the background might look like. My first pass (see below) was a background comprised of random New York buildings.
Cindy felt that the buildings were too non-specific and the feel was of an area of NY that she doesn't represent. She also wanted to be wearing a white shirt with a collar and a more straight-forward necklace. She provided me with some thoughts of what she wanted in her background and I began to work on it.

And then I pulled it all together, adding color but keeping the buildings a gray tone so they wouldn't compete with the portrait.
Finally, as you'll see in the final image at the top of this post, we added the 'SOLD' sign and pulled her collar out to overlap her jacket (she knows fashion much better than I do!). And the image is complete.

If you want to see her new image in action, Cindy can be found at www.twitter.com/cindybernat

French Windows

A bit of a departure from my usual 'ED' (cartoon-y) stuff, this photo-realistic 'FRED' image based on a photo I took in Paris is one I've been working on for quite some time. I'll open up the file from time to time and just work on bits until I get distracted and put it away for another time.

I really like the yellow-ish color of the building and how the areas where the sun hits get bleached of any color. Someday I'll finish it up...