Category Archives: Uncategorized

Some sketches culled from the past few months:

My try at being John Romita, Sr. (A fantastic Spidey artist in the '60's and '70's)

An exercise in surreality from the sketchbook

A depiction of a "Cap Drop" from Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers."

 

For a few months now, I’ve been contributing one-page comics to this rad online magazine called BLEEP, which covers creative culture in NY, LA, Texas, and so on. There’s a pretty dedicated set of Baylor Alumni that make up the staff, so I’m thankful for the opportunity to work in good company!

Here’s a rough draft of this month’s submission:

The whole things’s finished and colored in the latest issue, which just released TODAY. Check it out (along with a bevy of pretty great articles) here:

Don't be put off by the shirtless dude. I'm sure it's a New York thing.

A few odds and ends from the past two weeks at StoneBridge!

Final look for our new sermon series. Handwriting is my wife's.

Some logos for a new Bible study on John. Tried to get the font to suggest how, in this Gospel, Jesus is literally "The Word"

Flier for the John Bible study, including the approved logo.

Singles gotta eat too! This is pure Burger King inspiration at work.

Proud of this flier, which incorporates logos designed by friends Andrea Mahler and Judith Dollar

Absolutely love this guy. Have ever since I was a kid.

Sharpie Pen with pencilled tone

Freehand with calligraphy pen

It’s been a busy week at work. Here’re some pieces from the process:

Shirt design for a July 4th kids' musical

A concept piece for an upcoming relationship series

Flier adverstising my services for a church charity auction

Old-time inspired ad for a men's breakfast

Last week, we were talking in staff meeting about why people come to StoneBridge (the church I work at). After we sorted through a few deep, spiritual concerns, someone mentioned our sermon logos.

See, we have a large billboard at the church entrance, and we put our new sermon branding on it each time we start a new series. It was mentioned that folks have come to church here just because my predecessor’s signs piqued their interest. Then all eyes in the room turned to look at me…

…Aaaand I’m only four weeks into being the main graphics guy. No pressure.

Fortunately, we’ve got a good process in place for these things. Here’s how we got there on our most recent logo:

From an intial discussion with my pastor, some rough ideas for the main logo.

After vetting ideas in a staff meeting, I scrawled this concept on the whiteboard. It was approved.

Attempts to draw a smooth, calligraphic "Soul" font

The final product, marrying the "soul" with a great iStock image and adding a little electric glow.

This was pretty simple and readable from a distance, but it also required a little bit of a longer look to get the whole meaning (and we love forcing a second look at our material).

I think we delivered.

Animator Don Hertzfeldt is a pretty cheeky and subversive guy. (You’ve seen this, haven’t you?)

I recall one time where he put a comic in this slick anthology called Flight  that was made entirely of Post-It notes. It struck me: that’s a great medium. Just looking at it, you know that it’s intended to store a quickly-scrawled idea for a short time, then be discarded once you flesh it out somewhere else. To keep it around and show it off? That’s a little subversive. It’s cool to buck the natural order and keep them around.

I’ve been trying some quick sketches on a pad in my office lately, and I like the practice. This would be a great format to do a project with, someday.

Can you spot the disguised tangent in the cowboy picture?

Behold, the place of our doom:

Okay, that’s not totally true. It’s just a diorama. And it didn’t exactly cause anything near death… just a few extra hours at work. So it wasn’t too bad.

But it’s one of the souvenirs of our massive video-production crunch week.

Our plans for the church Christmas video involved a little live-action (which we had experience with) and a lot of computer-aided animation (which was a little less of a familiar prospect).  The live action part, bookending the video, was supposed to show a little girl building a nativity scene… so we went ahead and made the prop you see above, complete with a removable lid. Vince Mims, our media director, was able to easily take it and shoot the live-action part in a single afternoon.

Then it was off to the harder stuff. I’ve told you that Vince is a video wizard. That applies on all sides of the camera. For this video, he planned on using Adobe After Effects to take static drawings and turn them into animated characters. This is a pretty time-consuming process, and we felt a good amount of pressure to get it right.

Vince started by literally replicating the diorama as a 3D world inside the computer. This way, he’d be able to get any camera shot he wanted.

Image courtesy of Vince's Facebook page

As Vince worked on the 3D setup, I worked to draw all the characters we’d be seeing. At first, I only focused on the parts of the characters that we’d see in the shots, like faces and such. Vince then explained that we needed full-body images so he could pull off some sweet pans and zooms. That led to the figures below:

Manger pieces to be assembled in After Effects

This crowd was actually done as three seperate, movable layers, then composited together in Photoshop

Drawing is one thing; digitally coloring is another. All told, I drew nearly 30 images and then dropped in color and shading. This took a couple of extra nights at work… totally worth it.

And once I got the characters finished, Vince began dropping them into the video and setting up the virtual shots.

After that, it was all Vince putting in his virtual magic. The man worked all week on it, then pulled an all-nighter on Friday to finish. And then he did a tech rehearsal on Saturday morning and ran the production on Sunday. He doesn’t quit, folks.

Behold, then, the fruits of our labor. The bumper plays at the beginning, followed by Steve Bradley’s sermon:

Of course, we weren’t done going all-out. Not yet. After we finished the video, it was time to build yet another little town of Bethlehem– one that could go in our foyer.

And it’s a big foyer.

Next: A Display Of  Our Affections