Breaking out

It's always cool to do an illustration that'll appear someplace my friends and family might just stumble across naturally. I was excited, then, to be asked to draw the cover to this week's Pittsburgh City Paper.

Weekly publications like this always have ultra-tight deadlines, so there's not a lot of time to experiment with different ideas and sketches. Fortunately, the art director gave me a pretty good idea of what she wanted that I could use as a starting point, and this is how I saw it in my head:

Once I got approval on the sketch, I finished it up. Since this paper is given out free all over the city, it's important that the cover be really bright and eye-catching to encourage people to pick it up. I've been really interested in working with more intense color schemes lately so it was fun to come up with a palette that was surprising and appealing and would really get people's attention.

Here's the finished version that will appear on stands all over Pittsburgh starting today:

Roller Derby (again)

And here's the final! After reviewing my original design, the SCDD merch team decided they wanted something they could print on a dark colored t-shirt, so here's the version that will be coming soon to a roller rink near you!

Roller Derby

I was recently talking with some folks in the merchandise department for the Steel City Derby Demons, Pittsburgh's kick-ass roller derby team. They mentioned they'd like to have another children's shirt to sell, something more boy-friendly than what they have now (their only current kids' offering says "FUTURE DERBY GIRL" on it, so that automatically excludes half the audience).

So I thought it over for a bit, and I came up with a design that I hope will fill their need.

I kept it to two colors to keep printing costs down. The black-and-gold combo reflects the SCDD team colors, plus it's reminiscent of the late-70s/early-80s "City of Champions" Steelers/Pirates t-shirts I used to wear as a little kid.

Just for fun, though, I also worked up a more elaborate 4-color version with crazier colors, just because I thought it would look cool:

Party

Here's another one from a few months back: a greeting card/party invitation. Maybe I should start my own line of these sometime. What do you think?