posted: May 28, 2007

Today, I went to a Memorial Day Parade near where I live, and shot some photographs.  Sometimes, I do drawings from my photographs, or I get ideas from them. 
The photo from which I based this drawing is below.  More photographs from the parade have been added to the Garden State gallery of pictures.

posted: May 27, 2007

My dad is visiting for the Memorial Day weekend.  I haven't seen him in a year so we're having fun.  He's great, up for anything.  He did a drawing of me, it's above.  And I did some drawings of him.  I wanted to upload it to show him how this whole internets thing works.  He's blown away by the whole blog/internet thing.

posted: May 17, 2007

Joseph Fiedler and Kroninger mentioned Rosetta Tharpe recently and I thought I'd put this drawing up. I did it a couple of years ago for The New Yorker. I hadn't heard of Rosetta Tharpe until I got the assignment. My family only played Latin music when I was growing up. One of the things I love about illustration is that the work introduces me to things I never would have known about otherwise. Tharpe's singing and guitar playing is incredible. I got some recordings to listen to before I did the drawing and still play them regularly. Here's a video clip of her:

posted: May 17, 2007

This is an image from several weeks ago for The New Yorker.  It went with a review of the film "Reign Over Me" with Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler. 
Drawing films can be difficult, there is always a lot of information to condense into one image.  This one was complicated because Adam Sandler has different, bigger hair in the movie.  It's hard to get a likeness when something like that happens. 
Someone at Sony Pictures bought the original for Sandler and gave it to him at a post premiere party.  I've had drawings purchased by a few people in film in the past.  My favorite one has been Uma Thurman.  I made a copy of that check, it was somewhat surreal to see her signature and my name on the same piece of paper.

posted: May 10, 2007

This past weekend I went with my family to The Bronx Zoo.  I brought my camera along.  I've added a few images from the zoo to my photography gallery.  You can check them out HERE.

When I was at Pratt, in Brooklyn, some of our classes would go to the Bronx Zoo to draw, it's really a wonderful place for artists.  Many of the students that were into animation went there often to study the behavior of the animals and incorporate it into their animations.  One of my favorite teachers, David Passalaqua, took his students there often.
The visit reminded me of a recent assignment I did for Kelly Doe at the New York Times Science section.  It was on new studies that relate the behavior of Chimpanzees to the behavior of humans.  Characteristics such as empathy, discipline, nurture, etc.  I was asked to draw chimps exhibiting these behaviors, you can see those illustrations below.

Leo sent me a link to this Weezer video and I'm in a goofy mood, so it's going up here. This will be my wildlife post! Great song:

posted: May 9, 2007

This is a portrait of Carlos Salinas de Gotari, former president of Mexico.  It's a full page image in the Spring issue of 02138, an alumni magazine for Harvard University graduates.  The story is about Harvard graduates that went bad.  Salinas graduated from the University and turned out to be a very corrupt president for Mexico during the 1990's.
The magazine is designed by Pluto Media, Patrick Mitchell's design firm.  He was responsible for the wonderful Fast Company and is now running his own place.  02138 looks beautiful, it has a great cover, printed on nice paper and has several illustrations by other Drawgers in it (Cathleen T., Steve B., Barry, and Hanoch). 

posted: May 8, 2007

As part of the long tradition of Drawger piggy backing, I am following Marc's post on the TIME 100 with some work I've done for those issues in the past. 
In the current issue I did a small portrait of Raul Castro, Cuba's current head of state. 
The TIME 100 is an annual issue of the magazine that looks at the past year's most Influential people, from politicians, to scientists, artists, and entertainers  Many of the articles are written by other notable people in the respective field. Below, I've included some images that I've done for the issue in past years.

This was an opener spread image last year.  The image below went on the following spread.  Fourteen portraits total, a lot of work.

posted: May 8, 2007

This is a recent portrait for The New York Times Book Review.  It accompanied an article on Thomas Hardy, an English novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement. He lived from 1840-1928.

posted: May 4, 2007

I've known author Jhumpa Lahiri since the late 1990's.  At the time she was working on a small collection of short stories, some were excerpted in The New Yorker magazine.  The stories were published as a book titled Interpreter of Maladies.  She was just a regular person!

Interpreter of Maladies was given a Pulitzer Prize and Jhumpa was suddenly on Charlie Rose, in Entertainment Weekly, and so on.  It was funny seeing someone you knew make it big!  There were a lot of expectations surrounding her second book.  It was titled The Namesake and was very well received.  The book was reviewed in the Boston Globe in 2003 and I was asked to do the art that accompanied the article.  That's the image of the boy above.  I gave the original to Jhumpa and she put it on the wall in her little boy's room.  "The Namesake" is now a film and I think it's in limited release around the country.  It's received some nice reviews so you should check it out if you're looking for a film this weekend.  The film is directed by Mira Nair, who also directed Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala.  There are no big Hollywood Stars and probably no large explosions, so it's my kind of film already.  You can see the trailer here.