Town Names in HGTV Magazine

Here's a piece I drew for the March issue of HGTV magazine about towns with unusual names, and their origins. My Sketch:

Final art in the magazine:

Here's a town I suggested, Hercules CA, that didn't make the cut:

The style was inspired by this old travel map I did years ago for the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

While working on this I happened to stumble upon this awesome old ESSO gasoline thermos at an antique mall and took these panoramic snapshots:

Pet Prints on Parade Process Post

I was happy to make these prints for this year's 21st Annual Beggin' Pet Parade, part of the pre-Mardi Gras festivities in Soulard, and "The Guinness Record holder for the largest parade of costumed animals".

Here's a bunch of sketches and stuff that piled up on my desk like a lot of puppies. Early ideas:

Here was the first round of sketches. "Flowchart", "Gang" and "Hot Rod":

We ended up going with the Hot Rod/Dog kinda idea:

Made some tweaks to the final sketch, thanks to Greg S. and fine folks at Purina, and we were just about there:

Final Drawing:

Ink color tests:

Final vector art:

Separations on acetate:

3 colors (indigo, metallic silver, fluorescent pink) down:

And the 4th (yellow):

Thanks everyone! Hope to see you at the parade!. We're really gonna try and get our scoodle into that jester's outfit, even if he hates it.

Communications Work / Smoke Signal Comic

I had a new four-page comic in the last issue of Smoke Signal (the one with the Chris Ware cover) called COMMUNICATIONS WORKERS OF AMERICA. Here are some sketches and behind-the-scenes materials from its construction (click for larger images). Thumbnail / layouts:

Character designs:

Reference Pics:

Other schematics:

Animated .gif showing a page's evolution from thumbnail > rough sketch > tighter sketch > inked lineart > halftoned final page > etc:

How My Cat Works

ANATOMY: A Look Inside of Your Feline Friend!, Acrylic, Ink, White-out & Silver Leaf on Wood Panel, 20"x16", 2014. This new painting will be up for auction at Tenth Life Cat Rescue event at the Regional Arts Commission, tonight in St. Louis. Here was the original sketch and some in-progress snapshots.