Suicide Watch

A few months ago, I got a call from UCLA Magazine to illustrate an article on rising suicide rates among middle-aged Americans. After sketching the first few thumbnails and re-reading the article, I decided to focus on the absence of connection and we went with the man in the park. From there I experimented with the idea of visual isolation by including the passing world in watercolor figures and warmer temperatures.

Postcards from London

In between projects over the past couple weeks, I've been working on some pen and ink drawings on postcards to send from London. Here are a handful from the British Museum, London Natural History Museum, the Louvre, Tower of London and some streets around London and Paris.

Hope everyone out there is having a warm and happy holidays, here's to the end of a monumental year and the beginning of a bright new decade.

Chirac

New promo series: Jaques Chirac

Superstition

Just completed this comic sequence in collaboration with Helen and the good folks at Sonny London. (The fully scripted and scored version is also available here.)

Londinium

Seeing London for the first time made me wish my full-time job was location sketching. The city just draws itself. Here are some sketchbook pages so far, fountain pen and ink wash mainly, more to come.

The Big Sleep

Here is an illustration I just finished of Carmen Sternwood from the final scenes of Chandler's The Big Sleep. I noticed a lot of my thumbnail sketches while reading were characters other than Marlowe, so it was interesting to attempt to capture his tone through a supporting character and scene. Unlike previous approaches, I tried to limit the compositional drawings to rough thumbnails, which allowed the final drawing/watercolor process to be a bit more fluid.

In other news, I've been included in Taschen's new "Illustration Now! 3" book, alongside some amazing artists. I also did a quick Q&A with the good folks at Gym Class Magazine, which is on internet-stands now.

Overlook

A new illustration I just finished for this week's LA Weekly. Also, I've just started on Twitter, in case you're interested in more links and less alphabetical-characters.

PULP

Earlier this year I got the opportunity to collaborate with photographic dynamo Neil Krug on two illustrations for his and Joni Harbeck's upcoming PULP ART BOOK. I have been a huge admirer of Neil's polaroid work since first seeing it on Flickr, and although these are still in-progress, I thought I would post some of the sketches and pin-up drafts so far.

Nerding Out

I had the good fortune to get a call from Nick Vogelson at OUT magazine last month for an article on the crossing-over of nerdism into mainstream American culture. Through the eyes of the writer at events such as the San Diego Comicon, I was left with a certain reverence for the pop culture pile-up that these events seem to inevitably lead to. The first few sketches were essentially riffing on this idea of fictitious comic book and film worlds colliding, first with each other and then again with the world around them. The rough pencil ideas were scanned and re-drawn into the more legible sketches in Photoshop, and once the hallway version had been approved I did my best to retain as much of the loose, crowded quality of the rough sketches as possible.

Overall it was an incredibly fun assignment, and really any day I get to draw Skeletor sleeping on someone's lap at a bus stop is a good day. I think it's the issue should be on stands now, thanks again to Nick for the opportunity.

Conchords

Here is a new self-promo portrait I just finished of New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo, along with a bit of the process from sketch to digital paints. Owenfreeman.com has also just been updated with a bundle of new sketches and illustrations.

Also in case you haven't seen it there is a fantastic Drawger post by Yoku Shimizu detailing the process of a new portrait she did for Golf Digest. Can't recommend it enough.