Portrait Series: B-rock

I've been wanting to paint a tribute to our 44th president for quite awhile now, basically since he was elected the first time, but have been tied up with other projects. Hopefully those other projects will see the light of day soon, but in the mean time I've been doing some research and sketching. 

More to come soon.

Jerry Kalback

I found out this week that my illustration professor at Kent State is retiring after 30+ years of teaching. Jerry had an enormous influence on my painting style and inspired me to look beyond the contemporary crop of illustrators and artists into some of the great painters from the 70's and 80's (Bart Forbes, Bernie Fuchs, David Grove, Marshall Arisman, Alan Cober, etc.), and also to love the art that I make. A tip of the hat to one of the greatest teachers on earth, and I wish him a paint-filled and relaxing retirement. You can see some of Jerry's work here.

Shop smart, shop S.Mart

I'm pleased to announce that there are some new prints/paintings for sale in my shop, including giclée prints of this guy. As you can see above, each print is signed, numbered, and printed on high-quality watercolor paper.

Mobius Trio— Last Light

Mobius Trio is a group of contemporary classical guitar performers from San Francisco, who I had the pleasure of making a website for last year. This year they've been busy recording their first album (sounds awesome, btw) and I've been busy designing their first album.

Also on the chopping block was their old logo, which admittedly, I threw together in about 30 minutes in late 2010. The new one is a bit (read, A LOT) more refined both conceptually and visually and also plays into the visual direction of the album artwork.

Good news is, all of these projects are finally wrapped up!

The CLCC & Me

Chicagoland Concert Choir is an upstart community choir serving, as the name implies, Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. As there are many community choirs in Chicago the CLCC needed to distinguish itself with a solid visual identity system and some eye-catching promotional materials.


Interested in joining? You can find out more on their website at CLCCsings.org.

Mobius Trio... A Website

This project isn't exactly new, but it's as finished as its ever been so it warrants a blog post.

Mobius Trio is a contemporary classical guitar trio from San Francisco. The purpose of this site was to be a sort of catch-all for their numerous social media outlets and fill in the blanks for pertinent information. The focus on external websites can be seen in the two global navigation systems, outgoing links are ever-present in the corner.

You can visit the site here. One of their videos is below.

Recycle Your Plastics!

The company I recently began working for makes plastic things. A lot of plastic things. You probably don't realize how often you are using their plastic things... which means that's a LOT of plastic. Unfortunately, until very recently, it was un-recyclable plastic... NOT ANYMORE!

Now all those plastic things can be shipped to Florida and turned into plastic railroad ties... so not only is that plastic not going into landfills, it's slowly rebuilding our decaying rail system! Two birds with one stone! BAM!

I was able to make some fun posters and tradeshow banners announcing all this.