Swamp Creature

Final Design:

Original Design:

This is my favorite Halloween Design for this year.
As part of my job, I get the opportunity to created what American Greetings calls "innovation" or "up front art." What this means is, that I can create greeting card illustrations with little to no direction. Yeah! Artistic Freedom!!!
However, sometime the coolest stuff never gets used. And everyone outside of American Greetings will never get to see it. There are many of these pieces, I would love to post but, until they are used in product, they will not see the light of day.
This design however, is not one of those.
My idea was to create a kids design that used one of my favorite monsters, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It is a monster that is rarely illustrated here at American Greetings and I have been dying to have the opportunity to work on it. I chose my highly rendered technique. It takes a lot longer to create the artwork using this technique but, I love it. I have been trying to get better at understanding of dramatic lighting in my work and this was the perfect opportunity. Overall, I am really happy with how everything turned out. I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to create this piece but, did not use any of 3d features. I have been working with the 3d capabilities in Photoshop but, because of their limitations I haven't created anything with it yet.
Happy Halloween!

Halloween Series

Being a Senior Designer/Illustrator at American Greetings is so much fun. I have worked there full time for 8 years now. I have had the chance to work with every department on some type of project.
The season I look for most as an illustration stand point is Halloween. The color palettes we are assigned, work so well together, unlike many of the other Hollidays.
For this series, I was asked to create these 6 designs. Some had rolly eyes, others crystaline/glitter, and so on. I had fun creating each one and look forward to using this technique further down the road.

Haunted House

This is a 3d lenticular card I created for American Greetings. I had blast playing with textures, patterns and lighting. I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 to created the illustration. I did not use any 3d software to create this piece. I hope all of youlike it as much as I do.

All Aboard

I was contacted by Cardstore.com to create a cartoon train invitation. Cardstore.com is a site were you can personalize your own greeting card, stationary or invitation. You can upload pictures of yourself or others to be printed on their designs. Here is the link to my design.

Secret Agent Hamster

Character Detail:

Briefcase Detail:

This is a Grandparent's Day card I created for Target. It is currently out in stores.

Many of you who have checked out my work in the past may recognize this character. This is the third time I have used this hamster character for American Greetings. To see previous versions of this character, just click back in my history and you'll find other designs using him in different situations. I did however, update the hair on this version. I have made leaps and bounds with this technique since the first hamster character was created.

As for the design itself, I also had a lot of fun playing with the dramatic lighting on the character and his environment. I also liked having to figure out the the lights reflection coming off of the briefcases computer screen and reflecting on the keys and ground. You can really see this on the detail images bellow. I also hid a few personal things in the art. One is the numbers in the lower right. Yep, it's my birthday. The 2nd is, I included the American Greetings Rose icon on the buttons next to the space bar. I know it is minor but, I love adding those little details.