Christmas Bear

This is my favorite design for this years Christmas. I believe you can find this card at American Greetings Walmart Stores.

As for the design: I used a different method for creating the fur for the bear and the fur for the Santa Hat then I usually do. I love experimenting with different approaches when it come to technique. I also like to pushing myself to finding quicker ways to achieve this highly rendered look. This piece was created using Photoshop CS5.

Nativity Stickers

Last year, I created a Nativity Card with this technique. It was created for Target. This year they asked me to create stickers in the same style. They are out in store right now!

Christmas Panda Bear

This card was created as a Christmas concept. I wanted to play around in Photoshop to mimic a 3d like image. You can purchase this card online at cardstore.com.

Baby Greeting Card Promo

I was asked to create this baby card theme for American Greetings. I had a lot of fun experimenting with different color combinations and textures. I usually work on more highly rendered or animated styles so, this was a nice change.



Enjoy!

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!