My illustration work from 2015

As I was working on current projects, I was thinking about the illustrations I did last year. I did a good bit of other work like animation, design, and page layout, but as this is an illustration blog, that's what I will concentrate on. As usual, some of the images here are favorites of mine, and some I'm not so happy with. That's just how it goes in the world of commercial art.

This was a pretty major illustration, painted quite large for an exhibit background. It took a lot of work and is actually one of my favorite pieces now. I'm especially pleased with the pipe threader (that's the thing on the left side). It was almost my best piece of the year, completed quite early on.

Here's one that's not quite an illustration. It's more of a logo that I had to design, but with Photoshop I was able to make it look a bit more dimensional and give it some texture.

This one was kind of interesting: realistic but a bit conceptual as well. I've been working on mimicking photographic techniques, so I tried a bit of depth of field here by making the background out of focus. I also got to paint some figures, so that's always fun. After completing the illustration, I also did the final ad layout and design.

If you've been following my work, you may recognize this one. I did an illustration of a nice, completed shower installation. For this image, the client wanted the same layout, but a before image, showing old, ugly, and broken tile as a contrast. Sadly, I used my own shower as an inspiration for this illustration.

Here's one that never really worked, but I just had to get through it. The background elements were taken from older illustrations and incorporated into this image to save me some time. I was not able to fit all the elements in to my liking, but it fit the requirements for this job.

Another one based on a previous illustration. For this one, I had to extend the bottom and add the bridge damage and work scene around it, so the bottom quarter is new. It started out as a 3D scene, but for the addition, I just extended the canvas in Photoshop and painted in 2D elements.

Because of the complexity of something like this, I built it as a 3D model first. I also textured, lit, and rendered it, so there wasn't much more to do in Photoshop, except paint the background.

This isn't much, but it's just a small image I had to whip out quickly. With Photoshop's layer effects and vector shapes, it's pretty easy to do something like this without putting too much time into it.

Back to my usual painting of construction scenes. New client and equipment to render. It's okay, I suppose. The main thing is that the client liked it.

More construction stuff. This image went back and forth until I finally figured out what the client wanted. Again 3D made this relatively easy. The water was built from photos, based on techniques I've shared previously in this blog. A bit of final Photoshop painting, and it was done.

Now this one took some time, but I really like how it turned out. It was quite challenging and I tried some new techniques to represent artificial illumination at night, which ended up pretty successful. My initial inclination is to get by with as little work as I can and my client kept wanting more elements added. But as much as I hate to admit it, they helped the final image. I liked the final result so much that I kept on working after it was complete and approved, adding details on the far left span of the bridge, like the truck and streetlights. Anyway, this also ended up being one of my favorites.

Another quick project. Intended for a large exhibit background, it was really just a simple 3D scene textured and rendered. I also did the text and layout and it ended up doing what it needed to.

Another calendar header image. This one worked out okay, but I had hoped it would have been a bit better. Still, it's pretty good I guess.

This is a series I got through my rep. It was a pretty cool job, but the images were very large and required a lot of work. Much of the detail gets lost in these small images, but they should give you an idea of what went into the final images. The first two are panoramic images from a coal plant and the third was a cutaway view of one of the interior turbines in the plant.

This last one is really a photo editing project instead of an illustration. The background was quite complex and required a lot of hand painting to mask it out. There is some concept going on here, but it might be hard to make out.