In general I try not to dwell on the topic of style, but during this past February I had the pleasure and opportunity to try out a new drawing and painting process while working with a client. By necessity it is a much faster, and expressive way of working, and it surprisingly lead to a new look for my work.

Summary: moving quickly to meet a new client’s needs,  I discover a new illustration style.

The client, is a children’s occupational therapist from Ohio and was putting together some of her teaching stories together to pitch them to a publisher in New York. She uses the stories in her professional practice to help kids on the Autism spectrum to help deal with difficult emotions and social moments. She wanted to have the added value of illustrations in her proposal and she contacted me. We both agreed that it would be best to present some sketchy illustrations that communicated the point of the story, but would also show that there was room for change and that these were not the final artwork for the books.

The resulting images were pretty exciting for me to create. Because of the fast-pace, fast turnaround for this project I wasn’t able to dwell on the details in the images. I especially enjoyed creating the marks inside the “angry bubble” and drawing the characters is always a blast. Of course while not being able to render out the entire scene, I did get a lot of enjoyment out of  drawing the little boy’s gesture and emotion.

I will be interested to see what the general reception for this work will be. I believe that it will be a way for me to work on jobs that might be a much quicker turnaround that I’m used.