Wall Street Journal - Ask Teri / Charlene Chua illustration

I created an illustration for the Wall Street Journal’s Ask Teri column. The piece talks about winter boots, and how they are more practical footwear for the cold, wet winter weather in New York lately.

Here is the original sketch. The art director requested that the buildings be removed so as to let the girls come to the foreground. I think it was a good call!

By the way, I am making all the sketches blue in the hopes that they don’t show up in Google’s ‘clip art’ search. I don’t quite have a problem with Google itself (though I wish they would call it something other than ‘clip art’). However I noticed that there are some sites offering what they call ‘free coloring pages’. They’re basically riding off the Google clip art search, and running their own ads on their site. While it’s not a unique situation, I really don’t like how they’ve set up and besides, it’s running up bandwidth usage for everyone. It’s not cool. Anyway, here’s hoping blue sketches don’t qualify as ‘clip art’.

Thanks to Angela over at Santa Fe Reporter for working with me on this one! This is the cover for the magazine’s ‘winter guide’ issue. The space at the top is reserved for the masthead. The brief was open so I came up with some ideas involving winter. We both liked the idea of some sort of ice princss, so I married a couple of concepts together and came up with this.

Below are the other sketches I roughed:

(I ended up re-using this one for my own Xmas card.)

This was the reworked sketch:

Some new work for Penthouse. Did these recently for their December erotic fiction piece. It was a fun piece although somewhat challenging since not all that much was happening in the story (a girl meets an old flame at a condo she’s eyeing, they make out in the pad’s outdoor shower). I tried to come up with some ideas that didn’t involve showers, but couldn’t really. The magazine prefers the images to be more direct and less conceptual anyway. The suds were quite fun to figure out, and I think generally it worked out well.

Here’s the spot that accompanied it:

I kinda liked this sketch that didn’t make it (thanks for the anatomy help Vince!), might do it up when I have the time:

Did this a while back as a quick overnight fix for a magazine. Usually I’m not one for using Photoshop filters but for once it actually worked out pretty well. The article was about a indie punk band called Trigger Effect, and was mainly talking about how they tended to do a lot of their business independently, although they disliked the being associated with the term DIY. For visual sake though, I thought the 80′s DIY punk aesthetic made sense for the article.

I basically ran a stamp filter over a photo of the band and cobbled their heads together to make the record cover. Was trying to get it to look like a grainy black and white photocopy – actually tried drawing it but it looked too clean. All in all  I thought the experiment worked out pretty nicely.

Did some work for Kayak, Canada’s history magazine for children. I created the moose, Monty Moose, plus a couple of other spots which are in the magazine. Watch out for more Monty Moose!

Happy New Year! What a way to end the year – this was done for the New Year’s edition of Las Vegas Weekly. It was a rush job that I got contacted for on Christmas (just like getting a present from Santa!).  The article is about people partyinh while sober, hence the whole deal with the clubbers holding bottled water. The article was in the print edition of the magazine and their online edition as well.