New Year's Card

I did this New Year's card for Thebe&Co, a local design firm run by Beth Desnick and Thea Nelson. They are a pleasure to work with by the way.

Mr. Park Ranger

When I think of park rangers I think of Yogi Bear and a song starts going through my head. It's going through my head now and will continue to for most of the afternoon. Cartoons are a constant influence. Mostly Bullwinkle, but also Quickdraw and Yogi and Babalooey. I've always worked with brush on paper. Adding digital color to a brushed line, as I did in this piece for the Sunday LA Times, brings me closer to the look of flat paint on cartoon cels. It's a bright, interesting look, and a new variation for me. I've always admired people like Seymour Chwast and Steve Guarnaccia for their pure colors, without drying lines. This brings me closer to that too. But I still use a brush and a pencil.

The World Cup

Half a lifetime ago I spent a lot of my time contemplating the game the rest of the world knows as football. I was writing for an alternative weekly, covering the elderly World Cup players who were spending their retirement in the NASL, which is how I got to interview Pelé and Beckenbauer, along with some second-rate but very amusing English players. All of these players were infinitely better than anyone America could produce at the time. One thing I learned is that soccer, or football, is an endless source of explanations for how the world functions. Somebody wrote a recent book along those lines, something I never got around to. But the metaphors are just as useful to an illustrator. Politics and business and other forms of global conflict take their form from the original ball game. I did this illustration for an insurance magazine.