posted: December 17, 2007

...and Astronauts and Nuns! 

These were recently done for the excellent Matt Petty at the SF Chronicle, as a cover and spots for their Travel section's annual "Geo Quiz". 

The cover concept was based on the question: Which country has lions, tigers and bears living in the wild?  Hint: it's in Asia, hence the attempt at an Asian feel to these illos.

I was attempting at making images that made the viewer question a bit, so I liked the non-sequiter angle of having these beasts as an image that was talking about travel.  I also wanted to avoid the Oz cliche. 

With the spots, I wanted to do a similar graphic treatment but refer more to the specifics of a few of the given questions.  Any guesses at what they might be about?

posted: December 16, 2007

I may be an illustrator, but sometimes what I really wish that I was was a mathematician.  I wish I could dive into the language of math and understand things like this, the latest sub-realm of string theory, E8.

I don't know how they've done it, but this is apparently the visualization of the mathematical equation of what the 8th dimension looks like.  Or something like that.  I currently have this as my desktop pattern, because it's so beautiful and I'm hoping that maybe it will make my brain grow by having it around on a daily basis.

This is another diagram of this phenomenon, called a Coxeter plane root system.  If you want to try and learn about this stuff, check out this Website.

Otherwise, I hope you can just enjoy how beautiful nature ends up being, even when it's pure math.

posted: December 6, 2007

Rob D's cool latest sketchbook stuff reminded me a bit of the bulbous forms I've been using in a series of miniature paintings I've been working on for an upcoming group show in Portsmouth, NH. 

Here's a gallery of the finished pieces, I'll probably do a few more but at a slightly larger scale.  I named the paintings using a cool random name generator I found on-line.