I just came back from jurying the Advertising and Institutional categories for the Society of Illustrators. Such a great honor not to mention a great time, hanging out with my fellow jurors and friends. I love the Society of Illustrators, it's a special place. I had been on the jury of the student competition but this was my first for the professional show, quite an eye opener, such great work that it's no wonder even"good" work gets left out. Decisions have to be made.
I had two pieces accepted into the show, one in book and one in editorial. This piece Three Days to See was chosen for editorial, my cover for Triburbia was chosen for book, that's two awards for Triburbia. I entered other work that I felt stronger about or just as strongly about, but the choosing is a mysterios process and I'm happy to be included at all, an honor.
 
The above piece was done for Readers Digest to accompany an essay written by Helen Keller. I gave this assignment to my students last year, after I resolved my solution of course. I gave them several essays to choose from, one was about being kidnapped and buried alive, most chose that one.

A few roughs for the Helen Keller piece. I guess the first rule of thumb is avoid the obvious, come up with an idea that doesn't involve an eye, or glasses, a cane, etc. My students drew lots of eye concepts, you can't blame them.

Upon returning from New York I generally find myself both inspired and humbled, inspired by the people I meet, and the friends that I see too infrequently, humbled by the incredible work and drive of my contemporaries, and those kids. So I got busy with some personal work, something I do from time to time, nothing ever gets finished, they're kind of like experiments, exercises, artistic calasthetics. I've been wanting to go back to actual drawing as opposed to working directly in Adobe Illustrator, possibly a way to work out some of the figurative and more organic things I want to explore.

As I said the second piece accepted was my book jacket design and illustration for Triburbia. This has been shown before as it was also in American Illustration. I'm getting a bit tired of looking at it but it does represent a direction I want to explore, more narrative work, maybe a graphic novel of some sort, but oh the time needed for that. So I explore a bit.

I'm doing more along the lines of this stuff, submitting a few narrative pieces for New Yorker covers, things like that.

The other aspect of the Triburbia cover is the design component, the constructed title treatment. I spent a lot of time in NY as a designer, I've always loved the marriage of design and illustration. Something else I need to explore a bit.
Onward.