John wastes paper

ALBERT & EINSTEIN STICKERS Kids love stickers, so we made some :) These were done in 2007, again for the California Department of Water Resources . I served as my own art director, adapting most of the illustrations from my drawings for the Albert & Einstein coloring book . I was going for layouts that were active and colorful (simple warm/cool color combinations), which I thought kids might like - at least what I would have liked as a kid. The drawing of the blue fish on the last sticker is really dicey; evidence that I was still not entirely comfortable with "funny animal" drawings :) These were scanned ink drawings, with color and final art set-up in Adobe Illustrator.

ALBERT & EINSTEIN POSTER This is a poster I created in 2005 for the California Department of Water Resources . Years ago, I helped develop these two water safety mascots for their water safety outreach programs. The target audience was defined as young kids ages 5-10. We've developed a minor industry of items around them, from pencils and stickers to crayons and coloring books. I'm not really a "funny animal" sort of artist, so I really struggled to develop them. Believe me, my first drawings of these characters were down-right embarrassing, and I still can't believe that they published that work. But I got better over time and was pretty pleased with this piece. I tried to go beyond the line drawings of the coloring book and went for a slightly rendered look. Almost nailed it :) I scanned my pencil sketches and finished this in Adobe Illustrator. They did an initial printing of 10,000 and they periodically reprint this as needed.

SACRAMENTO KINGS CONCEPT BOARDS I thought I'd start with some older stuff. To the best of my recollection, this is from the early 2000s; maybe 2001. I was asked by a contractor to conceptualize an interstercial type video that would be run on the arena's jumbo-tron to rev-up the fans. Not being a sports fan, I was kind of at a loss of what to do, so I came up with this clearly pedestrian solution. The final piece would have been done as 3D computer animation. Needless to say, the clients didn't bite :) I sketched these panels traditionally, pencil and ink on paper, then scanned and colored them in Photoshop. I printed these out and mounted them on a black presentation board, nice and pretty, 'cause back then clients weren't used to reviewing things on-screen for approvals.