Control-Alt-Hack

Now it can be told!

Earlier in the year my normal prodigious illustration output slowed to a crawl. Part of that is because of my increased Ace Kilroy workload, but that was also because, as I alluded to a couple of times, I was in the middle of a big illustration project and it just didn't leave me with much time to do anything else.

Well, now said project is out for all to see (and buy)--it's a RPG called Control-Alt-Hack, which is "a tabletop card game about white hat hacking, based on game mechanics by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games (Munchkin and GURPS)."

Not being a gamer, I had no idea what any of that meant when I landed the job, and I still don't. My part of the game was to produce twenty portrait illustrations, loosely based on real people turned into characters for game play. Here are some promo shots from the Control-Alt-Hack site:

Each character was shown in a sort of action pose, doing something that was specific to them: dancing, blogging, cooking, etc. They were detail-intensive and my part of the game took quite a while; I worked on it from March through July, one of the longest projects I've ever been involved in.

Here are a couple of the other portraits as I delivered them to the client:

It was an enormous challenge working on Control-Alt-Hackers; it required a lot of concentration and organization. And while that's normally not a problem for me, sometimes the illustrations were in so many different stages of completion that I had to whip up an Excel spreadsheet to keep it all straight.

But in the end I was glad to be asked to do it, and am proud of the final results. I've not been asked to do this kind of project before so I was happy to expand my portfolio a bit.

If you're a gamer and this sounds like something you'd be interested in playing, use this Amazon link to order the game:

...once you get the game, pick out your favorite characters and send me the cards; I'll return 'em autographed!

Smithsonian - Nov. 2012

I drew the contributor portraits for the November 2012 edition of Smithsonian magazine--nine illustrations in all, though one had to be dropped because the author's piece was bumped from the issue.

I used to like putting heavy outlines on all my illustrations, now I kinda prefer open color holds like you see here. For portraits this small, it helps each piece breathe, I think.

Video Detective Villain of the Week

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted anything new; I've been so busy with other projects that I really haven't had time to produce anything new outside of client work, a lot of which wasn't really worth showcasing here.

One exception are the series of portraits I've for VideoDetective.com, a website featuring trailers for movies, TV shows, games, and more. Back in July, they came up with this idea for a "villain of the week", who would be picked from whatever big movie was coming out that week. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, I produced these every week from August through October. Starting in November, they changed their frequency monthly--the better to give people more time to see them, and enter the contest associated with each one.

Below are all of the VOTWs I've done so far; I think they got better as I went along and they've been a lot of fun to do. I hope I can keep doing them!