Life With Girls has been a constant, personal thread throughout my freelance career. The project began as a series of illustrated status updates featuring, my family, and friends and me. It has allowed me to explore technique, and storytelling. Finding joy and wonder in the every day has become one of the mainstays of my work over the last decade, as the stories expanded from single panel, to multiple panel strips, to longer form comic stories and lately back to illustrated prose. Drawing from daily experiences presented poses, settings and props that became building blocks for creating fantasy worlds.
I began working with Hex Games in 2008, doing spot interior illustrations for their role playing game supplements, and from there was given more responsibilities, including cover art, logos and graphics, interior layout as well as input on content creation. The Hobomancer setting explores the idea of magic and transplanted culture in the United States as we follow the adventures of the magical hobos who ride the rails, and protect our reality from creatures beyond the veil. It became a project that includes two main game supplements, three books of magical artifacts, one book of rules for magic in the new world, and a novel with illustrated book plates.
Rhymes With Weenie is a children’s book following a day in the life of Buddy and Allie, two real life wiener dogs. As the reader turns the pages, they are presented with a two page spread featuring the two dogs doing something that “rhymes with weenie”, such as “Cafeenie Weenie”. Early on as we discussed the way the words and images would be presented, the author and I hit upon the idea that one of the dogs could be doing the activity as a human would do it, and one as a dog would do it, allowing opportunities for readers to discuss differences. I love presenting situations that are subversive in that they are both absurd, and consistent with reality.